Day 8

I'm actually writing this on the day after I finished the work, because it is after midnight!

Tonight, I spent about 5 hours in the garage.  I got the front beam off.  It was heavier than I thought!  It's on two moving dollys so it can move around semi-easy.  I need to get the tie rods off, they seemed to be quite keen on staying on the steering box and the wheel assemblies.  More research to see what I'm doing wrong.

Last night, as I wrote before, I started getting the undercoating off.  What a pain.  Tonight I followed up on what I did last night and removed the smaller bits of undercoating still attached to the passenger pan section.  Following some research, I used some oven cleaner to then remove the smaller pieces and also the paint.  It seemed to work OK but with either method intense mechanical removal is required.

"Top" side is good enough to send to blasting, bottom hasn't been touched.

Remember, the passenger jack point was already bent!  I'm sure this isn't helping but it needs to be fixed anyway, so I'm not overly concerned.

Quite a bit of gunk near the transaxle.

So, slow but steady progress.  Tomorrow I will try to get the rest of the underside prepped enough to send to the blaster.  I don't have to or have the patience to get the bottom completely spotless.  But the blaster emphasized that he would need a lot more time if there was undercoating on the pan/body.  I'm doing my best to keep his time ($$$) as minimal as possible by making my time (worthless) count for something.

I need to pick up a "torquemeister" or "torque dude" or "torque tool" which is basically a torque multiplier to remove the rear axle nut.  Then I'll get the pan set and sent to the blaster, the transmission to the refurb, and start working on the front beam.

Or so that's the plan...