YAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!! - Bill's Car Project Thread

[kbadr]

This is my favorite thread. I wish I had the knowledge and skills to have a project like this. Something grounded in reality and physical objects. Everything else in my life floats in the ether.

[DollarBill]

EFF YOU, FIREFOX! I hope you all enjoy this post. It should be super-well thought out due to a browser crash which forced me to write it twice.

Okay, so, we're really tearing into the front suspension now:
This is a drum brake.


I am told that the brake shoes (which push on the inner wall of the drum) are a hassle to adjust and replace and I know from experience that stopping the car with front drums is harder than the old pieces of Chinese food in Ace's bed sheets. That's why I'm upgrading to straight/fast/smooth stopping disc brakes and that's why Ace's door must remain closed at all times.

1) Here's a close up of the drum. 2) There's old rubber hoses which connects the hard metal brake lines to the cylinders that push the brake shoes. They're rubber because they have to be flexible since the wheel moves so much. They're old because that's the point of all this. I cut the hose so that I could remove the drums. I didn't unscrew it because... well you'll see. No fluid came out. Must be why the brakes didn't work. 3) Then I removed the dust cap or the grease cap or whatever you wanna call it. Inside are a bunch of pins and nuts and washers and bearings that hold the drum/shoe/hub assemble on.


1 & 2) I remove the washers, pins, nuts, caps, and outer wheel bearing. 3) This stuff smells worse than Ace's sheets. It smelled like someone pooped a dumpster from behind a What-a-burger. Never mind... it didn't smell worse than Ace's sheets.


1) Remove the drum. 2) Remove the shoe/cylinder assembly and the inner wheel bearing. 3) Then I'm left with this. That rod thing is the spindle. The big thing it's part of is called a knuckle. I had to get that out and replace it with the ones from the disc brake car because they're different.


1) After loosening the nuts, I used this "arm puller" to screw down on the stud while simultaneously pulling up on the arm that the stud fit through. Get it? 2) Then I removed the nuts (Bob Barker would have been proud) and took out the knuckle.


Here's the current state of affairs.

[DollarBill]

Oh, I almost forgot. The reason I cut that rubber line is so that I could get all the old brake parts out of the way before I tried to remove the rubber hose from the metal brake line. I wanted as much space as possible so that I wouldn't mess up the metal line and have to run a new one. I sprayed the connection with a lot of that bolt loosener oil (PB BLASTER). I even bought special line wrenches because everyone said these things were gonna be a beeyatch to get apart. Well they were. And despite all my careful efforts I still rounded off the fitting. Now I have to run a new brake line. Ooops. Oh well. It'll be cheap and I'll learn a new skill and write a post about it. I just hope I don't make so many mistakes that I have to upgrade my flickr account.

[beardedlamb]

don't know how many times i have to say this. BILL, the car is not going to work the ay you want it to without wheels. the brakes are irrelevant at this point.
gah.

[DollarBill]

Wheels? Who needs wheels?


Google "mattracks" for more fun.
http://www.mattracks.com/html/customer_ ... bnails.htm

[beardedlamb]

wheels. where we're going, we're don't need... wheels.

[bradisntclever]

wheels. where we're going, we're don't need... wheels.

a truly epic movie.

[DollarBill]

wheels. where we're going, we're don't need... wheels.

I almost posted a picture of the Delorean, but then I remembered the Mattracks from a Trucks show that I saw and I thought you'd get a kick out of it. Anyway... Here's some more before-and-after pics of when I painted my parts.... come on. Like you never painted your parts before...

[HerrHerr]

Wow! Looks like something out of Dead Ringers!

[DollarBill]

Well that escalated quickly:

boom. Boom. BOOM!

BOOM!


1) All for this. 2) Well, actually to replace the thingy (brake pedal bracket) on the left with the thingy on the right. 3) Because of the difference between them which is this, except in this picture I'm replacing the thingy on the right with the thingy on the left.


So this is the hardest thing I've done since I got the car back. It's incredibly frustrating, but it should also be extremely rewarding. I'm also learning a lot and having fun: http://www.theclassiccougarnetwork.c.../restom18.html
That's either a link to an article on how to switch to power disc brakes from drums OR it's a really mean joke to play on n00bs.

"column is lowered... 2-3 inches from its original location... The support rod does not have to be removed from the car... Once the pin is out, the brake pedal and support will come out easily."

EASILY?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?! I got so mad I almost punched my fist through the my rusty floor-pans. I don't know how many times I tried to wiggle the thing out, failed, and then re-read the instructions. And every time I read that word "easily" I started to feel like I was being made fun of.
After removing the brackets that the instructions say you don't have to remove and destroying the air ducts inside the dash (see above pic), I managed to get the thing out. I tried ONCE to get the new bracket in and then my brain exploded. I started searching forums and finally I learned my lesson: If you have a '70 and you wanna make this switch to the power disc pedal... PULL YOUR STEERING COLUMN!!!!!
That's the first thing it should say at the top of that article: "70 owners, failure to remove your steering column may result in pinched fingers, bloody forearms, and/or taking a free ride on the Koo-Koo Train straight into the heart of Crazy town. Pull the column. Do it. NOW!"

By the time is was done my arms looked like I got in a fight with a cat made of broken glass. I'm through to the other side, though. I'm putting it all back together. So far I've encountered only one problem. One of the old bolts that holds that bracket in place doesn't fit the new one. I hope all it takes is a trip to the hardware store.

Oh. One more thing. I haven't put the stuff back together under the car yet because there was a mix up at the auto-parts store that I think may result in me getting NEW brake calipers for $10 bucks. EXCELLENT! Getting closer! All that for this:

[beardedlamb]

yeah, but does it have XM?

[DollarBill]

REASSEMBLY!!!

I'm so close. Just a few more screw-ups and I'll be back on the road! I put the passenger side back together, and I'm pretty sure I did it right.
Here's the order of assembly from left to right:


Before I could put the rotor on I had to pack the wheel bearings with grease and install them in the hub.
I looked up a video of how to do it, but he was obviously pretty adept at the technique he was teaching. When I finished I looked like the grip on a porno set:


Now here's all that stuff going onto the car. I don't have a lot of stories for this one because it all went pretty smoothly... until the very end.
1) Spindle goes on. 2) Dust shield goes on. 3) Rotor/Hub goes on.


Caliper goes on, and there it is. Much less purple than that other picture, as promised.

The problem arose when I installed the outer pad in the caliper. I broke a tiny clip that holds the pad in place. IDIOT!
But everything was cool because I had the old ones from the old calipers, right? Nope. I accidentally left the clips on the
calipers when I turned them in as cores for a discount on the new calipers. EXTREME-IDIOT!
So, now I'm set back SIX BUCKS(!) and 3 days, waiting for the new clip to arrive at the parts store.

The following pictures are what the clip should look like and what it looks like now after it fell into my curs-ed hands...
OR... The following pictures represent Ace's love life.

[arclight]

I feel your pain, sorta.

At some point I should change out the pads on my Element. I blew $90 on the factory service manual (everyone should do this for a car they intend to keep for a while) and it gives excruciatingly detailed instructions on how to change out the pads, the tolerances on rotor wear (so you can check if your rotors need turning or replacing), plus all the torque settings, etc. so you don't break things or leave them so loose they fall apart. It seems like a lot of money to spend on a book, but if it can save you an hour or two of labor, it's paid for itself. The cool thing is that you can see what the mechanic needs to do to replace something and you can decide whether you have the skill, equipment, and patience to do it yourself or whether the job is something you really want to punt to your mechanic (like replacing a water pump in a Porsche - you have to rip half the car apart to do that...)

Bill, you should call or mail me or something. I'm moving to Chicago in November for a new job. I'll have some free time to help with your car, if only to hold a work light and make dumb comments.

[DollarBill]

You'd never know it by the amount of awful things I've said about him over the years.
You wouldn't assume it after observing the stupid things he wears, says, and eats.
You wouldn't even think it once if you glimpsed him sleeping through the phone alarm going off in his hand with a dog on his face*...

... but Ace IS a Bad-ass.


And yesterday he helped me get my nuts off. Dees nutz to be more specific:

I wasn't gonna show the driver's side assembly at all because it was SUPPOSED to be exactly like the passengers side, and I didn't think I'd have anything new to show you. Two stuck nuts and a blow torch later I had a good story for you all. Those nutz are called castle nuts (I think because the dude who invented them was way into The Punisher). The studs that those castle nuts are on are actually little ball joints so that the suspension can flex without breaking. Well, my car basically needs a hip replacement. See, the joints are SO old that the studs are SO loose that when you try to spin the nuts off, the stud itself spins in its joint....

I was told to try torching the nuts because the heated metal would expand making them easier to unscrew.
I tried it but the studs were just too lose.


So, I enlisted the help of my bad-ass friend and room-mate, Ace Manning.
Ace has been going to the gym a lot and is way too strong for his own good. His brute strength paired with his reckless bandying-about of his limbs is most certainly going to cause serious injury to him or me or all of Mexico, somehow. But not yesterday. Yesterday his strength was an asset. He held vice grips on the stud so that I could remove the nut which would free the old spindle. Here's what it looked like after we got the spindle off. I left the vice grips on the stud and threaded the nut back on so you could see our method. It worked perfectly. Ace told me he had gotten the nuts off of a few studs in his lifetime. I believe him.


After I could remove the spindle from the lower control arm I didn't have to get the other nut off. Since I have to replace the tie rod end because of its loose ball joint (broken hip),
I could just loosen the sleeve that holds the tie rod, and then rotate the whole spindle with the tie rod attached. GOT IT!

Now I just wait for the new hips to come in the mail, and I can put it all back together so it looks like the other side. THANKS FOR YOUR HELP ACE!!!!

*

[joplin]

i've done ace in this position before.