Time To Buckle Down and Get Stuff Done

The past two weeks have been a blur! We have really been busy. Like I said in the last post, because we bought another car we have more work than we know what to do with. We started out the week by working on Richs’ truck. The braking system on this thing has been nuts! Nothing is working properly. But we were determined to get it out of the shop, and on the road. We worked on the brakes for a few hours, back bled all four brakes – until there wasn’t any evidence of air in the lines. We did that numerous times, to no avail. The pedal is still goes to the floor. At this point Rich had – had enough. We decided to move on from the brakes of Riches’ truck, to the cCown Vic.

At this point everything we did, we needed to be methodical. We were starting to take the engine out of the crown vic. Wire by wire I marked down what the wire was for, and a number on both sides of the wire. I numbered every wire whether we needed it or not. Each side of the wire has the same number. That way we could match wire number one, with the other half of that wire. Most if not all cases the wire we were disconnecting one side of it was connected to the engine, and the other half was a part of the wiring harness attached to the car, and plugged into the ECM (engine control module) or also known as the computer. We didn’t know at this point what wires we were going to need, and which ones we weren’t going to need, so we made sure we were taking our time and doing it right.

Disconnecting the engine from the car was pretty time consuming, but we got it done. We took everything off of the crown vic that we needed. For instance, we took off the power radio antenna, the engine, transmission, and the wire pass-through rubber boot for both right and left hand side doors. We still need to remove the rear axle, but we are waiting for the lift to do that.

So now that we have stripped everything off of the crown vic that we needed it’s time to move onto something else. More cleaning is in order. Rich decided we should do some metal work. But before metal work could be done, the site had to be prepped. Which meant that there was cleaning to do. I started wire brushing and scraping the engine compartment while Rich worked on taking out the rubber windshield seal.

We needed to remove the windshield because we needed to check under the roof drip rail for rust. There appeared to be some surface rust under the rail but in order to tell for sure we needed to take off the rubber seal from the windshield, thus taking out the windshield (because it can’t stay in without the seal).

Once the windshield was out he wire brushed, and sanded away the paint and surface rust to see how much damage had been done. Luckily, not much damage had been done. It was just surface rust that hadn’t been taken care of prior to the yellow paint being applied. When you paint over rust, more times than not it will bubble up and crack your paint. So taking our time and doing a good job is key.

With the windshield out, and the rust issue solved for now, it was on to the undercarriage. I was scraping, and steel brushing away in the engine compartment and Rich was scraping way under the cab. The amount of dirt, grime, and oil was remarkable. I think I lucked out with the engine compartment, because most of the oil seemed to spray back onto the underside of the cab; where Rich was.

The object here was to get the majority of the large debris off the truck with putty scrapers and wire brushes. Once we removed the big stuff, it was time to go back over the area with a smaller wire brush and spraying everything down with a cleaning solution. While we are cleaning the area for metal work, we are also in the prepping stages for paint.

Once the metal was as clean as it was going to get, for now, it was onto fabricating a piece of sheet metal for a rotted out portion of the engine bay where the battery sits. It wasn’t a large area but it certainly needed some attention. So while Rich was making a template of the area that needed to be replaced, I was sanding the area down. The metal area still had paint on it, so I had to remove enough for the fresh piece of sheet metal to adhere to. Welds don’t adhere to painted surfaces, so you have to sand off the paint, down to bare metal. While doing this I also went around the engine bay and identified any holes that weren’t needed, and I sanded those down, too; because they needed to be filled also.

Things are starting to take shape. Progress is begining to happen. There is so much left to do, but every little piece of progress is motivating.

Until next time -