Battery Tray, Then This Happened!

    I figured I would hang out in the garage and mess around with odds and ends. The battery tray was just a tray someone made and bolted to the fender well wall with two bolts. It was rather wobbly and did not have a battery tie down! It was/is scary to say the least.
    I started by welding on a third spot to bolt it to the car. Just an upright that wil also support the front on that side.

    Then I welded on sections to use to secure the battery and from one upright  I added a angled piece to support the front of the other side.I also welded bolts into the uprights and drilled a top bar so wing nuts can be used to secure the battery.

I will finish this up and install it today. More pictures to come.

    It's nothing fancy and by all means ugly, but it is safer than the way it was mounted in. Down the road I want to relocate the battery to the trunk so I did not want to buy anything jsut yet for this application.
    As I was shooting the finished piece with Rust Reformer guess who showd up!

    The big brown truck! And on board was my idler arm. Needless to say, I stopped work on the battery tray and cleaned up the garage to prepare for the suspension install.

    I painted and Installed the rebuilt idler arm on the cross member.

    After raising the car a few more inches on the stands, I transferred the front end over to my floor jack and rolled it under. It was easier than I thought it would be! The trick was to have it balanced on the jack so that it would go up and teeter on the jack. The idler arm helped support it from flipping forward.

    Then it was time to install the drag link. This turned out to be a major PITA! After several hours of pushing, pulling, twisting, disassembling, crawling in and out from under the car, throwing and cussing, I learn that one of the rebuild parts was slightly too large to fit down in the hole thus holding the cup too far forward to allow the ball to slip in. I located the old one and inspected it for wear. It looked great so I set the new one aside and put the old one in. 5 mins later the drag link was on!

    From there I went to the drag link, then the connecting rods. I decided at this point to grease the parts installed so far. I connected my grease gun to the grease fitting of the solid connecting rod and it seemed hard to pump. I think I need to replace that fitting, no big deal. Well, until I went to remove the grease gun. I pryed, yanked, jerked, cussed, beat banged and cussed some more. I gave up and left it hanging there and moved on to installing the brakes and drums.
    This was pretty straight forward. But, I need the grease gun to pack the bearings. I finally got the thing off, I'm not sure how, it's still a blur of red LOL.

   Before and after ...

    Everything is pretty much all set. I still need to finish greasing a couple parts, put my battery back in and give it a test drive! It got late so I cleaned up the garage and got the better half's daily driver back in the garage, showered and went to bed.