Current Projects

Things have been relatively quiet in the garage for the past while. Between looking for a new job and being over at my friend Bob's garage www.67heaven.com giving him a hand to get his project completed, things have been a bit slow.

Jane's '78 has reached that point where a very original car starts to need some more work than just regular maintenance. While on the local NCRS Fall Colour Road Tour and Annual Water Leak Test www.ncrsontario.org/events.html we noticed a low growl in the drive train. With 105,000 kms (about 70,000 miles) on the car it was about time to check a little deeper under the car.

We started with checking the half shaft u-joints and sure enough one was very “crunchy” so we decided to change all 4 of them along with the joints on the drive shaft. Good thing too, as the other joints, although smooth feeling, showed brinelling on the cross shafts when taken apart. After bead blasting the shafts, Brian polished the shaft tubes with a die grinder and small Scotchbrite pads to sort of replicate fresh tubes. They were sprayed with a clear engine paint from Canadian Tire and then reassembled.

As usual, about now the “while we are at it” syndrome started to kick in and the complete diff assemble is now down and apart. The trailing arms are next as the bushings are shot. Also on the list are all new bushings for the rest of the rear suspension since the rubber is not aging well. When we were messing around under the car it was obvious that the rear spring needs to be changed as it is starting to splay outwards and the lower leaves are twisting. We will get one of the replacements from Eaton Spring in Detroit http://www.eatonsprings.com/

During all this fun we are trying to resist the temptation to just pull the body off and revamp everything at once and be done with it, as this has always been our first choice with the other cars. However, we are trying to keep in perspective that this car is our driver for now.