Current Plan -- July 18, 2002

July 18, 2002

Stu and I have been busy. When last I wrote we had done some investigating, and were discussing rear axle choices. We discussed the Chevelle wagon parts car, the rear under my '72 Chevy work truck, buying something in a junk yard, frame swaps and all manner of crazy plans.

Since then we've also checked into the purchase of two trailers that might have provided useful rears, and also been usable as utility trailers with another axle. Neither trailer included an axle that will bolt under the sub so I abandoned that idea.

I like the frame swap idea, and for a couple days was convinced I would swap the body onto the Chevelle wagon frame. The problem with that idea is that it would be far more work than we could accomplish at home in our spare time within a finite period of time. After rejecting that idea I crawled under the front of the Chevelle and discovered old repairs made to the front cross-member I don't know what happened under there, but someone appears to have fixed a major dent just in front of the attachment point for the passenger side lower a-arm. This frame is not a keeper...

I took me a long time to make up my mind, but after forecasting the cost of time required for each option, I decided to use the axle from the wagon. It really came down to having it here already. I don't know the exact gear ratio, but it appears to be near 3 to 1, which is right for a big car, if wrong for a heavy truck. I don't expect to ever pull anything heavy with this thing, and going down the road with decent fuel economy is something I'd like a lot...

That decided Stu and I have been disassembling the wagon. First was the motor. While removing the motor I found another reason to be glad to abandon the Chevelle frame. You can not remove the starter without removing the exhaust. I couldn't get one of the engine mount bolts free without removing the exhaust. It was rather tiresome. I used the red-tipped wrench on some of it since most the stuff around is not expected to see reuse ever.

We set the motor in the back of my pickup, and I joked that my pickup had 16-cylinders and 700 cubic inches (or 11.4 Liters). Stu thought it was funny. We moved the pickup and then set the motor under a tarp for safe keeping. No pictures of any of this. Greasy fingers and expensive cameras don't mix.

Our next project is removing the disk breaks and rear axle from the wagon. We plan to complete this project after work tomorrow, and be finished before bed time because we want to attend the Good-Guys show in Puyallip Saturday. We'll jack up the front of the car, and remove the calipers, rotors, brake lines, bearings excetera. These goodies are all required to do the ChevyDuty.com disk break conversion. Once we've got the front pieces off, the rear goes up and the axle comes down. I suspect more torch action, though I'll have a better feel for that once the rear is out on the ground.

My friend Gene says he has some 8x8 wooden blocks we can use to hold the car up. This is important because we're doing this out in the lawn, and don't want jack stands to sink into the ground. Also it may sit on these blocks for a week or more before a truck come to remove the hulk. And as they remove the hulk I don't want it mashing my jack stands...

So that's tomorrow's plan. Yes we do have a plan, and I'm sticking with it at least for the rest of the evening!

Pictures? Well I've been bad about photography the last few weeks, but I did find a candidate for my next project, and here is a picture of it.

Last updated: December 31, 2006