More Work Done

Yesterday I went back to Keven’s place to do some more work with him on the car. We checked out the lower suspension bumpers and the Gorilla Glue we used to fix them seems to hold pretty good, so we threw those back on the car.

Next step was to check out the idler arm. I had bought a replacement idler arm from Auto Zone the day before. The one I bought was a beefed up police / taxi heavy duty version. When we put it on, it was hitting a couple of headers big time. After about 20 minutes of trying to figure out what to do, Keven noticed that we could probably force the idler arm lower onto its bushing using his 45 ton press. That worked very well! After doing that, the arm wasn’t hitting the headers as bad – more like scratching it now. So Keven took out his trusty ball peen hammer and dented the header until the arm was barely even touching it.  Keven made sure everything was lubed up.

With that done, we moved on to the driveshaft u-joints.  Keven decided that it would be best that I get new ones, so we headed over to Checker Auto Parts and picked some new ones up.  Again, we went with the beefier ones.  The old u-joints had "Made in USA" proudly cast into the iron.  The new u-joints have "Made in China" printed in 3 different languages on the box.  After having some fast food for lunch, we came back to the shop and went to work on replacing the u-joints.  We put the driveshaft back on and noticed that there was far less play than there was before.  Keven also checked out the gear oil in the rear end – as soon as he took the plug off… glug, glug, glug… gear oil came out.  It was quite overfilled.  After letting some out, he put the plug back in.

Now with the work on the car all done, we moved on to the trailer.  Keven basically just took the old bent-to-heck angle iron out and threw on some new ones.  He had to use one of his backhoes to push down the wood deck to make it flat again.  7 bolts later, I had a newly repaired trailer.

Some photos below.  First one is of the old idler arm – Can you see the rubber between the idler arm and the drag link?  Yeah, gone.  Next one is of the new transmission mount.  You can tell it’s new.  No rust on it.  Then there’s a shot of the mullet mufflers we put on the day before.  Then the next couple of pictures are shots of the suspension bumpers.  Then we have a shot of the groove the old idler arm was wearing into the headers!  Then we have a beauty shot of the car on the lift.  Then we have a bunch of shots of the driveshaft work.  Then last we have pictures of the work repairing the trailer.