Moving in the Right Direction

 With the gearbox out and all the heavy metal off the frame, I am really, finally down to the frame itself.  The rear trailing arms and front torsion arms are at the shop being fitted with new bushings and ball joints, respectively, so what is left just needs to be cleaned and painted before the reassembly can begin.

Honestly, the rust is minimal, confined mostly to the front part of the frame where the master cylinder is located.  Even though the front beam looked pretty gritty, it cleaned up very nicely.  

The next thing to to come off was that beam. At first I thought I wouldn't bother doing this, and just buff/paint it as an assembly, but as I looked closer, it was apparent that it needed to be pulled apart for a proper cleaning.  

I wore out at least one wire wheel and beat up a couple of others in several hours of what, 'whisking'?  It wasn't exactly grinding, but the action was the same, essentially a tedious but very satisfactory experience of removing all the surface dirt and rusty patina from all the edges, tubes, nooks and crannies of the fully exposed frame. After hours with the wire wheel,  I primed and painted it with a semi-gloss high-heat paint.

I wasn't too happy with this finish, because I think the flat black just looks better on all this suspension stuff, but I didn't want to repaint it.  It was nice to buff up all the nuts and bolts that hold the torsion spring in place.  Putting these back was actually the first thing to officially go back together since I started this project back in September of last year.  On such tiny pivots do projects like this turn. 

I cleaned up one of the pivot bolts and put it back as a test to see if the paint was going to prevent a proper fit, and it looks great.  I had thought of painting these bolts another color, but it looks like the standard will be to buff them up and give them a light coat of clear lacquer just to retard the rust patina that will inevitably return.


After buffing and priming the front part of the frame, it was time to flip the whole thing over and clean up the bottom.

This really does represent the baseline, so to speak, of this project.  Once it was over on it's back, I could finally attack the last dirty and rusty surfaces.

More hours of buffing and sanding preceded a nice coat of rust-proof primer (conveniently rust-colored) and a rubberized undercoating to seal the deal.  A few hours of drying and it will be time to flip it back over and begin the reconstruction in earnest.

My goal, as I've said before, is not to fully restore this car as a showpiece, but to refurbish it as a daily driver.  To that end, I want to clean everything up and make sure it all works, but I am not obsessed with making sure the details of the underbody are perfectly painted and polished.

Considering how long it's been since this thing has been down, it is remarkable that it can be brought back to the street at all, so I am focussing on that goal and not letting obsessiveness with unseen and unnecessary detail get in the way of productivity.

Next:  the parts come back from the shop.  They were expensive but worth it...I think.