A Tale of Dusty, Dirty ...

... and Greasy.  This blog will have to start in the middle of things because, well, that's when I decided to start blogging.  Some of you may recognize YACC from another context, but here it means "Yet Another Corvette Conversion"!  I've been beating up on the car for quite a while now, doing pretty well autocrossing, but starting to worry about what's going on under the hood and elsewhere.  My friend Rob is engaged in the same undertaking and his experience suggests that some important parts may be breaking.  Especially the frame and that's exceptionally worrisome.   Further the car has been sitting out in the weather (we do have some in California) accumulating rust corrosion and spiders everywhere.

Additionally there is a lot of new tech out there.   All in all time to pull it apart and put it back together better.  Think "resto-rod"!

Since every new project requires a cool new tool I decided to make life easier and bought a lift.  And that necessitated a makeover in the garage to raise the roof a tad.  Reroute compressed air, have the garage door lift a bit higher and most importantly reinforce the concrete floor.  Since we have so far simply travelled down the conventional path of unbolting and bagging stuff I don't really have anything different to add to that activity.  Let me instead show what the lift is good for.

Pull the body off

The body-lift entailed putting a 4x4 underneath the rocker panel and for good measure attaching a vertical 4x4 to the frame hinges.  With the lift positioned under these outriggers everything separated cleanly

Here's what the body looks like off on a dolly.  I elected to remove the doors, headlights and as much other weight as I could to minimize stress on the body, especially the front clip.  In a previous accident the entire front clip was replaced so I took no chances that the work done was not as strong as the factory's.

There are a couple of styles of dolly.  Mine is just a perimeter frame bed with verticals at each of the body mount points.  The service manual has a dimensioned drawing and, following that drawing I had no real issues

Pull the engine

  Here I've pulled the yellow arms off and bridged the two posts with a big wooden beam.  This gets the engine high enough to seperate it from the chassis.  Next roll that out and drop the engine onto a four wheel dolly

Chassis Work

This is looking at the aft end.  The front end is pretty much naked and I was a little worried about mass imbalance as things got lighter so I weighted the front with a bunch of old rotors.  Incidentally these are also handy as bench clamps for woodworking

  I can raise and lower the frame and to whatever position is most comfortable.

There is a lot of internet discussion on this particular lift that I found before I bought and installed it (costs about $2K) and I posted  some of my thoughts here

http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=35763&page=15

I'm pretty happy with this toy.  Finally here's what the frame looks like prior to sending it out to be sandblasted and powdercoated.