Chris' Site

Today has been a bear! Started out this morning about 8am and went out to get started… First order of business, get the tires off. Sounds easy enough, right? Nope! Broke two ratchets trying to remove the damn things.

Since I only had a 1/4″ drive ratchet left, I went to sears and accidentally bought a little more then I needed.

Grandpa would be proud! 🙂 I also just bought some socket organizers on Amazon, so hopefully they will be nice and organized and pretty soon!

Spent the rest of the day swearing and sweating and LOTS of use of the BFHx2 (Hammer and Handle!) to get this darn thing apart. All the video’s I’ve watched made this look MUCH EASIER. This is even after TWO DAYS of soaking it with lubricant.

I was really hoping to get both sides done today and get the rear loosened up. Guess I will be working on it this week to get those parts done.

So the next part of this project is to get it off to blasting and body/paint. But I’m a bit confused about what order to do things in:

Option A:
1) Blast and Primer
2) Bring back home
3) Put new suspension stuff back on so it’s rolling again
4) Take to body/paint

Option B:
1) Blast and Primer
2) Take to body/paint
3) Bring back home
4) Put new suspension stuff back on so it’s rolling again

I like option A better, because then they won’t be painting over/around all my new and (hopefully) pretty suspension parts.. But it makes it 1000x harder to move the car around. The blasters I’ve talked all want it fully stripped so they can blast everything and I want to lizardskin the bottom of the car so the painters I’ve talked to have said they can work either way. Not sure what’s the easiest though.

Been busy lately with life, so car has been a bit on the back burner. This weekend I spent a lot of time working on it.

Today I got the front window out… What a mess that was:

Also got the gas tank out… Not so hard

I also got the brake lines and fuel line out. Put a lot of WD-40 on all the bolts for the suspension, tomorrow I will tackle that.

I spent a lot of time today going through parts and cataloging everything. Found the passenger side mirror at the bottom of a box. Sadly I’ve already spent $260 on a replacement mirror and the replacement is in much better condition then the old one, so I’ll use it.

Lastly, I spent some time painting the sun visors and the kick panels. Here’s some pretty neat before and after pics:

My goal for this weekend is to get it stripped to the point where I can send it into sand blasting/body and paint this week sometime!

Yesterday I worked a few hours to get the dash out…

Came out a bit harder then I expected. On my bronco there were about 6 bolts and the thing just popped off. On the torino there’s a HECK of a lot more calbes, wires, etc attached. And, maybe I did something wrong, but once the dash was unbolted there’s no support for the steering column.

Heater box is in pretty rough shape, the fan is really rusted, etc. Will probably have to either get an all new one or just take it apart and replace some all the components. The doors inside it that I could see were rusted shut.

Here’s the worst rust I’ve found so far. This is on the outside air intake thing. When I tried to unbolt it, the bolts just snapped off.

Everything is all out, still need to get the wiring harness the rest of the way out. This car must have spent it’s LIFE at the beach. There were buckets of sand covering EVERYTHING behind the dash!

Now to figure out what to do with the body RE-body work, paint, etc. Need to find someone good in LA to do the work that’s not crazy expensive.

SUCCESS! The engine is outttttt!

Didn’t take as much work as I thought it would to get the engine pulled. Yesterday I took the day off and got the drive shaft and exhaust out. This morning, with help from my roommate, we pulled the engine

Problem is… Where to store it???

Here’s the empty bay, there’s a weird blue canister in the far back left. Not sure what that is.

Also got the back seat out today

And the vert top.

Along with some other random bits and pieces, including the two door windows, need to clean them up, but they look pretty good.

One problem is that I have no idea how to get the rear windows out. The manual says to unscrew two screws, but I did that and they still won’t budge.

Tomorrow will work on the dash!

Today I started some of the engine tear down process so that I can pull it out. Started with pulling out the Radiator.

Radiator had (4) supports, two top and two bottom. The bottom two had two bolts each, one on each side, the two top supports only had one bolt each.

Here’s my current radiator, with the spare that came with the car. Clearly not the same size, nor is the fan shroud. I think that the radiator that came with it is too far gone, I can see two BIG holes in it and it’s very very rusty inside. Will probably just buy a new one.

There were two trans cooler lines on the driver side of the car into the Radiator.

Here’s the heater hose placement, I’m not sure what that weird thing is that they are connected too in the upper left corner. Looks to have some vacuum lines come out of it as well.

From there I also removed the fan, (4) simple bolts and then I pulled some other small items off…

Some weird fender mud flap type thing, each one was bolted on differently. These are pretty beat up, will probably just need new ones.

Then I removed the horn, washer fluid bucket, hood weather stripping. There was some random electrical cable next to the horn that wasn’t plugged in at all.

After that I decided to dig into the Carb. Was pretty easy to remove that, not that I was expecting it to be hard. Although, it had a lot more random connections, etc then I was expecting. Tried to get as many pictures as I could with tape noting where they went.

Started to try and disconnect the power steering pump but the lines were giving me a hard time and I’ve been feeling sick. Came in, took a nap and made dinner. Now it’s raining here in LA! About time!

Hopefully in the next couple weeks I can pull the engine!!