70 Challenger going Plum Crazy

[dakota]

Today was a good day.   Dropped the leaf springs, exhaust pipes, heat shields,  ancient rear shocks (complete with air lines) and finally the gas tank in a matter of couple of hours.   I had pumped out the gas tank several weeks ago and noticed a little bit of black crud in the bottom of the gas can I used, so I wanted to take a closer look inside.   There was a much bigger supply of sludge (thinking it's rust since it's magnetic) that flopped out as shown in the first picture.   The sending unit was pretty bad too.   The float had a crack in it and the strainer had split open among other problems.   Looks like another Roseville order is in my future.  I'm really glad that I'm getting a chance to get this stuff addressed rather than getting stranded by a plugged fuel system.

I think this is just about the last parts to come off the car.

Another part of the good day:  GO BILLS!   Nice job on Green Bay.

[dakota]

Finally got back to doing some work on the heater box.   I have a gasket kit to install still, but the surface of the box was a little beat up so I decided to paint the outside.   A Rustoleum paint ("oiled bronze metallic") was the closest I could find to the original color.   It's not a perfect match, but it works for me.

The actuators for the heater box cleaned up pretty well with the help of 3M sanding pads ("fine", then "ultrafine").   I sprayed a little clear coat on them to try to keep the clean.

[Brillo1974]

Car is looking really nice!  Where I Iowa did you have your car painted? It sucks here right now we got 8 inches of snow and it's still coming down. 

[dakota]

The car was painted at a small collision shop south of Burlington, IA.  The shop owner painted the car as a favor.   He and his guys had done some work on my truck and my wife's car previously.  He was an absolute perfectionist so it was done right.  I don't think he'd do another repaint as my Challenger tied up one of his bays for more than a year.  It made for good fill-in work for when things were slow on the collision side. And I think his guys liked the change of pace.  I was in the process of moving while it was getting painted, so the long time lag worked out Ok for me. 

We have another 7-12" of snow coming our way tonight and tomorrow (same storm that hit the Midwest?) so I feel your pain on the weather. 

[dakota]

When I positioned my Challenger in the garage to replace the transmission and clutch, I had not planned to pull the engine.   After doing more reading about ways to improve the stock suspension, I came across several references about stiffening the K member.   In another post, I had also mentioned my attempt to use POR-15 engine paint had not turned out well because of the drips/sags that formed.  So now I had at least 2 reasons to pull the engine.   I didn't want to remove the hood out of fear of damaging the paint, and I'd have to move the car (currently supported only on jack stands) to have enough room to get the engine lift in front of it for picking up the front end.   My solution was pretty ugly but it worked:  remove the flywheel (tranny is still off the car), rotate the oil pick up so it was out of the way (the oil pan was removed earlier for a repaint because of the POR-15 drips), then use a small transmission scissor jack the support the bellhousing while I used a floor jack to lower the K-member onto 2 layers of scrap landscaping timbers.   I went back and forth between easing down the floor jack and lowering the scissors jack to keep the engine and K member mostly level.  The timbers created enough space to pull out the floor jack.   From there, it was a matter of tipping the K member to pull out the wood to get everything on the ground.   All of this was done on top of an old moving blanket, which was strong enough to allow dragging the whole assembly out from under the car through the wheel well.  All in, it took about 20 minutes. The engine is now safely secured in a stand.  I will wait until the rear axle is in before reinstalling all of this stuff so I can do things in a slightly more normal fashion.

I ordered one of the K member stiffening kits from Firm Feel, so that's what will come next.   I mailed my power steering box to them for a Stage 3 rebuild/upgrade.

And I still chuckle when I remind myself that when  bought this car, all I was going to do was change out the cracked dash pad.

Burdar - if you're reading this, please know that reading through all the posts on your Challenger build inspired me to get off my butt and get busy.  Thanks.   

[dakota]

I'm using a vacation week to make some progress on the Challenger.    Most of the focus will be on painting/coating stuff while the weather is still nice (hard to believe that I've already seen some leaves change color and fall in the back yard).

Decided to paint the new gas tank, and got (another) quick lesson on humility.   When I pulled the tank out of its box, I saw what I thought was shipping damage on the flange.   Grabbed my hammer and dolly and knocked out the bends.   Then I saw the same thing on the other side..... oh yeah, that's where the tank straps go.    Crap.   More banging to put the bends back where they belong.   My neighbors seem to be impressed by all of the tool-related noises coming out of my garage.... if only they knew why.

I used Alan G's recommended Seymour Stainless Steel paint on the tank.   I ended up with the "sandpaper" texture on one side which was from a combination of painting in direct sun and/or moving the can too fast.   After wiping the surface with a Scotchbrite pad and applying another coat more slowly and when it was overcast, it turned out great.

[dakota]

I've read a couple of posts about whether and how to remove the factory undercoating.   I had some "bald spots" on my undercoating, a bunch of dirt packed in the texture that wouldn't come out even with a scrub brush, and a fair bit of overspray from the recent paint job that all added up to things looking kind of crappy, so I thought I'd give a go at removing the old stuff in the rear wheel wells.   I have a trigger-ignited propane torch that I've used for soldering copper pipe that was handy, so I put that to work along with a relatively thin 1" wide scraper.  With the torch in one hand and the scraper in the other, I found that keep the flame just ahead of the scraper was the best combination to soften things up without putting on too much heat.  I moved from one end of the wheel well to the other every couple of minutes to avoid overheating the metal, and turned off the flame about every 5 minutes to let everything cool off (especially the scraper).  The was a little bit of smoke, and the globs tends to a glow just a bit before they came off, but nothing burned.   If you're reading this and thinking about doing the removal this way, I would offer 4 pieces of advice:

0.  Have a fire extinguisher handy, just in case.
1.  Be very careful not to push too hard with the scraper, as there is a risk of your hand passing into the flame if you hit a really soft patch.
2.  Wear long sleeves.   A couple of hot globs landed on my coveralls without a problem.    One glob landed on bare skin and left a hickey (I'm pretty sure I won't have to explain this one to my wife).
3.  Keep the flame directed in a safe location or turn it off if you're checking progress.   It would be pretty easy to accidentally wave the flame somewhere you didn't want it to point... like at your new paint (no, that didn't happen).

The scraper started out flat but ended up developing a curve as I used it.   It actually worked a little better with the curve in scooping out the material.

This approach removed most, but not all, of the old undercoating.   The picture below is a "bottom up" view of the wheel well.  I'm using a truck bed liner material applied by brush and roller to recoat the wheel wells. I'll add some pictures later when finished.  Some of the edge lines from the scraper are telegraphing through the new material, but I think another coat will hide most of them.

An argument can definitely be made to have left the undercoating alone, but I really didn't like how it looked.   The front wheel wells are in much better shape and cleaner, so I'm going to just scuff that stuff a bit and recoat them.

[dakota]

I ended up replacing a section of the trunk floor pan.  The small wells where the exhaust hangers sit are low points, so I would guess that water pooled in them at some point in the distant past to cause the rot.   The passenger side had previously been repaired with fiberglass and bondo.  As far as I know, all of the other sheet metal on the car is original, so I didn't feel that great initially about cutting into it, but the thought of the hanger pulling through after hitting a bump wasn't too appealing either.

For those of you that do body work routinely, this probably isn't that big a deal.   Given my limited past experience with trying to weld (mostly involving rusty metal evaporating), there was definitely some nervousness.   Since I was going to need a patch panel, I sent the first picture to the folks at Roseville and they were nice enough to cut down a regular patch panel to something closer to the size I needed so that I could save a few $ on shipping.   The rest of the work involved trying to get the gap consistent around the patch and the hole, followed by lots of tacking, grinding, and more tacking.   I definitely learned the hard way that adding the least amount of weld metal possible is faster that building up a pile and then having to grind most of it away. 

I used a thin layer of bondo reinforced with fiberglass followed by the regular stuff to smooth out the surface.  It's amazing how much sanding can be involved even over a relatively small patch.   Overall, it didn't turn out too bad.

I will eventually be repainting the truck floor but for now am focusing on getting the wheels back on the car so I can eventually relocate it in the garage.   It will be a serious marital incident if my car project forces my wife's car into the driveway again this winter.

[dakota]

I was able to pick up the engine from a local machine shop this morning.   The 340 has been bored 0.030 over, new pistons & rings, new oil pump and a valve job completed as well.   The way things are looking right now the first firing probably won't be until next spring, but it's nice to have it home again.   

[1 Wild R/T]

Might want to check those valve covers, on small blocks I've seen the valve cover flange interfere with the intake runners causing the valve cover to not seal well..... On that engine I trimmed the flange for clearance on both valve covers just over the intake runners...

BTW Looking good..

[dakota]

Might want to check those valve covers, on small blocks I've seen the valve cover flange interfere with the intake runners causing the valve cover to not seal well.

Thanks for the tip.  I was surprised by how tight the fit was.... maybe 1/16".   Based on other posts here,I may end up changing the gaskets when I drill the holes in the valve covers for the PCV vents, so it will be something to watch.

[dakota]

Continuing the story on the wheel wells:  There wasn't much texture to the truck bed liner material (a Rustoleum product I bought at Autozone - 1 gallon can), so it took 3 coats in the rear wells to fill everything in where I had scraped the old stuff off.   On the front wheel wells, I just roughed up what was already there and used mostly a roller to recoat it.   If I were to do this over again, I probably would've tried hard to remove all of the dirt packed in the coating in the rear wells rather than going through the removal work.   From an initial appearance standpoint, the front turned out nicer.

I also spent some time this past week applying Rust Bullet to the underside of the car.   It goes on in 3 steps:  Metal Blast (acid etch), a silver protective coating (2 coats), and then a gloss black top coat (also 2 coats).   Painting it on mostly with a 2" brush while laying on a creeper is not exactly ideal as the material will run down the brush and then drip.  I ended up using duct tape to seal my gloves to my coveralls because the paint kept getting on my arms.  I'm pretty happy with how it looks now but this is a fair bit of work to apply properly.  The drips on the garage floor from the Rust Bullet aren't the only reason, but it looks like painting the garage floor will be something I'll need to do in the future... after the Challenger is "done".   
 

[dakota]

I took the 489 center section from the rear axle apart today.   Some chunkies rolled out when I tipped it to get the last of the oil to drip out.   It doesn't appear that the pieces came off the current gear set as I couldn't find any broken or chipped teeth on the ring or spider gears.   

There was essentially no preload on the carrier side bearings... maybe 6 inch-pounds total and about 2 on the pinion only.

Note to self:  when you see an "L" on the bolt head, that means it's left hand thread, so reverse your impact gun.   That was so much fun coaxing half a bolt out of the ring gear after you sheared it. 

[Chryco Psycho]

Could be spacer or shim material resulting in the lack of preload ?
 Bolts marked L huh 

[dakota]

I just received a package from Year One that had a replacement wiring harness from M&H for the engine compartment.   The item was originally ordered near the end of May, so it took just over 6 months to get.   The replacement harness for the A/C is still on back order. 

There is still plenty of other stuff to work on, so the delay didn't matter much.   At first glance, the engine harness looks to be very well made, so the wait is most likely worth it.   That said, if you're thinking about replacing your wiring harnesses with the Year One option, get your order in early.