February 2012 - Time for a little metal work

I've known since I blasted the car initially that some work (sh*tty work) was done to replace part of the tail pan where the tail lights came through on the passenger side. 

Thanks to Dad and the good folks at Keystone Automotive in West Des Moines, I had a nice full tail pan to replace the 40+ year old one.

This ended up being a pretty long job for a guy who has a smattering of minutes/hour or two to work on the task.  There were easly 40-50 spot welds I had to drill out.

One discovery though - when trying to set the spot for the drilling I couldn't get a good point my Blair cutter to work, so I got out my drill and drilled very small pilot holes (not all the way through mind you) which allowed the spot weld cutter to stay centered.  Its a huge pain when that sucker wants to dance everywhere. 

You can see the bronze around the horrible previous fix on this.  Spot welds are about every three inches around the seam.    In the end I did some of the cutting of the inner steel out first... which left me with just freeing the steel around the edges.  That made things easier.  It was an evolution to say the least to get this sucker out.

Oh - and the bumper brackets needed to be cut out as well to get to all the spot welds.  Took me way too long to figure that out... and lots of staring.

The other thing that I did as a precautionary measure - A piece of angle iron (its your friend) tacked across the trunk opening to make sure all my lines and such aren't moved when I removed the tail pan structure.

January and February - A Gift!

I have been trying to determine what rear end combination I wanted to put under the car for some time.  Do I do a Ford 9 inch?  (which I already have a case for)... do I go a beefier Dana 60 unit?  How about the Ford 8.8 they've been putting in all the newer cars/SUV's lately?

My buddy Greg bought a Dana 60 on Craigslist for 125 bucks and decided to go another direction - i.e. took the guesswork out completely and likely will build one custom for his Duster via Currie or Moser.  Thus - he didn't need the Dana he purchased anymore.

So - he gave it to me.  What a find!

First things first - it had huge drums on it and truck/military axles.  They were completely frozen.  So - after heat and lots of lubricant didn't work, out came the cutting tools.  Bye bye drums!

When I got the drums off, I tried to spin the pinion... it wouldn't budge.  No hammering or brute force would budge it.  So I investigated further.  Upon taking the cover off, I immediately was able to tell what was freezing it up - there had been more water than lube in this case for some time.

Drum brake backing plates and shoes in the trash.  They were locked up yes... but the diff (as you'll see, had issues of its own.

The top and below photos are only different in that I used a flash on one and not on the other.  In the end- there was some pretty good sludge on the gears.  I was able to scrub quite a bit of it off the ring gear, but decided I didn't want to go deeper and free the spiders.  The decision was based on the following:  The only thing I would keep out of the whole rig would be the case.  I didn't want to run 4.10 gears and would need to get disc brakes, new axles, posi... almost everything.

In the end, too many dollars for this guy.   Back on Craigslist - free to any taker.  Hopefully the guy that got it will really enjoy the 4.10's in his jeep project.