This project has moved very slowly due to weather, family and other projects happening simultaneously. Among other things, I am concurrently building double bypass sliding barn doors for two carports. I've been coming down to the barn and whittling away at this project as I'm able. Unfortunately, most of the time I forget to bring the camera.
As I feared in the last entry, cutting was the only option to remove the shock mount bolts. It required buying some large cut off discs, which also meant I had to take the safety guard off of the cutting wheel. I really don't like this as I've had a wheel explode on me before so I'm a bit skittish of using angle grinders with no guard. This is a catch 22 situation because one thing that causes cut off discs to explode, is cutting while not holding them true to the angle being cut. Since I have no guard, I'm definitely not going to be able to position myself to best see the angle which I am cutting. I was able to use three cuts to remove the bolt. Two just on the inside of the arms and one to severe the strut rod. After prying out the middle part of the bolt, I put the nut back on the end of the stud and used the impact to pull the rearward piece out.
I had to drive the forward piece out with a punch.
Unfortunately, accessibility is not always the best. On the driver's side I accidentally cut into the rear spindle support. I believe this part will now have to be replaced, which opens up a whole new can of worms.
The strut rod brace, attached to the bottom of the differential housing, came out with no problems. It seems that the only badly rusted areas were bolts that were very close and in direct line of sight to the moist concrete over the years. After disconnecting the front driveshaft, I moved onto the crossmember support. I had been soaking these for many days in anticipation, however they still required the puller. I am thankful for the advice from The Corvette forum, because pullers are not something I've owned or used with regularity and so it would not have naturally occurred to me to use this as a solution. The puller made very easy work of separating the crossmember from the car. I tried a pry bar just out of curiosity and it was not doing much good. I unscrewed the bolts about 1/2" and when the crossmember came loose it was able to hang from the bolt until I could get a support under the differential.
After some trial and error I was able to find a position that allowed the jack to get under the differential. I then used a ratchet strap to hold the rear end to the jack because the balance was not even and it would have fallen off immediately. I was afraid of it falling onto the exhaust and damaging it. For a while I feared I was going to have to cut the exhaust off and have it re-installed later, I was eventually able to leave the exhaust intact.
This was a very slow process of lowering, observing and moving the jack.
I could have removed the crossmember after lowering the differential, but I left it because it was not interfering with anything or causing problems while lowering the rear end. It was various parts of the housing itself that were the problem, and by leaving the crossmember attached it allowed me to have a greater leverage point to maneuver and position the rear end while snaking it out of the car.
After taking my time, and a whole lot of sit ups, I was able to successfully separate the rear end from the car.
I had to remove the crossmember in order to pull the differential back to the tack room where the workbench is. It was a very narrow passage.
It was almost as tight getting the jack through the passage way as it was getting the rear end out of the car.
Finally, I was able to get the differential on the workbench. Now is time to do more research. Since I've been tied up with other issues (among others, I had two AC units go bad at one time) it has been tempting to begin researching the next step too soon. I have learned from previous projects that I must be patient. Often, if I begin researching steps before I'm ready for them, I then forget the information when I'm ready for it and it's very hard to try to reread and relearn things I recently already spent time researching. So now that I've finally got the differential out it's time to research the next steps. I've ordered a dial indicator so I can measure the run out of the side yokes. I can tell already that the endplay is too much, but I'll need to measure the new ones when they're installed and just for the sake of curiosity, I'd like to know exactly how much endplay is in the old ones. Given what I've read online so far, it also seems like it would be foolish to be this far in and, given the condition of all the other rubber and bushings in the car, not remove and rebuild the trailing arms and associated bushings.
No comments:
Post a Comment