Race to the Oppo Rally, 7 days to go.

"Pixel" (Improbcat) 05/21/2017 at 00:08 • Filed to: Oppo rally, Race to Oppo Rally

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( !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ) Day 8 had me putting paint on the last control arm, then going to a party to celebrate a friend finishing the construction and install of a giant stained glass lizard in his living room.

Getting to see it, hang out with cool people, and hot tubbing made it well worth losing some productivity. All told we didn’t get home & to sleep until 3am. So I awoke at 8am, and headed to a swap meet (my partner intelligently stayed in bed).

After wandering looking at other people’s rusty junk for three hours, I headed home to work on my rusty junk. After lots of sandblasting, painting & prepping it was finally time to start bolting pieces onto the truck. The finished final A-arms was ironically the first to go on.

After mowing the lawn while I got the A-arm assembled and everything prepped, my partner joined me in getting the front end together. Not only willing to help me with insane projects, but also cute in a skirt. I’m a lucky guy.

After bolting up the A arms and installing the spring I tried to get the spindle on, only to discover that with no engine or front sheetmetal there wasn’t enough weight to compress the front suspension enough. Jacking up the lower control arm lifted the truck off the jack stands before the upper ball joint seated in the spindle.

This was my incredibly janky solution, it worked surprisingly well, when assembled I discovered the upper control arm was hitting the spindle even with the suspension slightly compressed.

I poped the ball joint back out and did some grinding the clearance this to avoid and binding of the steering.

Once the shock went on, the left suspension was complete.

We stopped for dinner, and the 5th parts run of the week.

Once back the right suspension went on in half the time, since we (sort of) knew what we were doing.

At that point it was too dark to keep working outside. So we turned our attention to the motor, and bolted on the oil pan and the side covers.

With that, the motor is done enough to come off the engine stand. I’m about 90% sure I’m swapping out the distributor & engine wiring harness from the old engine. I also may picking up a reman one ($40 at NAPA) and put the pertonix module from my old distributor in it. However this one is staying in long enough to at least test fire the engine to check everything else before introducing another variable when trying to make it run.

The list is getting shorter! With only one new thing added because it turns out I never mentioned installing the steering components.

shop-teacher > Pixel 05/21/2017 at 01:10

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Good progress! Yes, you are a lucky guy.