| 06-19-2012 |
Dad and my friends Nick and Daniel came over to help set the body back on. Normally we all have a pretty flexible schedule but for some reason it took about a week or so to get everyone free to be able to come by on the same night. Moving everything out of the garage was no small feat.
Here we are deciding our plan of attack. April took pictures for us.
And this is where the grunting started
Even with 4 guys this thing wasn't light. What made it so bad was the fact that there was no good spot to get a good hold of it.
A little bit more
A little fine tuning and it was right on the money.
April captured us admiring our handiwork
And post-hernia inspections
The transmission dipstick was hitting the firewall, but other than that I was very glad to see that there weren't any other parts of the engine hitting the firewall.
It is close, though.
I'm surprised that massive transmission fits up in that hole.
Unfortunately, the Lokar shifter plate is hitting the very back of the floorboard. Another 1/16 of an inch and it would have been fine. I'll have to cut this out, which won't be a huge problem since I'll have to make a new cover for this area anyway.
April got all artistic on us when we weren't looking
I'm getting absolutely sick of lugging these doors around from one side of the garage to the other. They are super cumbersome.
Here's a shot of the car.
And afterwards we couldn't help but prop the fenders up to see what it might look like if it were a real car.
After we finished we wound up standing around in the garage and talking to 9 or 10 o'clock that night, talking about cars and telling stories.
Daniel is real big into drag racing. He currently runs a 77 Trans Am that's a strip-only racer as well as an old RX-7 with a Chevy 350. He's also building a '68 Charger pro-street and just recently acquired an old 60's rail dragster that he's rebuilding. He's showing us pictures of the newest dragster he had just gotten that week. It's a Chevy Vega with a huge motor in it. What's cool about this one is it's also street legal. He traded his motorcycle for it straight up.
The next day I spent most of the day reorganizing the garage. To mock up the grille shell I reinstalled the top chrome hood strip to make sure I got the distance and angle correct. If you look at the bottom corners of the grille shell you'll notice they're contacting the shock towers and this is causing the grille shell to bend inward. This is where some trimming will have to be done.
I bolted the fenders on while doing my alignment so I sat the hood pieces on just to see what it looked like. For the first time it actually resembled a car and it was nice to get a glimpse of what the final goal might eventually resemble.
