Ed the Herald

Got the brake calipers back today, they're sitting downstairs in the car, i should have taken a photo to make this less a wall of text. so thats one job down. Heard from dad last night that the guys at the garage had sucessfully extracted the bolt from the front trunion so the trunion and the wishbone are both fine. they'll do the other bits when they have spare moments as I'm not in a rush. Hoping to go up, not this weekend, but the following to start stripping the undercoat from the chassis. The pricing on blasting was too much, so i'm going to do it by hand. Shouldn't be too hard and hopefully wont take too long, i'll have to make sure i have a couple of beers handy when i start. I'm tossing up whether to try packing each chassis rail section in dry ice and chipping the undercoat that way, or doing the heatgun/turps trick i used on the floorpans. i was going to go up this weekend, but i have to stay in town and get my house in a state where i can re...

SO, the front bulkhead went to the panel shop a couple of weeks ago and is now complete. Had a little more rust than we thought. ended up getting it media blasted to clean up the firewall and get the remainder of the underseal off. I'm waiting for some photos, apparently the panel shop took a pile of photos. Ended up repairs to the heater and firewall (known), rebuilding both A-pillars (semi known), Repairing the outer skin near the passenger side body mount (known), the innerskin of the passenger body mount (unknown) repairs behind drivers side body mount (unknown) . Apparently its primed in 2K and had new underseal applied too. All done. Now i need to get the bonnet down to him for the same treatment. I rang the guy who was recommended for the chassis media blasting but its looking quite expensive. So i might have to spend some time with a heat gun and some beers while i'm up working up that way over the next month. Sent the brake calipers to the shop to be rebuilt,...

 So, disconnected the handbrake cable, jacked up the front of the car and lifted/slid the body tub off the back on Friday night. Got stuck in this morning and pulled the rear axles and diff off basically we're completely disassembled. .  The great news is the chassis looks perfect, the rear shock mounts are fine, diff mounts are fine. Had some horrifying moments pulling it apart, the left rear upper shock bolt didn't have a nut on it, the rear brake hose between the left and right wheels was basically rusted through, many bolts in the drive train that were loose. It was pretty terrifying. Had a little clean up too, still a mess but not as bad. I still have the rear half-shaft to pull apart, but other than that now its the slow and painful process of cleaning and painting everything. Oh yeah and i picked up my bits from the UK, YAY!