Tonight I came home and started putting the suspension back together. Fortunately I hadn’t gotten too far with taking it apart, so I didn’t have too much to put back together. I decided since we only have a couple of weeks left I won’t try getting the other suspension under the car, I’ll just worry about getting it together and secured for the trailer ride to Colorado (http://www.going2colorado.com) later this month.

I got the front suspension bits together, though I didn’t bother to put the sway bar on for now. I then decided to pull the steering column to get the new one put into the car. That was easy, at least the pulling it out process, I stopped for dinner, but it sure looks like the replacement column isn’t going to work :(

I’ll have to try to get that in later this week.

With the success last night I decided I had to work on the car this evening a bit. The first thing I did was get it up on all four jack stands so that they were under the frame and not under control arms of the car. This would allow me to begin working on the suspension pieces.

When I got the car from Jeff, uhhh over three years ago now, it came with a second suspension that had been pulled off another car. This other suspension has springs (yellow), new(er) struts, a larger front sway bar, and also the addition of a rear sway bar. It also is a lot cleaner then the current suspension. So tonight I started pulling off the front suspension, starting with the sway bar, and moving on to removing the rest, at least what I could, of the right front.

I got stuck at the tie rod, but I did manage to get most of the other bolts removed. I came to a conclusion though, I’m going to likely just drop the whole front suspension out, including the cross member as the second suspension has one as well. In order to do that though I am going to have to dismount the motor. I will attempt to do that by lifting the motor up off the mounts with the cherry picker, hopefully without having to disconnect the transmission and not removing the whole thing from the car.

Before I do that though I will likely fully disassemble the other suspension and take it to a friend’s house to sandblast everything. I’m heading to Tampa for a conference tomorrow, so that will have to wait until the evenings next week. I’ll try to get everything disassembled during the week, both front and rear suspensions, and then probably go down to his place Saturday if he’ll be around.