Such was the tank mounts for the trunk. The ones that came off the car were well crusted I could have probably salvaged them, but why. They were beyond hoping that I could stop the rust.

So I had to wrap my head around making some new ones.. the strategy was simple. Bend some flanges, copy the profile and weld a strip to the top.. 3 pieces of flat welded up to make what Alfa did in one stamping. For some reason this little chore took up a lot of mental space.. I fussed and fussed and waited and waited to cut and bend the flanges. Once I got the ball rolling it was easy and the plan unfolded just as I would have hoped.

These things have a way of working out once you apply your attention to them, I just need to spend less time worrying about how it MIGHT go and more time jumping in. Here are a few pictures of the process.. all in all it took about a week worth of worry and planning, and 4 hours of fabrication spread over two evenings.

What you see here is maybe 15 minutes of fabrication.. with a weeks worth of worry and fret leading up to it. bent flanges on the bench with the profile sketched on..

I cut the profile in with the electric sheet metal nibblers.. everyone should have this tool. simply amazing.

After I had two profiles cut I clamped them together and ground them on the sander to match eacthother perfectly.

Withthe two profile strips set up side by side, I was able to bend a flat strip to the profile and tack it in place. I used the TIG machine for this work.

The old one and the new one.. A pretty good replication less some of the contours from stamping.. From a originality standpoint, mine are obviously not stampings but functionally I expect the new ones to be perfect.

I TIG'd the seam using no filler rod, just heat and push the puddle along the seam, as a resut there is very little heat warpage and less grinding required to smooth out the welds

satisfied withthe way things worked onthe first one I used it as a template to make the second one.. This is not good practice for serious multiple runs of parts, you can get a sort of Andy Warhol degredation effect, but for these onesie twosies that I'm grinding to match it works out Ok.

Self replicationg trunk parts!

Now we have two parts that are starting to look like something!

A little finish grinding/blending of the seams and some holes punched for rosette welds and we're just about done! Looking at the new parts next to the old one I'm glad I finally jumped in and made these.

Checkingthe fit on the tanks, these are dimensionally correct and will work out just fine..

Here you can see the contour of the tank that these parts have to follow.. Much ado about nothing! It was just not that hard!

A shot of the trunk floor waiting for the tank mounts to be welded to it... the pieces are all coming togehter.

All in all it’s taken a long time, but most of the time has been spent worrying and fretting and getting it done has been easier than imagined and very rewarding.  All bark and no bite!

This weekend I drove from Oakland up the 101 to Santa Rosa where my Girlfriend was doing some work. I picked her up and we hauled out for a dinner and took the pup for a walk on the town.  Then we had a dusk drive up hwy 12 to 29 on to hwy 53 to Clearlake and further on to hwy 20 through the bottom of the Mendocino hills. Then down hwy 16 to cache creek where we spent the night.  All in all it was about 175 miles of driving, mostly windy mountain roads (with a lot of nasty downhill off-camber turns). The Ti performed flawlessly. We passed Sunday drivers in Subarus and family vans in comfort and ease going through the hills and the car was comfortable and FUN for the whole trip!

In any other car this much driving would have been a total chore, but the Ti left me feeling invigorated and full of inspiration to explore the area, and to get the Giulietta on the F#$&ing road! We will definitely be back, there is a Guatemalan Ice cream Joint in SR to try and we both want to spend a night at the Flamingo hotel there as well.

Furthermore, The dusk/night driving was awesome! I’m inspired to host a small night time rally with Camping or something where we can all outfit our cars with driving lights and go make lots of vintage noise in the otherwise quiet forest night!

Ok.. just too happy and excited to not share a story.. I’m off to the workshop to replace some rusty metal on the Giulietta.

G’night Bay area!

-Luigi

With the rear axle dropped and the trunk repair still midway done I decided to continue to work on that. I dropped the rear valence and started to clean it up so that I could salvage it. The top lip required all the rusty layers of trunk to be ground off, which turned out to be quite the chore. The girlfriend worked on it for a long while. Then the next day I put a few hours into it and was shocked at how long it took.

Rusty lower valence. Getting the grind on it! Tons of scaly red stuff reduced to dust. Only half of which made it to my boogers.

The wheels on my 1964 Ti were going flat every morning. I took them to the shop for new valve stems. It fixed one tire but the other was constantly flat in the morning from a slow leak. After taking it back to the tire shop I finally found a crack in the rim where the center meets the hoop  (these are on 105 wheels, not the fergats). I was thinking of ways to fix the cracked rim when fed up with the whole process I dumped two new sets of alloys onto the credit card (eep!). The fergats I spent all that money on to procure and blast and straighten will get a nice finish coat in silver and hit e-bay. I’m hoping the alloys will last a long while and be hassle free.  Both cars have new vredenstien 155’s so I hope to be done shuffling wheels and tires around for a good while.

Everyone likes opening boxes (unless the box contains your credit card bill)

The rims now might have surpassed the passenger spindle for part most fussed with before ultimately abandoned! Although the new spindle that I installed had one last surprise up its sleeve! The threaded section is too short for the castellated nut to reach the hole for the cotter pin! Possibilities are: there are different length spindles (with possible varying upright geometries?), that the bearings were simply not seated well in the hubs? … …Possible solutions are: re-seat the bearings, futz the castellated nut to work, or seek new part.. I re-installed the wheel studs and it was a bear, requiring the torch on the hub holes and the studs to spend the night in the freezer, They all still needed a tap with the hammer to get into place.

The bead rolling got finished, and now I’ve yet to drill all the holes and to form the flange for the gas sender hole. I did a little more fitment to the trunk floor piece.

I reworked the inner fenderwell, there is still a tiny bit here that is unsatisfactory… ah well third times the charm.

ratty fitment and welding needs some attention

This is the backside of the same part. I welded both sides because the fit was poor and I needed to ensure a water tight joint. At least no-one will be looking in here.

With the fender well in and the lower valence  in place I clamped in the trunk floor and sussed things out.

The trunk and the valence clamped into place from the underside. Things are generally fitting up OK and I think I wont suffer too much shame considering I'll be leaving the cosmetics of the car full on ratty.

With everything in place I wanted to tend to REALLY making the lower valence clean and nice..This meant cutting out some chunky sections..

The lower valence hid plenty of rusty mess. This stuff has to come off! Here I am sizing up a patch.

I tried to make the patch as simple as possible leaving the contour that wraps the wheel arch. I still had to put a little compund bend in this one to fit right. Its easy enough to do an eyeball fit with the rubber hammer and something to form on. the flange got shrunk on the cheap-o eastwood shrinker stretcher kit. More to follow on these tools as I plan to use them extensivly to fix the upper valence.

here you can see the little flare that needed putting in in order to meet the wheel arch..

With a haphazardly cut hole to match the patch! I should really go a bit slower when it comes to the pretty stuff.

Welded up and half-blended. This patch actually fits pretty well and wont require much (if any) bog to make perfect

Here's a better angle to see the fit of the patch. I think I can make this work out pretty good.

Finally I drew sharpie lines in the trunk floor, for the spot weld holes to be drilled, and I started trimming up some more patch pieces for the trunk. My power was out to my welder today or I’d have made a lot more progress. I’ll try to get it sorted and have some more welding done to the trunk tomorrow. Goal is to have the trunk Done-done by the end of this week.

Still up:

• holes cut in floor for filler batt cable etc..
• new tank supports fabbed up
• upper valence fabbed up and tied into body
• trunk rear transition patch fabbed and welded in..

Plenty left to do, but a little bit more done each week. Please if you’re reading this blog. post a comment. We stay up late to write this stuff (hence the grammar/typos) and I hope someone is reading it!

The Giulietta has been disassembled on the lift for over 2 months now. With the impending shop move, It’s high time this car was able to roll around.  Dan and I dropped the rear axle one night. It had some frozen bushings that needed tending to  and was altogether filthy. Further more, you pretty much need to drop the rear axle just to service the shocks!

Going a little deeper down the rabbit hole I figured with all that stuff out of the way it was a good time to address the trunk rust.

Here’s where I am so far:

All journeys have a beginning.. This journey starts with a car some people have already told me they would have scrapped!

The rust from the battery area of the trunk went on to claim the upper valence, and the passenger wheel well.

Extremely blurry shot of the trunk rust.. My hands must have been shaking!

Witht the lower valence removed, and the rust in the trunk about to be removed, you get a sense of how much sheetmetal needs to be replaced! YIKES!

one more shot to further illustrate the task at hand.

Some of the debris from cutting the rot out.. I'm actually a little thrilled when I see this. I'm glad its no longer ON the car!

Fabbing up a patch from some 20ga steel I had laying around.. I eventually decided that this stuff was too thin, and ripped this patch out and re-fabbed it all again!

Bending up a little flared section for the outer edge of the wheel well. I wanted this stuff to look "factory-ish" not just slabbed on, so I took some time to recreate the joinery and shapes.

A full sheet of 18ga ready to be turned into an alfa trunk.. they say skilled wood workers look into the grain and individual piece of wood to determine what it will become. There can be no crossover to the world of metal , cause this looks nothing like what I will beat it into.

Trimming and fitting and trimming again to get a pattern for the trunk..

Detail of the corner getting its shape. I beat up a flange around the wheel well. Am getting the fit close enough so that I can start mapping out and rolling in some beads.

the battery side, you can see my old patch on the wheel well. the new piece fits up just fine.. a third piece will span the back side.

This is supposed to be a low budget, high sweat equity ratty hooligan style build, not a concourse restoration. “git-er-done”  has got to take pretty high precedence. That said, I couldn’t keep myself from wanting the thing to look decent. Anyhow, I ended up cutting a new set of dies for my cheap-o bead roller. I wanted to get something at least kind of close to the factory profile. This gave me an excuse to fire up my little south-bend lathe as well. It was a joy to work with.

rolling the beads for the trunk panel. I had considered many options for replacing the trunk metal. Originally I was going to create a CAD drawing and have lots of trunks fabbed at a professional sheet metal shop with a laser cutter and a progressive hammer die on a CNC punch press. I also considered buying wolf steel panels which are probably as good or superior to my own efforts here at a fraction of the time and cost. I decided to make my own, cause.. well thats just what I tend to do.

Bead rolling something this big with such a deep bead is a two-person operation. My second person here looking chipper, as she is!

Halfway done with the beads.. we had to cut out before finishing to tend to family stuff and sleep.

The second attempt at the wheel well patch. this time pre-assembled and out of 18ga.

A gratuitous shot of the dog. Everyone loves a ratty Ti post with a dog in it! Buddy and I are looking at something with serious intent.

That’s it for now.  Lots of pictures.. not a lot of rambling.. hopefully I’ll have more to post soon as I really need to power through this part of the build and get this thing rolling. I’m very much looking forward to having a rust-free Giulietta spider!

What a shock it was, to then go on to study Quantum mechanics. Finding that in fact the world was subject to statistical anomalies.  That while things were mostly predictable, underlying everything was a sort of chaos, an uncertainty, that could rear its head at any moment. While loosening up the notion of rigorous and complete Causality was initially a shock, the complexity and wonder of Quantum mechanics had is own beauty. The world is a big, beautiful, and immensely complicated place.

I imagine that when Alfa engineers designed the 1964  Giulietta spider, they too were acting as engineers upon notions of Causality.  Insert bearing into front hub A, insert hub to shaft B. Hub A rotates freely on shaft B and customer is benefited by means of transportation. A nice and tidy application of physics for the benefit of mankind.

Or possibly if something unplanned were to happen to the car down the road they provided solutions and directions for those contingencies as well : to service strut P, Remove nut C with spanner, apply grease, and torque  to 5 N-m upon re-assembly.

What they couldn’t have ever imagined would ever happen was that I would try to repair such a beast after having it sit untended for such a long exposure to entropy and neglect. Nature has its way with things, especially when you aren’t looking, or when you allow enough time to pass. What once would have been considered a statistical aberration tips over to absolute certainty.

Mr Newton meet Mr Murphy.. There's a new sherrif in town and the new law is " anything that can happen, will happen". Muprhy's law applied to 3 of 3 fasteners that simply shear instead of turn.

What then were the perturbations from the initial conditions and series of sucessive events, the causes if you will, that led to the effects that I have been dealing with for the last few months?

My experience with the machine has been more along these lines: Apply spanner to remove bolt B from nut A, Hrrm Jammed.

Apply penetrating oil and go wrestle with some other stuck component.

Return and apply heat. Jammed.

Apply penetrating oil, return after 20 minutes of trying to salvage rusty fasteners by cleaning them with the wire wheel. Apply impact wrench to bolt B… Nothing.. curse profusely. now apply sawzall and make note to buy beg or borrow special metric fasteners.

It has been this way for EVERYTHING. Thankfully I have a great support group of car nuts and my friends and family all accept me and look the other way as I try to sort through the never ending tangle of crusty parts that I’m calling my Giulietta!

Tools of the trade.. the sawsall wrench is one of the mostl unlikely "restoration" tools you would have ever imagined.. yet statistically has a better sucess rate of removing fasteners on my car than any of my wrenches.

It’s this type of thing that kept me from driving the Giulietta on the Motherlode400 rally, and in all honesty, given the rate of repairs there are several hundred more man hours left before I’m really going to be out and about enjoying the car.

Heres a little list of the hurdles that I have thus been able to put behind me:

• Removed the stuck passenger drum! After about 2 weeks of pulling on it and heating it with the torch, I finally just removed the whole assembly and took it to Jaans workshop where he attempted to pull it, then we resorted to trying to cut the bearing race with the oxy torch! Still nothing!Finally I ended up sourcing a replacement! Lots of time for what ended up being a totally seized bearing race on the spindle.
  

  Get OFF of there! dag-nabbit.

• Each hub got new bearings.
  

  Ready for a re-fresh!

  

  hubba hubba!

• Each brake cylinder, and the master cyl, were disassembled, polished the bores, and rebuilt with new seals.
  

  gooey mess that permiated the entire brake system. reminds me of the sewage monster: http://boingboing.net/2009/07/06/north-carolina-sewer.htmlCrusty mess of guts

  

  That's better!

  

  ready for use

• Shoes were sent to Porterfeild racing for resurfacing, came back and the front ones were too thick causing the drum not to fit..  they are now on their way back for a trim (at no cost to me thanks to the fine folks at Porterfield).
  

  Shoe repair..

  

  daddy got a new set of shoes!

• Front suspension pieces were all cleaned with the wire brush, stamped steel pieces painted in black epoxy, cast pieces got a layer of clear-coat resin (kinda snotty looking when dried but I started down the path and I’m not turning back now).
  

  This is AFTER pressure washing

  

  going back togehter after a serious round of scrub

• Brake lines all had goo plugging them up, so I tried to clear with a wire and compressed air, some of them were obviously not going to return to service so I ordered some new cunifer brake line material from Fedhill, salvaged the fittings and borrowed a flaring tool to replicate the lines.. I have heard that some people make drawings to bend their lines to but I had good success by incrementally supporting the line with the vice and bending the new line to match, securing it all as I went with zip ties. The zip ties were key here and made the new lines easy to match.
  

  Spanky new Cunifer lines bent and tied to match the dirty old ones in a twisted game of S&M.

• I spent a day just detailing things under the hood, all the grommets and straps and baubles.
  

  totally frustrated cleaning of grommets/escutcheon

• One day completely frustrated with the whole project, I just made a license plate and fog light mount out of the front bumper bracket.
  

  ratty racer bucket bling

• FERGATS! uuugh. My car came with maybe 3 usable wheels. most of the wheels had a TERRIBLE wobble to them. So I searched for a replacement set and found that Giulietta steelies are actually pretty hard to find. After uncovering a set I gleefully brought them to the sandblaster only to find afterward that they too were bent and one had been rotting and repaired with some bondo/JB weld.  Let me delve a little deeper here as I hope others can learn from this whole mess. The Fergats aren’t really robust around the mounting flange, in fact they’re pretty tinny. What I believe is happening is that they are bending when they are mounted in the hydraulic tire machines. Some of these machines hold the tire centrally with a cone shaped arbor, and then apply hydraulic pressure to the outer edge of the rim to break the tire bead. This is an enormous force and I believe it tweaks the whole rim at the mounting face. I now have seen 7 of 8 rims with this kind of wobble in it. To fix this, mount the rim on the wheel and spin it (if your wheel bearings are free), Mark the high-spot. Take it to the hydraulic press and press down the high-spots.  Return to the car, and repeat until the wheel spins true.  Stockton Wheel company can perform this service too. using the same procedure but with a dial indicator to quantify the high-spots.
  

  trying to make the best from a bad wheel, this one got tossed.

• I had hoped that my shocks would have been rebuild-able but they were all sealed, so I ordered a set of Konis.
• I mounted everything up front nice and tidy and all cleaned and rebuilt. using long threaded rods in the spring pans to decompress the front springs..
  

  This is a photo of the springs coming out with the treaded rod method. I couldnt find a good one of them going back in, but its the same way.. you replace two of the spring pan bolts with long threaded rods and slowly release the tension on the spring by incrementally loosening the rods.

• Having spent months sorting through the front end of the car Its now getting down the the really nasty stuff. the stuff I’ve been dreading and avoiding, but knowing that I’d have to deal with the whole time I owned the car… the rust. I feel like nothing could be harder or more laborious than what I’ve dealt with so far, but I know that the worst is yet to come.

If I had to sum up the whole experience so far with an analogy, I guess I would say that so far rebuilding the Giulietta is like running into a burning pet store, its difficult, its scary, its worse than you imagined, but you feel obligated to rescue things no matter how repulsive they are. And in the end, you gotta deal with the snakes too. well, its kind of like this:

I guess I feel pretty good about it all, I’m finally pretty happy with the way the front end is coming together. Though the whole experience has been a LOT more work than I had expected.  It is all coming together nice and tidy, and I think I’ll value owning/driving the car more having done the full Monty.

Earlier that day I stopped by a local indy auto parts shop. Mostly american stuff, but seemed like a better bet for ideas and general rap than the chain alternatives. I was greeted by a fairly light hearted fellow probably in his late 50’s. I get to describing my problem and found that the more I talked the less he was willing to help (mind you I had only said about 2 or 3 senetences). So I slowed down and opted to let him talk and see what sort of advice or guidance I could get. I basically got a lesson about how little I know. How what I’m talking about is only used in race cars (remote brake fluid reservoirs) and that he can’t help me figure out what to do because I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do or how to fix it.

I walked away angry and frustrated. Wondering to myself where things could have gone wrong. Why was my problem (a very simple problem) unworthy of a creative solution in his eyes? Is there only one way to do things? Why is it so common for responses to questions, on forums or in person to, to illustrate how little you actually know. I realize there is a lot of common knowledge and consensus out there on how to do things, but does this mean there is no other way?

Then this evening I stumbled upon this H.A.M.B. posting http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=422177t=422177  and was immediately inspired to just keep rolling. Hotrods from the 1940s. These guys did what they had to do… nothing perfect, nothing incredibly elegant, but in the end it turns out to be the complete package of honest to goodness creativity and ingenuity. I honestly don’t know a lot about those 1940’s hot rodding days. But I can tell you that after seeing the pictures I found an immense amount of confidence. Not necessarily in my skills, but rather the idea that you can do what you want and find your own way. Nay sayers beware. Just because your car doesn’t normally have a remote reservoir and it isn’t a race car doesn’t mean its the wrong thing to do or that its a bad idea. I’m inspired to do what I think is right and have fun doing it. Thats all for now. Just had to share.

After a couple sessions and some help from my lady friend I got the floors to an acceptable condition. I decided to change my game plan from ‘restore’ to ‘touch up’. The floors weren’t that bad, but rust down there always bugs me. Using a new paint and method on these floors. My 122 go the POR15 treatment. Bomber, no complaints. But, I lost my left-overs. Budget road for me! Found some Valspar Rust paint. Not too expensive. Its probably the same as Rustoleum, but Valspar just sounds serious. So, I Ospho’d the rust on the floor, used some Valspar spray primer, and will lay down a coat or two of the top coat and see how it works. I’m only doing half right now as a test run, make sure its up to the task. Still have to get that topcoat on there… perhaps tomorrow morning.

The brakes parts have all arrived. Got a new master form a ‘57 445, and a set of wheel cylinders… under 90 bucks for the whole package from RockAuto. Have yet to really dig in there. Might need some Luigi guidance as he’s balls deep in drums right now. Wouldn’t mind knocking that off my list, but the floors have my attention at the moment.

Then, as if I didn’t have enough work, Luigi, in his sudden wisdom, whipped out some polishing compound, wax, and a rag and tested out a spot on my hood to see what it would look like. I have to admit, it looked really good. Shines the rust right up! I’ve decided to go that route for awhile, god knows its going to be a hard days work getting over the whole body. Thus far I’ve slowly done little patches of the hood… mostly when I’m bored and sick of working on the floors.

I’ve also attempted to get my shop space in acceptable order. Thats a task, but good progress there too.

Thats all for now. Nothing exciting.

Look for a post next week about my trip north in the ‘66 122 I sold awhile back. Playing delivery man w/ that one. Should be a good time. Pics and story coming soon.

We’ll for the last few days I’ve been trying to coax the front left and right rear brake drums from the spiders suspension. After about two days of trying every hair brained thing I can think of… including some nasty use of prying tools (destructive behavior). I was starting to question if I was in charge of this re-build or if it was really the spider who would set the pace of things.. I began to wonder if the whole thing wasn’t just a bit of me  puffing my chest, setting my sights on such a lofty goal. Precious few days to turn trash to treasure, and I couldn’t even get the F*#king brakes apart.

Finally I stopped in on Jaan and borrowed some pulling tools, we commiserated about tenacious parts I and got some much needed encouragement to get back into the ring fighting.

The slide hammer I got, wouldn’t fit the alfa drum so I reached for the puller. I tightened it frighteningly tight (you could see the tension in the system) Sprayed everything with its 100th coat of PB Blaster penetrating oil, Triple checked the adjusters were all the way out, and I pulled out the Acetylene torch and got the area around the studs as hot as I could (the  steel sheet-metal ring around the stud pattern started to puddle!) in  effort of loosening the aluminum drums hold on the steel studs and letting the puller do its work… Nothing.. I whacked it with the rubber mallet while it was hot, hoping to shock the system, move the penetrating oil around, allow the tension in the puller to pry things loose… NOTHING.  This B*#ch would not be broken so easily.

I moved to the rear drum and tried the same techniques, Dan was watching me and we were nervously chuckling at the abuse this thing was taking, and just how much fight it was putting up!

Finally, with the puller in good tension, and the system HOT, I gave it the miracle whack with the rubber mallet and POW! the whole assembly sprung free with all components in seemingly good looking shape. A victory to be sure! But that front drum was still to be dealt with, I gave it the full runaround again with the torch, and the puller and the mallet, hoping to duplicate my success. Nah, wouldn’t budge. I finally had to leave for the night, my daughter still hadn’t any dinner and I had engineering work that was left to be done. As painful and morally defeating as it was to leave with the drum still attached, I couldn’t let this struggle throw the rest of my life out of order. Before I left, I put the puller on,  and torqued the system good. I then gave everything a serious dousing with penetrating oil hoping that the studs would “marinate” under tension all night long and decide to loosen their death grip on the drum.

The next day was busy, I had only around 45 minutes to spare at the shop and I wanted to return Jaans tools. I quickly checked the drum with the mallet and the puller and it was still not going to budge.  The studs had a pit-bull grip on the drum and it appeared that no amount of sweet talking or cursing would ease it free. I pulled out the torch kit and applied copious amounts of heat to the aluminum drum,  just as I turned off the torch to reach for the mallet.. POP!  Just like that it was over.

17 days down the rabbit hole and 27 left to go..

"Buddy" and I at Aaron's (of blackplate.org ) BBQ

Well, sold the ‘66 122 to a fine gentlemen up in Washington. Quickly there after I paid in full for a 1957 Volvo pv444. The 444 came before the 544 which came before the 122 series. Taking many design cues from 40’s American car design the 444 is a unique little car. This specific example is totally rot free. The paint has worn through in a couple places, but other than that, its straight and solid. It has also been upgraded to a later larger displacement b20 engine followed by a 4 speed m40 gear box. Its a pretty lightweight car and was hailed as quite the performer in its heyday.

I drove the car to the shop Tuesday of last week. It pulled sharp to the left when braking. Somethings unbalanced. I took the wheels off and things looked to be ok. The right wheel looked to have less braking power than the right… which would explain the pull. I’m thinking the right wheel cylinder was to blame… it also appeared that the right cylinder was leaking a bit, as was the master cylinder. *Sigh. Here we go again.

So, I ordered my rebuild kit and a couple wheel cylinders. Went back to the shop to try to ‘tackle’ more issues. Of course idle hands are very dangerous. I pulled the seats, took up the ratty homemade carpet and started removing the tar sound deadening panels. Half way through I cursed it all. Removing the stuff is a nightmare. And now that I’ve gotten into it. I’ve got to finish it. This seems to be my first task on any car. I guess I figure that if I don’t have to worry about the floor boards eventually rotting through I’ll have saved myseld a lot of trouble in the future.

Anyways, I plan on POR-15-ing the floors and laying some nice carpet down. Either repairing the seats, or finding new ones. Not sure yet. Hopefully I’ll have the brake parts by the weekend and will get it all running and driving. Cool, ONWARDS!

Anyhow, after a few days and multiple attempts to get the fargin thing loose I’ve broken down and asked “uncle Jaan” for guidance and advice..

This is the new plan of action:

Slide hammer on the wheel studs, along with acetylene heat where needed..

Its amazing how this hang-up has effected progress (negatively). I really hope the prescription works and I can get back on the fast track.

Wish me luck y’all.