Another long holiday weekend with SOME progress but nothing to really brag about. On Thursday I went out to the garage to work on breaking down the control arms so I could remove the bushings. When I got out there I spent a couple hours vacuuming the floor and straightening up the mowers and lawn equipment before turning my attention to the control arms.... Looks like come Spring I need to have a garage sale and a dumpster dropped off to get the rest of the junk outta there!
With cleaning out of the way, I went to work on the control arms, but that didn't go well at all.... seems the nuts on the control arm hardware are locknuts and I couldn't get good leverage on them to get them broken loose, so I put them in the car to take back over to the dealership and strip them of their hardware so I can tackle the bushings. One nice aspect about working out in the garage when it's in the thirties.... you don't break out in a sweat and your beer stays NICE AND COLD!
Well on Friday, I stopped and picked up sand at Tractor Supply, then went to the dealership to work some on the Tomato. First thing on the agenda was to dump out to old sand (man, it had turned to POWDER!) and put in the new. I then broke down the hardware on the control arms. With those done, I put a couple things in the cabinet to blast and got ready to go...... CRAP! Seems I bought medium sand rather than fine and the siphon tube was too small to draw it in without clogging, so I dumped the 100 lbs out into a couple 5 gallon pails and set it aside for later use in the hopper and headed for the barn. I ran back by Tractor Supply and picked up 100 lbs of fine sand and once home, I drilled out one set of the upper rear control arm bushings before my wife got home from work, so I called it a day...
Saturday was a bit more productive, finished blasting the front spindles and got headlight buckets, front bumper frame mounts, jack, jack base, jack handle, power steering cooler, spare hold down bolt, a few interior brackets and hood hinges cleaned up. Also hit the rear lower control arms again to scuff up the inner reinforcements that the team at F3 welded in for me. I THINK that should be about all the smaller stuff cleaned up and once the car is reassembled and outta the blast booth, I'll need to address the bumper reinforcements.
Hopefully the temperature will be warm enough next weekend to paint a few things!!
Stay tuned.....
ZEBRA 3 OUT
