65 Barracuda daily driver
Thanks @FridayGt, @Tadams and @66fyssh! It's quite an experience to restore an entire car in your driveway (and sometimes on the street). I couldn't do it without the advice from the Mopar online community. I'd love to have a garage, and more and better tools than I do, but I love this car and you have to work with what you got. Posting my progress (and sometimes failure) here motivates me to keep going.
I'm dying to get the interior done, but I probably should fix the front suspension first. About 5 years ago I paid a auto repair shop to "fix" the suspension. The holes where the strut rods come through the K-frame were broken and they welded big washers on. Not pretty, but I think it works. The problem was that they put the strut rod bushing cups in backwards, so the strut rods couldn't move as freely as they need to, which resulted in the driver side strut rod to break. They also didn't shorten the bushings on the engine side, so the alignment shop said they couldn't get it right. Also, I bought these really cheap upper control arms on ebay that had the bushings and ball joints already installed. They sometimes hit the rim, which is why the shop ground them down, which didn't fully fix the problem. I assume that the strut bushings not being shortened causes that issue. I already have new strut rod bushings, new upper control arm bushings and new ball joints. And I have a good pair of upper control arms from a 1971 Dart. I have the ball joint tools, but so far I have not been able to get the old ball joints out. I honestly haven't really tried yet, but I'll probably soak them in WD-40 and see how far I'll get. I found some great instructions online:
:::MoparMax::: Torsion Bar Front Suspension Rebuild Tips and Tricks: Part Two - 11/8/2011
What the K-frame looked like back then:
Thanks @FridayGt, @Tadams and @66fyssh! It's quite an experience to restore an entire car in your driveway (and sometimes on the street). I couldn't do it without the advice from the Mopar online community. I'd love to have a garage, and more and better tools than I do, but I love this car and you have to work with what you got. Posting my progress (and sometimes failure) here motivates me to keep going.
I'm dying to get the interior done, but I probably should fix the front suspension first. About 5 years ago I paid a auto repair shop to "fix" the suspension. The holes where the strut rods come through the K-frame were broken and they welded big washers on. Not pretty, but I think it works. The problem was that they put the strut rod bushing cups in backwards, so the strut rods couldn't move as freely as they need to, which resulted in the driver side strut rod to break. They also didn't shorten the bushings on the engine side, so the alignment shop said they couldn't get it right. Also, I bought these really cheap upper control arms on ebay that had the bushings and ball joints already installed. They sometimes hit the rim, which is why the shop ground them down, which didn't fully fix the problem. I assume that the strut bushings not being shortened causes that issue. I already have new strut rod bushings, new upper control arm bushings and new ball joints. And I have a good pair of upper control arms from a 1971 Dart. I have the ball joint tools, but so far I have not been able to get the old ball joints out. I honestly haven't really tried yet, but I'll probably soak them in WD-40 and see how far I'll get. I found some great instructions online:
:::MoparMax::: Torsion Bar Front Suspension Rebuild Tips and Tricks: Part Two - 11/8/2011
What the K-frame looked like back then:
