ENGINE WORK

We labelled and removed just about everything from the donor engine. As you can see it started out pretty dirty.

We added a couple of upgrades to give it a little more power and are almost done putting it back together.

The crate is gone! I'm very pleased with the progress we are making, as the crate arrived in July.

We pulled apart the crate this week. We cleaned the rear suspension pieces, the pedals, the fuel tank, and lots of cables. We pulled the transmission and engine off of the pallet at the bottom of the crate and hauled it out of the garage.

We're ready to start cleaning the engine and transmission. I ordered some upgrade parts for the engine, so we'll install those as well.

Once the engine is ready, we will begin assembling the buck to store the body. The buck will ride over and around items like the engine, and will take some creative engineering. We can't really start on the kit itself until the body is off of the frame, so we'll be eager to finish the buck.

The kit is here!!

Right on schedule, our Coupe (#497 from this manufacturer) arrived on July 29th. The truck drivers were very friendly and very careful. We have a pile of boxes to go with the parts that were temporarily attached to the car. Amazingly, we are expecting many more boxes as individual parts were back-ordered.

The back-order will not be a problem, as we still have a lot of work to do with what we did receive. We need to get back to cleaning up the donor parts. Then we need to build a body support (called a buck) to allow us to remove the body from the chassis. In order to store the body in the garage when we're not working on it, the buck will have to be tall enough to store the body above the pile of parts (seen below on the right) but low enough to clear the garage door opening.

On its way!!!

We got the call! The kit is on its way and will be here on July 29th. With the garage cleaned up, we took the weekend off of serious car work.

A little payoff for our effort

We finished all four brakes and hubs, and we replaced the clutch packs in the rear differential along with the diff and axle bearings. It took a lot of brushing with a wire brush on a drill, plus some time degreasing and painting, but the payoff is worth it!

BEFORE AFTER

The kit itself was scheduled to be finished and ready for pickup by the trucking company yesterday. With any luck, it'll be here by the end of the month. We will be focusing on smaller pieces of the donor while we wait for the kit so we have room when it arrives.

Getting our hands dirty

The donor pallet arrived this week. We had fun removing the 225 lb rear axle from the top of the crate. We opened the crate and saw all of the parts and pieces we needed from the donor car in a pile.

Since we're most familiar with brakes and suspension, we grabbed the front and rear spindles. We ended up buying new rear brakes and new brake rotors all around, but a surprising amount of the original parts were usable. We scrubbed, degreased and painted a number of pieces.

While waiting for some brake parts to arrive, we cracked open the rear axle. This was new territory for us, so we took our time. We spent about 12 hours working in the garage and another 6 running errands for parts and tools.

Still, by quitting time today we had the rear differential rebuilt with new limited slip clutch packs installed. Will post pics of that achievement next time...

We've been anticipating the arrival of parts for a few weeks, and have run out of things in the garage to clean in preparation.


Our Mustang donor pallet is almost here. We should receive it in a couple of days. The donor is a 160,000-mile Mustang convertible. The salvage yard took what we need off of the car and is shipping us one or two pallets full of parts. We're ready to start cleaning, polishing, painting and refurbishing the donor parts.

Tom went tool shopping and is now ready to lend a hand!