| 03-27-2012 |
Today I worked on getting those perches ground off the rear end so I could test fit the rear end and see how my u-bolt situation was going to work. The old u-bolts were a bit too wide and didn't want to fit int he bottom plate and the new u-bolts were way too small to fit around the tube. I also sat the motor in place so I will be able to tell if the engine mounts are going to be lined up before I install them. They have yet to come in and the guy from Chassis Engineering said they were out of stock and being made by the factory now so they should ship out in a couple of days. That will give me time to catch up on a few things like scraping the glued on sound deadener from the roof of the body and drilling out one of the interior screws from the rear passenger strap handle that broke off.
First I drug the rear end outside to have some room and checked out the perches. These were of course welded by a machine and they were some very thick welds
It didn't take long to find out these weren't going to go quietly. What isn't pictured is the immense amount of hitting with a hammer and chisel I did to try to minimize the cutting as much as possible and the extreme amount of hitting my hand with the hammer, too.
At long last I finally started making some real progress
Finally, I got them both off. I'm going to try to reuse the old perches so I took great pains to try to not butcher them as much as possible. I'm not sure if I succeeded, but I gave it the old college try.
Some of those cuts into the axle tubes were pretty deep. I'm hoping they aren't too deep. I'm going to have to figure out if I'm able to just weld them back up and grind them down smooth.
I'm going to have to wait until I have the engine and transmission mocked up to get the pinion angle and I have to get the pinion angle before I can position the axle and tack weld the perches back on so I can then remove the axle and fully weld the perches. Even though it isn't time to tack the perches I went ahead and centered the axle to see what it was going to look like and in case I wanted to go ahead and mock up some other things if time permits.
These u-bolts are a bit too wide and it wasn't easy getting them to go through the holes in the bottom plates but I finally was able to get them all through and bolted up.
You can see here that the u-bolts that came with the rear end mounting kit, which was designed for a Ford 9 inch (rather than the 8.8 I'm using) were way too small.
And then I had a rear end and some shocks
I'm not sure how I'm going to mount the rear sway bar yet, but I'm going to wait until I get the pinion angle set to make sure it doesn't get in a bind
Then I moved the motor over and after lowering the frame down was able to sit it in its place. I'm going to have to get a new transmission mount. I wanted to get it sitting in it's location so that when I measure for the new motor mounts that bolt to the frame I can be sure they are going to line up properly.
Now that is a beautiful thing. I just wish I already had the new motor mounts so it could actually be bolted in.
