I got a little ahead of myself story-wise. One last thing we did before removing the body was to set the big block into the engine bay to see if/where we would need to modify the firewall for clearance reasons. The passenger side wasn't going to be a problem, but it became obvious that a section of the driver's side would have to be cut up and reshaped to clear the cylinder head. We were able to put my hardly used GM motor mounts from the 355 to good use once again and the mount holes lined up perfectly with the frame. Another observation we made was that the oil pan was going to be a fairly tight fit but it didn't seem to pose a serious problem. Back out came the 454 and onto the engine stand once more.
On with the show.
After rolling my Suburban into the shop, and plenty of careful consideration, this is what we came up with.
The front lift arms were under the body seam, adjacent to the second set of floor supports. The rear arms sat under the wood floor on one of the rear cross braces. You can see that we had to stack a couple to adapters to get the height needed out back. I had done some research and purchased four pneumatic caster wheels in a compromise between low price and high weight capacity. I fabricated adapters from plate steel in order to bolt the front set to the first body mount holes, and attached the rear ones directly to an under floor cross brace.
It didn't all work according to plan.
After rolling the frame out of the shop...
We lowered the body...
The front wheels worked beautifully. The rear ones immediately folded the support they were attached to. After lots of finagling I gave up and just used a floor jack to get it out the door and back to the gravel. A spare set of jack stands would hold the rear up for the time being.
The frame was wheeled back into another bay where I commenced to remove, tag and bag all of the fittings that were still on it.
By this time I'd learned proper procedure for organizing parts as I took them off and started snapping many more pictures. We had previously removed the 40 gallon aftermarket tank because 1. it was too big and bulky and 2. we were planning on swapping in a tank with EFI pump compatibility in the near future.
That tag listed the manufacturer as “TRAVEL ACCESSORIES MFG. CO. INC.”
A stencil on the side read “DO NOT WELD OR TORCH”
I sold it to the scrap man a few years later.
My dad surprised me at spring break of 2007 with a completely sandblasted frame. We were ready to try out this stuff I had already been reading about for some time, POR-15.