Sunday, July 31, 2011

More Tear Down Progress.

Today was a very busy and productive day out in the garage. I started work at about noon, and before I knew it, it was 4:00. The hours just flew by. I swear, I have not been this focused or entertained by a project since I built my R2 so many years ago. It's a great feeling!

So on with the pics.

My focus when I got started today was to finish tearing off the stuff on the passenger side, which meant the front door had to come off. I must confess, I have new found respect for auto makers. These things go together like a jigsaw puzzle. I believe that it has to be assembled in JUST the right order. It's wild. Getting the front door off was sort of problematic, mainly because the bolts are so hard to reach. I'm sure they have all kinds of specialized tools to make it happen in the factory, but I'm just working with my basic Craftsman kit.

But with a little persistence, I got it cracked.



Speaking of crack, no pipes were found today, but I did take a picture of all the cash I have found inside the Caprice. I'm RICH!



Here is the front door after it had been removed, along with the mounting hardware.



Then there's these little suckers. These are used throughout the car, and as of yesterday, I didn't have the right tools to remove them. I made a trip to Sears and dropped another 200 bucks. I got a really nice torque wrench, a set of super nice work gloves, a set of torx bits (which is what are used to remove these types of bolts) and a set of drill bits for metal.



Here's one of the new Torx bits on top of my wrench.



This set was definitely a "must have," as I started finding these little bolts all over the car.

Next up was the front fender, which was also a total pain, as it was attached to the front bumper on the inside. Again, just like a big jigsaw puzzle.



Here's my stack of parts that I removed today.



Progress seemed a lot slower today, mainly because I hit a few challenges that didn't just unravel quickly. It was still a load of fun, and I'm making good progress. I think I'm going to have to pull the car out of the garage to get at the drivers side. I'm tempted to drive it around the community a bit, just to see what kind of faces the neighbors make as I roll by.

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