I think my new front suspension has a bit of “number five” (remember the movie “Short Circuit”?) in it. It seems to not want to come apart! I spent about five hours working on it yesterday, and still have some more work to do! I’ve gotten the driver’s side to the point that I want it, but the passenger side is being stubborn. Specifically, the lower ball joint does NOT want to let go of the spindle. Oh well, I’ll get it.

Here’s a photo of how it’s looking. I cannot believe how much dirt, rust and general crap is falling out of the nooks and crannies on this thing. I’ll bet by the time I’m done, it’ll have dropped about 30 lbs!

I’ve been getting bombarded with questions about GooCal, so I threw together a quick little sub-site for goocal. It should be accessible through http://goocal.henrysrodshop.com pretty soon, once the DNS changes go through.

For now, you can get there by clicking here.

Michelle and I went to the Blacksmith’s swap meet in Hugo this morning, and although I didn’t find anything for the truck (well, not anything that I really “needed” anyways…), I did come across a refillable water fire extinguisher. I’ve been trying to find one for a while, since they are pretty handy, and now I have one for $20. Heck it even works! I hope to never need to use it in anger, but if I need it, now it’s there.

Well, I submitted Goocal to Mozilla for approval, and I got an email this morning stating that it has been. This really doesn’t mean much, but it’s pretty neat to see that about 300 people have downloaded it in the last five hours! Hopefully it’ll be a worthy chunk of code, and I’ll find some time to do some more work on it (like auto-login, like Dan keeps talking about, and a tooltip, with upcoming events).

I started removing the old suspension today… I had to do some chores around the house, and run some errands, so I didn’t get started until after lunch. I finished taking apart my front clip, test fit my radiator in the stock mount (it fits NICE!), and swept up my mess from the last few days of taking the front clip apart.

Based on some advice from the HAMB, I tried using a chisel and hammer to chop the rivet heads off, but it didn’t work so well… I then took my new (old) sawzall to them, and then ground them flush. Finally I used a punch, and a 2-1/2lbs sledgehammer to pop the rivets free.

I got both the front shocks unbolted, and one of their mounts free… I also got all of the correct fittings for the air hose, and chuck, etc. so now I just need an impact wrench! Haha! Otherwise, nothing new to report, just mowed some of the lawn, and picked and moved rocks (I live in a town called Rock Creek, remember? That name is NOT a lie!).

I got the Volare (well, actually it’s out of an ’85 Dodge Diplomat… go figure) home, with a little help from a friend. I got out of work around noon, and he picked me up at home after I grabbed some lunch. He had along his one year old daughter, who is a little sweetie, and we shot over to West Cambridge Auto Salvage. The guys took the front end off, and had it ready for us in pretty short order… after they ate lunch . Anyhow, we got it home, and offloaded it with my cherry picker, and bolted some wheels on… backwards (see, I have some front wheel drive wheels, but they didn’t clear the a-arms… oh well).

Here are a couple of pics, I’m hoping to get the truck up on jackstands again this weekend, and start taking the front suspension off.

In the last photo, you can see just how much drop there is going to be with the new clip. It looks to me, like it’s going to be around 6″ before we get the smaller diameter wheels/tires, etc. Speaking of which, how much clearance do you need between the brake caliper and the inside of your wheel? I have about 1/4″ with the 14″ aluminum wheels Tuck gave me… (that he got from Mark Moriarity… who got them… ?).