1077 Days: A Small Update on a MAJOR Milestone

1077 days.  I look at this number and shake my head.  That’s a long time.  In fact, 18 days short of three full years.  It’s hard to imagine that the Boss has been hanging in the rotisserie for this amount of time, all the while getting its much needed and deserved reconstructive surgery.  In that time, I have dedicated over 2000 hours in all of the work that was required to return the chassis to a “buildable” state and I am only now reaching the point where “normal” restoration work will commence.  But more on that at another time.

At long last, a major milestone was finally reached in that we were finally able to take the car off the rotisserie and mount it on the body cart to begin the next phase of the build.  As exciting as this moment was, it came with a certain disbelief that so much time had been invested in the car to get it to this point and yet to the casual observer, it still looks like a gutted shell of a car that appears to flirt with the fringes of hopelessness. In fact, the before-and-after shots below are what finally gave me that “holy SH*T!” moment of realization that a lot of ground has been covered and every bit of it has been documented to an extent that I had never really imagined or put into perspective.

To say I am thrilled to have finally reached this point of the build is an understatement to be sure.  The enthusiasm to get on with making it look like a car again is building at a rapid rate and my ever-stirring brain is already working on the more intricate details of where I will start and how I will move through the preparation of the body.  I hope that the next phase of work will start showing larger leaps of obvious progress as panels start to take their rightful place, gaps are aligned, and contours perfected.  There is still a mountain of work to do, of course, but with every challenge, the therapeutic repayment the car delivers more than makes up for the strains of the work.

As it goes, I will let the pictures and captions tell the story of our latest success and thanks to all of the folks in “our” small circle of support who have kept the encouragement and positive energy coming.  It is more appreciated than you may ever know.

Thanks!




BEFORE

(ALMOST) AFTER



AFTER (1077 Days)!

 

 

 

The Big Move to the Body Cart!

After a bit of measuring, I determined all that was needed to provide a solid mounting surface for the chassis were these two simple wooded "pads".  The front pad (left) has the locator blocks already screwed into place.  Once the rear locator pads are in place, the car will be secure in both the fore-aft and side-to-side directions.

With the center spine brace removed from the rotisserie, the cart was positioned under the car and the entire works was placed on jack stands placed carefully on the body cart surface.  This allowed the front and rear rotisserie frames to be easily removed from the body mount brackets.



The body was lowered on the jack stands at their lowest settings in preparation for lowering the body down on the wooden support blocks.  Note the body brackets are still in place as they will be used as the final jacking points to lower the body to it's final place on the cart.

And there you have it.  For the first time in almost 3 years, the body is off the rotisserie!  Kinda looks like a car all of a sudden!

I kinda like this perspective.  This shot clearly shows how much working room this cart provides.