Today, the Wrangler is done. Spent the day polishing up the loose ends and fogging up the final paint. I'm happy with the final product. The long suffering Misses and I took it for a spin to town this afternoon to ensure everything was alright, and it was all good. The last photo is of the celebratory whiskey coke.. or few.
You need to make a road trip to Ohio gm I need some help getting mine all put back together, I have whiskey and coke but no ice it just takes up space in the glass and it is a product of water and you know what fish do in water
I'm game for a road trip. It's been a long time since I had to be delicate in installing a body, in order to not disturb the paint.
I helped a neighbor once install a 455 Olds into a 442 W-30. He was a body guy by trade, but not a mechanic. He painted the car and installed all the front end before the engine came back....to include the hood and fiberglass tooth. I dropped by with the engine hoist, and shook my head at the amount of disassembly we would have to do before we set the engine. We argued for an hour because he had all his gaps set and hood aligned perfectly. So I gave up and jammed the powertrain in. The only damage was a gouge in the insulation, and a fine scratch in the passenger fender top. He preceded to whine about that. I told him free good help is hard to find.
That's what SCARES me to death...............I will have the motor installed before I even try to tackle that "disaster in the making".
If I ever get the motor back sent it out to have the rotating assembly balanced and they never did a 4.1 that had a standard shift tranny, they called and said without the flex plate it was 225 grams light and with it it was 250 grams heavy. Now I am shaking my head trying to tell them it's not turning 8,000 RPM's and the flywheel I had made is balanced (and the 4.1 is a externally balanced engine) so put the damn thing together, were only talking 7-8 ounces from being balanced.
Some people's children. 8 ounces won't do a thing.
We slapped together a 355c.i. for a State Champion race. For whatever reason we had one 305c.i. right side head made up, and one 327c.i. double hump left side head built up. Of course it was the night before the race, and the coffee can credit bank was empty. We stood around and said what the hell. We slapped the two mismatched heads on and let it go. We didn't let it run at the shop except to set the timing. When we got to the track, we pushed it to the scale, then sat out mud laps and the heat race. We had to start at the back for the feature, but when that thing hit the track, it was an animal. He spent the first 10 out of 50 laps carving through the field. The remainder of the laps consisted of besting the second place car by upward of 2 seconds each lap till there was half a track between he and us. Everything was going great until there was 5 laps to go. Each corner when he would let off to set the car for the corner there would be a puff of smoke come out of the right side header. By 2 laps to go it became a steady haze. The checker flew, and the second place car had gained to within a quarter of a lap, but we brought it on home.