So far this has been kind of a fun retrospective. I've been able to recall the origins of my predilection for products like Simple Green for light grease removal and POR-15 for rust-proofing. I can remember seeing first hand how the internal combustion engine functioned and learning so many things 'hands on' that books simply can't impress on a young mind in the same way. Needless to say, by this time I was completely hooked on the car thing. My dad and I could understand each other's language and share our scheming plots for the future of this and other vehicles. He had some project cars of his own along the way, but nothing would keep his interest for very long and these vehicles usually wound up in the hands of the first person to walk in the door holding the right amount of cash. Aside from the Bel Air and the '72 truck he'd had a '66 Jeep Wagoneer, J10 and J20, '34 Plymouth, and a Datsun 510 two door. Half of them were basket-cases.
Where was I? Oh yeah, spring of '07 with a freshly sandblasted frame and axles.
This was my pleasant surprise:
The whole frame as well as the axles, springs, steering box and even the back sides of the rims had been sandblasted clean. I set about scraping off any thickly coated grime that the blast media hadn't completely removed and de-greasing each of those spots.
The frame was ready to rock while the axles were rolled aside and given the same prep treatment
The new rust you can see on the Dana 44 is from water I'd used to rinse off some degreaser. It oxidized instantaneously. Before I could blink that surface rust was everywhere the water had touched. I used a different degreaser after that, one that would completely evaporate and not leave behind a residue that needed rinsing to remove. Minor surface rust like that wasn't a problem though. The POR-15 adhered very well to the rough surface created on the metal by the sandblasting.
Donning a full body paint suit, respirator and head cap, my dad filled his HVLP gun with undiluted POR-15 straight from the can. After some minor adjustment to the spray nozzle we were in business.
Over a couple of days he sprayed two full coats on the entire frame, axles, the whole shebang. Low humidity in Southern Utah's high desert meant that it would take until the next day for one coat to be semi-cured and no longer tacky.
Man did it look good.
We didn't look so good, what with POR-15 all over our hands and anywhere that hadn't been covered. It took about two weeks for that stuff to wear off as new skin cells displaced the old ones on our bodies. I was smart enough to order some of their special thinner, but it only worked if we didn't get our hands wet first. It set up muy pronto in direct contact with water. Years later the bay we painted the frame in still had a darker floor than the surrounding concrete.
My dad had sprayed the first coat on a Friday, so Saturday morning we snuck up to the shop for the second coat. On Saturday afternoon I was shopping for new shoes and the clerk had brought me a pair that seemed unusually dirty. He gave me a really funny look when I asked for another pair in the same size, one that didn't look so grimy. I didn't realize until later that the clerk probably suspected I'd smudged them up with my filthy looking mitts.
On Monday I threw the axles back on:
I had the rest of the week to figure out how to properly mount the drivetrain. To begin we went ahead and set that rat motor in place.
You can see everything lined up and ready to go in that shot. 454 nestled between the framerails, 4L80E, NP241C behind it, fuel lines and then a 31 gallon EFI Blazer tank at the back. The tank we had scrounged up from a local junkyard as I thought it looked like a good fit. After going back to the shop and doing some measuring it seemed that the tank would wedge perfectly and very snugly between the rear framerails. I had considered a stainless steel ECE tank, but the price was much more agreeable at the junkyard.
I pulled a torque converter from the shop's stock and threw it on. The original t-case adapter had a hairline crack in it, so another was found in the shop's inventory of parts. With the transmission and transfer case bolted together I hoisted them into place with a cherry picker (hydraulic engine hoist if you prefer) and attached the bellhousing with some new zinc coated Grade 5 hardware.
By the way, shouldn't something hold that super-dooper drivetrain up?
Don't worry, that picture was taken just after unhooking the cherry picker but before supporting it with a jackstand. We scratched our heads then hemmed and hawed for a while trying to figure out the crossmember conundrum. The crossmember would have to be able to clear a front driveshaft, be up high enough to not drag on rocks but still reach to the t-case adapter and support everything. My dad had a collection of a half dozen crossmembers from various applications lounging behind the shop. You can see some of them in the picture of the old gas tank. I picked through the metallic bouquet, trying out various combinations and theorizing.
In the end we used the original crossmember as a base. The slots in the bottom were enlarged with a die grinder to clear the sockets needed to attach the nuts for the base of the mount. One of the crossmembers from out back (probably an eighties GM truck) had the proper spacing for the mount in the center, but if I recall correctly it was too long, or didn't fit flat against the frame. It did, however, have a hump in the middle of the crossmember where a mount had sat. With a cutting blade in the angle grinder I chopped the hump out of the newer crossmember. After it was cleaned up we welded it to the top of the old crossmember.
It worked! The added height of the hump allowed the mount to sit right in the sweet spot. I was able to attach it at the bottom with the correct nuts and best of all it would clear the front driveshaft on the passenger side.
Here, you'll understand what I'm babbling about if you see a picture taken quite a few steps later:
In this next picture you can barely see the bottom of the crossmember in place on the bare frame after POR-15 coating it.
I slathered the rad support by hand with cheap paint brushes. POR-15 fills brush strokes very well. The radiator support was sitting on the front while I figured out how the mounting hardware fit. The headers were on loan from a local exhaust shop. The ones my dad later ordered for it didn't have those goofy A.I.R. injection ports.
I could see a slight complication with the Blazer fuel tank though. There was a crossmember in the way where I planned to mount it (the one it is sitting on top of in the picture). I added that to my list of problems to research back in Arizona.