Going lower

It's time to start restoring the lower A-arms.

Driving the bushings out is fairly easy with a 22-ton press. The hardest part is remoging the lower ball joints, which are riveted in place.

The right one was replaced at some point along the way. The original rivets were removed and replaced with bolts, which to this day is common practice. The left one, however, is original and is still riveted into place. It looks like every tool in the shop is out trying to get this out. It is a long process that will be continued next weekend.

Once completely disassembled, these will be sandblasted, primed and painted.

More nuts and bolts

While waiting on the mail service to bring parts that have been ordered, time was spent restoring hardware. Not very exciting, but this needed to be done.

The focus was on the mounting hardware for the lower A-arm, since it's next to be restored.

The nut plate and bolts were rusty, but after they were media-blasted it turns out they were in really great condition and restored easily.

The front nut plates are intended to be left uncoated, but to keep them from rusting these were electroplated and then quickly washed with black oxide to give them a more natural appearance.

The bolts were blasted, polished and electroplated as original.

The hardware for the rear mounts were Parkerized and electroplated as original.

Bad is good?

The caliper brackets were media-blasted, wire-wheeled and plated. These are infamously one of the only big parts to receive yellow cadmium secondary plating.

These would look better if they were taken to a professional zinc plater since they are a little too big for the little electroplating setup here at the shop.

Yet, the not-so-perfect look of this zinc plating job looks to this guy a lot like what this would have looked like with a more dull cadmium plating.

It's not perfect, but it looks like it probably did when new and that's the goal anyway.

The rest of the parts needed to put the front spindles together are on their way.

Lines

All of the hard lines for the brake and fuel system are finally all in and clamped into place on the frame.

The right rear corner of the frame.

The left front corner of the frame.

The front crossmember

The left rear corner of the frame.

It looks pretty good and is such a huge transformation.

It's a lot of work to make it look this messy

The upper A-arms are painted now and ready for ball joints and bushings.

At the factory, these were dipped in what one hast to think was a huge barrel of black paint, leaving exposed the ends where the ball joints had probably already been installed. Clearly they wanted to avoid painting the ball joints for obvious reasons, but this look is difficult to replicate without, well, a big barrel of paint.

This painting process creates runs and drips that have to replicated, but doing so with a paint gun is more difficult than one would think.

It goes against everything to intentionally run paint, but despite all instincts that's what was done here.

Done

Now that the new bumperette brackets finally came in, the front crossmember assembly is complete and ready to go back on the car.

Overkill, maybe?

The left upper A-arm is body-worked and under primer.

Looks pretty good, though it was really strange to be sanding body filler on a suspension component.

Thankfully, it wasn't as bad as it looked initially and didn't take long.

Here's hoping the lowers don't need any body filler.