No smarter than a torque wrench....

Haven't ordered the bolts and misc. parts to reinstall the controls arms yet, but i hope to get that accomplished this weekend.  My lack of planning is really killing my schedule.  

On a separate note I found out this morning that I'm not smarter than a torque wrench.  Let me explain.  I bought a torque wrench from Orielly's and while removing the painters tape from my control arms I decided that I should put in my upper control arm ball joint.  Easy enough, right?  Wrong...  The part went in just like planned but I noticed that the bolts had a specific torque spec on them which I found in the box. So i pulled out my new torque wrench, adjusted the handle to 11 ft-lbs and torqued away.....and away....and away....until I tighten a bolt to failure.  Yup,  pulled the bolt apart.  

As you can imagine this left me more frustrated about not being able to figure out the torque wrench as opposed to breaking the bolt. I'm positive that i set the wrench correctly although now i'm wondering if, since the control arm wasn't installed, I used the wrong application of force which makes the wrench not give way at the set point.

I don't know.....

C

No More Rust!

Now that I'm back from my field assignment I've had some time to regroup where I'm at with the car.  For the last two weeks I've recleaned and covered my control arms with a primary and secondary coat of POR15. 

The Before:

I spent some time pondering over the process that i would use to get these things cleaned, replace the upper and lower control arms, and coated with POR15.  After much deliberation i decided to have the bushings replaced before i coated the controls arms with a product that I'm told will likely never come off. 

The POR15 instructions indicate that if you allow the stuff to dry at the connection of to metal items you'll likely never get them apart....Now i know there are probably ways to do it but not many would keep the parts usable.  My primary concern was that the POR15 coating would reduce the size of the bushing whole just enough to make pressing them in nearly impossible.  So while I was away i have the bushing replaced at a local machine shop...total cost $40.  Definitely worth it!

I thought about posting some photos after the first coat of grey was applied but they just looked to ugly to post.  I'm not sure if this was because I bought the product over 2 years before applying, or because that's just the tendency of the first coat.  I'm going with the latter.

The Finished Product:

 

The next step: Figuring out if i saved all the bolts to reassemble this stuff...?

Front Suspension

With my aspirations to replace the stock engine with a crate 350 I decided to start my restoration with the suspension.  To make sure i don't get parts confused i decided to work on one side at a time.  The removal of the front sway bar was easy...the control arms were another issue.

Turns out when a car is 28 years old bolts don't like to come undone.  This was the case with the stock shocks.  The lower bolt on the shock came off rather easily, but i couldn't get the shock to stop spinning in order to get the proper torch on the top nut.  After trying all sorts of compression devices, notice the compression wrench in the photo below, I ended up doing this the hard way. 

What is the hard way, you ask?  Well it involved a miniature hack saw and a lot of frustration. After cutting through the upper shock tube and pulling the parts out of the frame I felt it was appropriate to take the below photo to document my success.

I wish I could have used a sawsall but that wasn't an option with the confined space I was working with.  With the shock out I was able to insert the coil compressor and unbolt the control arms from the car.  To do so I used a spare jack lift up on the control arm assembly, just below the spindle, in order to compress the coil spring.

After the spring was safely compressed I inserted the interior coil compressor and locked it into place.   With the stored energy of the spring confined by the coil spring compressor I lowered the jack stand and unbolted the spindle.  With the lower spindle connection unbolted i was able to swing the lower control arm down and remove the still compressed coil spring.


Now deciding if i want to use POR15 on the control arms...