Post 7: On The Rotisserie

30 April 2017:  Yes that right, Clint is attached to the Rotisserie! a quick Video.

I was left with the inner shell complete with the front and rear suspension, steering and a few brake pipes before this week end.  First job was to construct a left rear bracket to mount the rear rotisserie fixings too, was expecting this to take a while and it did BUT once competed then attaching the jig was straight forward, ably assisted by Mike.


After lunch, scavenged together from the debris in the fridge, we progressed to removing the rear axle.  I don't know how this is done in service and frankly I don't want to do it again as it was really hard work - nothing was easy to remove and sliding the axle out was heavy work.  We did however manage it and have it safely stored. 


Mounting to the car to the rig came next and with lots of jacking and winding later the car is mounted as you can see in the video.


Sunday - a new apprentice arrived, shocking though that number one son (Rob) was out of bed at 9am, but ready he was without being called too!  It was good to see him tackling the front suspension, learning about Left & Right! I hope he had fun, I think he enjoyed it anyway and it was good to have company and helped a lot - cheers!


Car is now almost ready to start the journey ahead.  To be fair it is a bit daunting what I have taken on, the car is well messed about in places, just need to focus on each job I guess, one at a time.  Almost completed my parts list though for phase 1 which centres on lots of panels, around 25-30 of them plus some I will manufacture myself and a new steering set to move to RHD.

Post 6: Pressure wash

22 April 2017:  Its been a few weeks since last blog, have been busy on the car and been away so where have I got to the?


Cleared the engine and all other items from the body, left just the front and rear suspensions so I can move the car about.  Car was very dirty so today we had a go at pressure washing the body to remove the dirt.

The car came up reasonably well, lots of holes and rot to remove - see some of it in these images.

So after all this effort I changed my attention to starting work on the jigging required to mount the car to the rotisserie.  First step is to make some door strengthening jigs. I could have purchased some but thought not!  One consideration was to make some bars that could be adjusted as I want to have the option to "jack" open the door gap.  Any way this is the end result after an afternoons work!



Next time I will be mounting the jig structure to the front and rear!

Post 5: Exterior Panels Gone!

2nd April 2017:  On to the teardown.  Aim was to remove all of the exterior panels to get first sight of the task. 

Started with the front end, easy to get the wings and doors off although a couple of hidden screws and many were seized so the drill took a hammering.  Dash came out fairly easily and the car doesn't really look like a car anymore!

As expected the sills, floors and bottom of the A & B posts have not faired well during the years in the US and some very dodgy bodges have been deployed to cover up the rot in the sills and bottom of the B posts.  A definite death trap even at the time the "repairs" were originally made - however they are now gone and what's left exposed.



Some quick shots of the right sill, all coming out along with the floor.  Not sure how best to tackle this yet although it wont be difficult as most of the metal has already detached itself in any case!

The boot has taken a pasting too but the car has given me the fuel take which is intact and sound - a wash out of the old fuel and clean up will do the job.

A new boot floor and side boxes required.

All this took no more than a days effort.  The next step I think is to extract the engine and gearbox for storage.  At that stage with the engine out maybe another days effort might get me to mounting the car to the rotisserie stage.