BUILD THREAD Project I better learn what I'm doing

I will be boxing the frame also after I get all the new fuel and brake lines ran. I'm trying to make the frame as performance oriented as possible without spending to much money. As for the suspension whats the best to do for the front? Should I consider getting new upper and lower A arms? Or will replacing all the ball joints and stuff with new make a big enough difference? The car will mainly be a cruiser but would like to take it to a drag strip a couple times and possibly auto cross about once a year

I've been super busy but heres an update of what I've got going on if anyone cares. I haven't really worked on either Cutlass or frame in awhile. Just been driving it. I did in the middle of September upgrade my daily driver. Went from my regular cab 2000 Dodge Dakota to a 2014 Ram 1500. So now the Cutlass project will be even slower and budget minded that I have a car payment again.

I did one thing with the truck that people might be interested in. I did an oil coat rust proofing with a product called fluid film. I bought a kit that included a spray gun, the bottles, extention wands, a gallon of the under coating fluid, and a jar of marine grade fluid film grease. I sprayed under the truck, in the rockers, and doors with the undercoating oil. I took all the bolts around the wheel wells out and put the marine grade grease between the bolts and fender when I reinstalled them. I also put the marine grade grease on the bottom of the rockers and on the door jam bottoms where the seal contacts the cab. I read mostly good reviews about the product so hopefully it works good. I think Im going to do some tests with it over the winter and see what happens.

I also rigged some wheel dollys for moving the car around the garage this winter. The local harbor frieght had a sale on 1000 lb capacity, 12x18 moving dollys for $10 a piece. I then went and got a couple 1x4 boards and added them to the dollys. They work pretty good for moving the car considering what they are. Only thing is that I have to physically grab each caster and turn it if I want to change what direction I'm pushing the car. I can deal with that considering I only have about $55 invested in them. We will see how well they hold up.

Now the best part. PICTURES!! I took some pics to show what I did during the rust preventative and the car dollys. If theres interest I could do a more detailed post about the Fluid Film process I did. I took lots of pictures. Sorry for the long post.

So I made some progress on the frame last weekend. Got the complete front and rear suspension off. Didn't injure myself with the front coils so thats a big plus. going to be working on notching the rear frame rails and adding bracing next. Decided that I'll be re-using the stock A arms and doing the blazer spindle swap. Im going to weld in a bar across to tie the rear frame rails together. Im guessing I should put the back bumper on first before doing this?

Its been awhile but I finally had a bit of time to work on the car here and there. Decided I was going to make a front reinforcement brace. This was my first fab project since buying my welder and grinder. I was still using the flux core wire that came with my welder and ran out about a 1/4 of the way through. Bought a tank and couldnt believe the difference. Anyways I finished up my brace today and to my surprise everything fit. Thought it came out good considering I cut all the angles with a grinder or swazall. My welding skills still need some work.

L67ss said:

Wouldn't wanna sell the fiberglass nose piece from the 81 would ya?

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Pm sent

Texas82GP said:

Been thinking about your projects. How's the overdrive in the other car? All the kinks worked out?

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Yup got the leaks and everything fixed and drove the car this summer. The leak I was chasing for awhile was comimg from the dipstick tube. No matter what I did I couldnt get it to seal so I ended up putting a bunch of rtv around the top of it and havent had a problem since. It's so much nicer on the highway now. One thing thats on my list to do this winter is either replace or take some weight off the governer because at wot it shifts at 3800 rpm. I'd like it to be more around 5000k.

First really nice day in Wisconsin today, so I spent it with the car. It started right up after charging the battery. I took it for a drive and found that I had a gas leak at the fuel pump. Some new hose and thread tape on the fitting threads and that was fixed. I changed the oil, checked the coolant and trans fluid and everything looked good. I then decided to swap the stock rear springs into my car to raise the rear end. I wasn't a fan of how the car looked lowered in the rear. I thought it looked weird because there was no gap between the tire and fender in the rear but there was in the front. Put the stock springs in and now I think it might be to high. I'm not sure what do you guys think? I also took weight off my trans gov. weights and the car is shifting at 4500rpm now at w.o.t. I'm going to make a separate post for that when I have time, because I actually weighed before and after taking the removing the weight.

Lowered in Rear 1.5"
Stock Springs