Richie called to say the parts were cleaned, so I went out to pick them up.  I’m not sure if they are really clean enough to paint, I have to fig­ure it out and if not, send them out to be media blasted before paint.  Maybe I am just being to para­noid, but at this point I just want to be sure they are done right I’m more con­cerned with qual­ity than speed right now so I will think about it before mov­ing on.  Back at the shop, I worked on the pas­sen­ger side blis­ter paint­ing the inte­rior with POR-15 to deal with any resid­ual rust, when it is cured I will fiber­glass the inte­rior of it, insu­late it with neo­prene and install it on the fire­wall look­ing like new.  With the heater core out I pulled the whole park­ing brake assem­bly out, cleaned and painted it too.  I also put a coat of POR-15 on the fire­wall where the blis­ters will mount.

At this stage, the frame on the driver’s side is com­pletely cleared except for the steer­ing box which will be com­ing off soon.  Once that is gone, we will clean and com­pletely paint the frame before we begin to assem­ble it again.

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After final clean up around the garage, we packed up the remain­der of the engine parts left lying around and took them over to Spring­field Auto Machine.  Ear­lier in the week, they called and asked me to bring every­thing I had, see­ing as they would be clean­ing every­thing any­way, they would check it all and who knows maybe some of the stuff will be sal­vagable.  When there, I found out the radi­a­tor was ready, so we packed it up to take back.  The radi­a­tor looks great and is much bet­ter than new.  The new core makes it even heav­ier that orig­i­nal, but it will give us many years of great worry free service.

While there talk­ing about the sus­pen­sion parts, Richie from the radi­a­tor shop offered to clean them for me right there so we left them with him and saved our­selves another trip some­where else.  I explained that the lower shaft was still attached to the lower arm because I did not have any wrentches big enough to take it apart.  He told me he would take care of it and when we began to install it to see him and he would loan me the tools to put it back.

These guys have gone out of their way at every turn to help me out and give me advice.  Need some­thing along these lines and are in the area, see them first, you will not be dis­ap­pointed.  Dick, Brian or Richie will absolutely bend over back­wards to help in any way possible.

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Okay, I’ll admit maybe I should have read the man­ual first, but it still took me 15 min­utes to real­ize not all lug nuts are the same, after all, how hard can it be to take a tire off.  I’ve never owned a car that has reg­u­lar threads on one side and reverse threads on the other, what’s up with that!!  Today we com­pletely pulled the sus­pen­sion parts on the driver’s side, upper and lower ball joints, shafts, arms, spin­dle and spring are now all gone.  While the orig­i­nal plan was just to pull the whole front sus­pen­sion, I chick­ened out and decided to just take one side down at a time, so I would have a pat­tern when it is time for it to go back.  The sway bar link was in bad shape and imme­di­ately broke when we put the wrentch on it.

After 2 rounds of pres­sure wash­ing the parts still had a lot of baked on and caked grease so we are send­ing them out to be cleaned before we do any­thing else.  The drum looks in good shape so we will have it inspected to see if we can turn it down or not.  Now we just need to clean up the garage again, that grease and debris gets into every­thing.  Time is short right now, but I will get more pho­tos up as time allows.

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I primed all of the fire­wall areas that had minor cor­ro­sion issues, and there were very few of those, to prep for fin­ish paint­ing that will be done later.  Spent some time clean­ing up and inspect­ing the engine com­part­ment wiring har­ness and so far every­thing looks very good.  Need to let it cure for at least 24 hours, so I moved on to work­ing on the blis­ters them­selves.  Over­all, they looked really good and solid from the out­side, but were a rusted mess inter­nally.  These items func­tion to chan­nel the water com­ing in from the cowl vents out of the vent sys­tem and drain that same water under the car.  The prob­lem was that they are lined with insu­la­tion that soaked up water like a sponge and just sat there cor­rod­ing the parts from the inside out.  As the metal dete­ri­o­rated and flaked off, it blocked the drains and the bot­tom chan­nels hold­ing the insu­la­tion were rusted out com­pletely.  The metal while still intact and solid, is very thin on the bot­tom with some minor pinholes.

These parts will prob­a­bly be hard to find in any kind of usable con­di­tion, so I will repair then either by build­ing them up inside with epoxy or body lead.  I will then re-insulate them using closed cell neo­prene instead of insu­lat­ing batts and with the drains now clear, we should have no fur­ther cor­ro­sion issues here.  It is impor­tant that these be rock solid, espe­cially on the driver’s side, because the brake mas­ter cylin­der and vac­uum booster are attached to it.

Final project today was to scrape, sand, wire­brush and prime the vac­uum tank which was mounted down low in the front left fender under the heater core assem­bly.  A curi­ous note here was that in work­ing with it, it appeared to have an ounce or two of engine oil in it.  On the plus side, it prob­a­bly means that there is lit­tle or no cor­ro­sion in it, but I’ll have to do some research to fig­ure out why it was there in the first place.

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Spent a good amount of time today clear­ing every­thing from the fire­wall.  All that is left is where the wiring har­ness comes from inside the car, I removed the cowl grills and rub­ber too.  The blis­ters were removed ear­lier and with every­thing gone I spent some time clean­ing, wire brush­ing and clean­ing the whole area to remove any last traces of cor­ro­sion, oil and grease.

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My fears about the radi­a­tor were con­firmed today when I made a stop at the engine shop to drop off the exhaust man­i­folds to have them checked.  While there I talked to Rich from the radi­a­tor shop and he asked me to see him before I left.  When I went over to see him, he had the top and bot­tom tanks off the radi­a­tor and we could plainly see that the core was plugged prob­a­bly 40 – 50%.

At this point, I’m not tak­ing a chance with it, can’t see the point of putting some­thing like that in front of a new $3500.00 motor.  Ordered a new core and he will put it back together like new using the old top and bot­tom tanks.  I know I’ll feel a lot more con­fi­dent when dri­ving it down the road in the future.

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