Tearing Her Down


Tearing the car down and preparing for the rebuild

Well, her she is as she looks today. No body damage or outer rust, just a little rigor-mortis from sitting so long.



Obviously, the rebuild project would be much easier if I had kept the car running and exercised it a bit. As it is, I'm going to have pretty clean up and/ or replace a lot of things all at once just to get it road worthy. One of the first things I did was drain and remove the gas tank. Ever wonder what effect 13 year old gas has on a fuel sending unit?



The picture doesn't really do it justice. It looked a lot worse live and in person. The part that was sitting in the gas seemed like it was coated in maple syrup and the parts that were above the gas level were covered in rust.

The next step was to pull the engine. I removed the hood and other extraneous items like radiator, power steering pump, alternator, etc. I also labeled all wires and hoses and put nuts, bolts and screws into labeled zip lock bags. Plus, I took numerous digital pictures to help me remember how things go back together

Here's the engine just before I started pulling things off.


All stock with the exception of a set of cheap headers.

Fortunately for me, one of my neighbors owns an awesome engine hoist. Not only that, he's also a Mopar nut (owns a '71 Purple Road Runner) and is great guy to boot. He loaned me the use of his hoist and even came over to help me pull the engine.

Here's my neighbor, Mitch, and his hoist pulling the 383 out.



After we got the engine out and got it on the stand, we noticed that a piece had broken off the flexplate. Not quite sure how long it had been that way.


Now that I've got the engine out, I need to decide how I want it rebuilt and who I want to do it.


Posted: Fri - December 5, 2003 at 08:15 PM      

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