setting up shop

The sharper eyed regular readers of this blog will have noticed one thing about my new garage: it's about a third of the size of the Green Room. This meant that once the car was rolled in, and the rest of my stuff piled around it, there wasn't really much room to do any work :( Add in the complications arising from moving house for the seventh time in the last eight years (!), and it's no surprise that several months elapsed with the following view pretty much intact:

I knew moving was going to slow down the project a LOT, and when I did finally get some free time, it was mostly devoted to making some extra space in the garage. I started by building a very strong and sturdy platform over the front of the car, which I can use for storage.

2"x4" joists supported  by a pair of 4"x6" posts

add closet doors

and start piling it up...

After a seriously long time spent shuffling boxes around in the dim glow from one light bulb, I had my workbench in place, some shelves on the wall, and a huge pile of boxes. It took the best part of three months to get this far, because I've been busy with other stuff.

Later in the story another platform got built at the back corner of the garage and I started getting stuff organized a little bit. The hardest part of this was trying to cut lumber on my miter saw without any space to work in.

Slowly the pile of boxes got smaller as stuff was unpacked, shuffled around or thrown out. I also sold off a lot of the excess furniture I've acquired over the last few years.

Really felt like I was getting somewhere when I had space to put some shelves up.

A few more weekends invested and this is pretty much how my new workshop will look for the rest of this garage. Now, back to the car....With a little bit of luck, 2013 will see the car running again! Happy New Year :)

the best of the green room

A lot happened on this project in the year it was housed in The Green Room. Without question it was the most productive portion of the project so far, and that includes a four month period where hardly anything happened at all. Looking back at photographs of the project over this time really helped get my motivation to keep moving forward in the next few months.

last minute hitch

I was supposed to be a pair of fenders and the front wheels away from rolling. The fenders went on quite easily (doesn't everything by the fourth time!), and I didn't waste much time on the alignment.

So far, so good. Now the wheels....well this was where I ran into a snag. You see my brakes came from a Granada setup that my friend Terry donated to the cause, and while I used the spindles, the rotors had either worn or been surfaced below the minimum thickness...so I had to throw them away...which is exactly what I did, soon after I acquired them.

Now you see it...

Now....fast forward a few months, and it's time to move the car...and no rotors. Fortunately it wasn't a big deal to get a pair of replacements. At least it wasn't a big deal after I paid a visit to my buddy Mark at the Vic Hubbard Speed Shop. As well as the rotors, Mark sorted me out with all the bearings and seals, and for a great price too. So all good....well, not so fast. What I didn't realize, when I ordered the "Granada rotors", or even while I was installing them, was that the hub on these discs is larger than on the Mustang rotors...which means, in layman's terms...that the wheels won't fit on. Oh $hit....school boy error :( This would be bad enough anytime, but on the day before I needed to move the car I could have got by without it.

These are the roller wheels I have on at the back of the car - part of a set of four that I stole from my friend Terry's backyard while he was at work. They used to have the limited edition center caps until our friend James took them off and sold them! One day they will be replaced with some Magnum 500's and a set of classic BF Goodrich treads.

But.....nothing I could do was going to make these wheels fit on over the rotors I just installed, so I made yet another frantic SOS call to my good friend Chuck...and after a quick wave of the BAMA magic wand, we managed to borrow some appropriate wheels from one of the guys at Mostly Mustangs in Oakland. These wheels actually came off a Jeep. It's not quite the look I'm going for, but seriously, I don't know where I'd be without my car-guy friends....probably still trying to change my oil pan gasket.

Looking more like a drag car than ever:

Leaving, as it arrived, on the back of a flat bed:

Settling into the new home:

to be continued....