Drivetrain Work

Ray did a great job of cleaning and painting the engine block.  Vince then did a lot of assembly work, plus cleaning of components.

For example, here's the carbs with one clean and the other not:

They were pretty nasty.  Vince also found some broken and worn out pieces of the carb linkage.  Basically the choke higher idle speed was not functional, plus the choke linkages are all "wallered out".  But these are all components that can be easily replaced.  I'll bet this thing was hard to get going when cold. 

Here's two shots of the engine cleaned up with most components in place:

We also got the transmission back from it's rebuild:

We have a plan of attack for mating the body to the frame.  Ray and Vince will install the drivetrain in the chassis and deliver is to Darrell's body shop.  Meantime, Darrell will finish body prep and paint the under hood area only.  Ray and Vince help Darrell drop the body onto the chassis.  The engine compartment will be in finished state but the exterior of the body will need to still be painted.  Once Darrell finishes paint then it's back to Ray's shop to finish the car!

Chassis Continues

Nick the welder did a great job of welding the new floor tracks to the frame.  Here's some pics:

Nick taking a break, nice smile huh?

Pieces welded in place:

We also filled in any remaining non-structural holes in the frame members.  The floors did require some trimming to make them fit, but they turned out real well:

Nick even welded back the bracket to attach the rear brake line:

The fuel line, rear brake line, and rear wiring are all correctly installed in the track going down the inside of the passenger side frame member.

We checked out the front suspension by cobbling together a coil spring compressor to release the spring pre-load and then move the suspension pieces to make sure there was no slop.  The kingpins and other joints seem to be in great shape:

We checked the fuel sending unit, did not give a reading, upon dismantle found a broken wire between the rheostat and the connection.  We'll have to get a new sending unit!

Ray is making good progress on cleaning and painting the engine.  We are expecting another shipment of parts by the end of this week, otherwise we will be running out of work!