My apologies for my lack of updates in MY OWN build thread. Not much of a build thread afterall, eh? It's been a busy couple of months... and things have changed direction a bit.
A friend of mine purchased an original paint 1971 Camaro. It's pretty cool looking, so I told him I'd keep an eye out for an original paint body to put on my rebuilt chassis. At the end of April I saw a post by Keith (n2billet) about his new project "SwingSet". In the post he mentioned selling both Lucy his red '68 and Ethel his blue '68. I had seen pictures of Ethel from last year, and knew she had just the look I was going for. I contacted Keith, and even though he was out of town on business, the transaction was flawless. It couldn't have been any easier. At any rate, on May 19th, Ethel was in my driveway.
So now I had another complete '68 SWB that I had to take apart... dang these projects get out of hand quick! Luckily my dad came into town on May 23rd, so I had some extra manpower and ambition to drive things along. With the help of a few friends we had Ethel mostly apart in one day. Had it not been for a cab mount bolt welded to the floor board, we would've had the cab off the first day. I set-up a web cam to take a pic every 30 seconds, and compiled the pics into a video.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...37984470014080
So a couple days later (between weather and work), we had the cab on the frame. Now it was starting to look like something!
Next up was test firing the engine. This 350/TH350 combo had sat in my garage untouched for two years. We made a pre-oiler out of the old distributor, and while pressurizing the oil system, quickly discovered there was no oil pressure sending unit in the block. So right away she was a quart low! We stole the sending unit from the other engine, and finally got some oil flowing on the rocker arms. Looked pretty promising. We aligned the timing mark, stabbed the new distributor, took the carb off the other engine, and worked on wiring it up so we could test fire it. So finally, on June 8th, we rolled it out of the garage, filled the block with water (oh, you mean there's no temp sending unit in the cylinder head? Let's go steal that off the other engine too), and with a little spray bottle of gasoline tried to see if she'd start.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...46237619644234
I couldn't believe it, it started right up! I looked at my dad and said, "We're not this good". He replied "Apparently we are!". So we ran it a few seconds and let it sit for a minute. Tried starting it again, and it ran again. Figuring the third time is the charm, we tried it one more time, and that's the one I shot the video on (with my cell phone). So, that was pretty encouraging. One less thing to *really* worry about.
Since then, my dad has gone back home to Tucson, and we've made just a little more progress. Sunday night we had finished up the wiring harness for the air ride switches, so we mocked up everything on the garage floor to see if all the components would work. Again, everything worked just as expected. So again, that was pretty encouraging.
Last night we took the bed off of Ethel's old frame, and set it on the rebuilt frame. It will most likely come off one more time before being bolted down, but I needed it in place to mount my compressor and air tank properly, and to measure for wheel backspacing. It was dark when we got done last night, so I just nabbed a pic with my cell phone this morning.
So I'm not really expecting to drive her to the board meet, sorry guys but it's just not worth it to rush at this point. I'm pretty happy with the quality of the work I've done so far, and I'm not willing to sacrifice that just to run into problems on the road to Missouri. I will still be there, most likely in my S-10.
In other news, I will probably be re-doing Ethel's original frame so I can put her body back on it and have matching VIN #s. But that won't be for quite awhile!
So there you have it! Thanks for taking the time to read all that and catch up!