Put the car up on jack stands and pulled the front and rear suspensions out. Incredible how easy things came apart - the more I work on this car the more I love it. Dare I say that it was actually enjoyable. God bless the South.
Jack stand ballin 4 lyfe, yo.
It's easiest just to drop the whole rear suspension as an assembly then rip it apart with the impact once on the ground. I had problems with it getting hung up on one of the mounting studs in the chassis but I just unthreaded it once I had clearance to get a wrench in there. The only definite casualty was my driver's side e-brake cable. The ferrule was seized in the trailing arm and I snapped a screwdriver off trying to punch it out, so I just cut it.
A little surface rust but everything is pretty clean in general. None of these bushings had been replaced in 170k miles so this all needed to be done. Everything is getting sandblasted and powdercoated. The diff is going to be rebuilt / regeared and the half shafts will get fresh grease and boots. Fresh parts have been sitting in a box ready to go for several months now - new wheel bearings, ball joints, and bushings. I'd call it an OEM+ setup - it's a mix of stock hardware and polymer in areas I wanted to reduce the deflection (subframe and diff mounts).
I dropped the gas tank due to its close proximity to the front subframe mounts. I have some welding I need to do in that area. I've done that job before with the gas tank in and it's definitely a very hairy experience....not something I'm trying to do again. Even when the fuel gauge reads "empty", there's still approximately 3 gallons in the tank - still plenty to warm things up considerably.
This also makes swapping in my fuel pump and replacing all the rubber fuel hoses an easier job.
Front suspension, subframe, and steering rack is all out of the car.
I then started disassembling the rear end, pressing out all the old bearings and bushings in preparation for sandblasting and powdercoat. I had to get a little creative to fixture things up for pressing out the wheel bearings - a pair of old wheel bearing (outer races) came in handy for this. I bought this HF 20 ton press for about $170 bucks and it's handled anything I've thrown at it so far. I can't use it for everything on this suspension because you can't always center up the bore with the ram without some ridiculous fixturing, but it's nothing that a BFH and a couple sockets can't resolve. I still need to upgrade my arbor plates though - these are cast pieces and sometimes things feel kind of sketchy when you really crank on it.
Not much left on the car except for the interior (which will be getting removed too!)
Aside from that, the rest of my time was bagging and tagging all the hardware and smaller components and reorganizing what I have stored in the garage for the time being.
In other news - I figured it was time to invest in some PPE. I bought cartridges for my 3M 6000 Series respirator: acid / organic gas filters for painting and some 2097 filters suitable for welding fumes / organic vapors. The discs are pretty small and I was pumped to confirm that the respirator fits under my welding helmet. I have a lot of TIG practice to do, and intend to spend a lot of time under the helmet to get my skills up to par. I'm welding in an open garage but figured it'd be better if I wasn't breathing in all of those fumes.
I follow a bunch of crazy TIG guys on instagram, and picked up a set of gloves that a lot of pros really seem to like. For a while I had just been using mechanix gloves, but they don't really offer very good heat insulation or spark protection. Other welding gloves that have good protection are way too thick and not very flexible, so you lose a lot of dexterity. The ones I got seem to strike a balance between the two - basically leather mechanix gloves. They're made by Torchwear and are supposed to be extremely durable. We will see - but first impressions are good. They fit really nice and seem to be constructed with quality materials.
I'm working on powdercoating a bunch of the smaller parts this week and will be starting on the bigger stuff after they're all done. I need to use the big oven for the bigger parts and it takes a lot more time to get up to temperature. For the interest of efficiency I want to get all the bigger parts prepped and ready to go at one time.
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