Day 35 & 36
Second patch panel welded in. One front fender off, and rust taken care of on the shell. Wasn't too bad, will post pictures tomorrow.
Going to have to weld in a new plate on the bottom of the front fenders. After that, minus a few micro rock chips on the windshield surround the car will be rust free!
Started hitting the good paint with 180 to scuff it up for primer, working on the fenders, front bumper, hood, doors, and so on.
At least 20 hours put in the past 2 days.
Picked up the 2K urethane primer with reducer and hardener, as well as some self etching 1K primer for the places I went to aluminum on the hood.
120$ worth of primer :shock:
Started assembling the suspension. I have pushed the primer back to the never ending nature of bodywork to Tuesday, so I will be installing the suspension tomorrow instead, I think I will leave off the racing beat sway until after primer.
I foresee limited sleep on Wednesday night for final assembly.
I have a request, can someone measure the gap from the middle of unmolested stock fenders to the center of the wheel, stock or lowered is fine, as well as the measurement from the bottom of the pinch weld frame (not the big rails, the thin metal that you are supposed to jack up the car from) to the ground. Has to be a 90-97.
I need it so I can set a proper ride height.
Thanks!
Day 37
"Huge Success" - Sasha Cohen "Borat".
Great day today. So much work done. Suspension assembled and installed, swaybar installed!
I would have taken it out for a test drive to see how the new suspension felt, but there are 2 broken 10mm's that hold the bottom of the fender to the frame that I snapped on the drivers side. Can you believe I have only broken 3 fasteners on the entire car? One was holding together the top seal on the front bumper, the screwdriver (and operator) owned the screw.
Anyways, suspension went together really well. I installed the rears first, went in super nicely, but forgot the damn telfon gasket on top. I actually forgot it separately on 3/4 shocks when assembling. The original gaskets were in great shape, so I used those, otherwise I wouldn't have used anything.
I think I finished the rears in under 40min, from start to final torque on the ground. The fronts on the other hand, I spent a good hour trying to get them out without taking off that bitch of an upper a-arm bolt, I had done it without removing it on the parts car, but it just wasn't working out for me. After removing it, it went pretty quickly.
The racing beat tubular swaybar is pretty awesome, but for what it cost me after all the brace and the endlinks and crap, it had better be. It took longer then expected to install, probably 1.5-2 hours, mainly due to the mounting reinforcement blocks and adjusting the endlinks.
Tomorrow back to bodywork!
Picture montage of this weekends work.
NOT FCM PARTS. Just the coilover kit, the mounting solution is unique. It is so much cleaner then the other hackjob ways of doing it, and it was cheaper then the FCM shock hats for me. JD designed CNC shock nut.