Resurrecting Grandpa's Dinosaur - a rebuild story. (1963 Chrysler Imperial) by topdawag_mc4

5 minute(s) of a 137 minute read

9-13-2012

I sent you a PM.

If we can get a solid quote on shipping and get a few more donations to cover the shipping cost, we'll be all over that. 

Although, even though that is a great find, it's still minor on our list of immediate needs, which is where our previous collected funds will be directed to first. We'll cross our fingers.

Valid points, but the big problem is shipping. I don't know any one in San Diego or even somewhat close that could go pick it up and prep it for shipping to us. We're across the country in Mississippi. The other big problem is cost. We have the fundraiser going because we can't afford this project on our own, and we have about another $300 dollars in expenses to go, so $250 for a back glass doesn't make the most sense right now considering we're not completely sure the transmission is going to hold up.

Now, if anyone feels so compelled to get us that back glass, let me know!

9-16-2012

Whew, what a weekend. When we started Saturday night, this is what we were looking at:

We're happy with the wheels and tires, but Saturday was lowering day. We bought a standard 4 inch block kit for the rear:

We ended up having to put a jack under the rear end to tilt everything enough to have it match up correctly. After some wrestling with it, it settled:

BTW, 80lbs takes a little muscle to torque to. So the rear was down. It took probably 1.5 hours total to get it all straight:

I hate that we didn't get any pictures of the clearance. We had probably 4 inches to the bottom of the U bolts.

The fronts are a torsion bar set up. And wow, it is incredibly easy to adjust ride height on this thing. With tall jack stands under the front to take the load off, it took probably all of 10 minutes to drop it 4 inches:

We were a little concerned we bar might just fly off and impale the adjuster (Tommy). But it didn't, we're alive. So here we are:

The "before" again:

It's like a totally different car, now. Instead of "wow, that is one clapped out car.. but the white walls look new," it's "wow, that is one clapped out car... but maybe it's intentional." 

On to today. We had hoped to have the car 90 percent ready to drive today. That didn't happen. It's always the little things that build up and slow us down. Oh, well, we made a lot of progress in 3 weekends. 

Today we finished up the fuel cell mount and ran the hard fuel line.

That sucked. It's one of those jobs where after you get cleaned up at the end of the day you look at your hands and wonder who drove over them with a lawn mower. Unless you wear gloves... Hmm... gloves..

Fuel cell chillin'

So now we have roughly a 75 mile range. 

Crunknastyvdubs made a bracket for it to sit in out of some scrap metal. It's bolted in through the trunk floor supports. They're still solid. Just the floor that is not. Then straps are on different tabs holding the tank down.

The tank is plastic, and there was a metal case...thing... around it already, so we just kept it on and sprayed it black real quick.