Its been a while since I’ve had much time to work on the car. My parents visited last weekend, and I was out of town in Seattle most of the week. I did finally get some time to work on the car yesterday and today.

The goal had originally been to get the brake lines finished up front and rear, but I decided to focus on getting the front of the car buttoned up instead. For a description and photos what I did, read the rest of this post.

I had quite a bit of miscellaneous bits of the front end that were in-progress. I finally had all the parts and time to take care of them.

The first thing I did yesterday was pull out one of my “oops” brake lines, lop one end off of it and use the new 37 degree “AN”-sized flaring tool to put an AN hardline fitting on the end. I realized after buying a lot of adapters and wasting a lot of money on handling costs that this was the best solution to hooking a hardline to the bulkhead fittings. I’m not entirely certain I won’t redo this, as I think there’s a bit too much tension at the -AN side of the fitting. I’ve been told the sleeve prevents that from causing leaks, but who knows. Its easy to redo.

You can see how the fitting comes through the footbox, and the hardline runs from there to the T-fitting for the front drivers’ brake line. Its not clamped and riveted yet because I may replace the line.

The next thing I finally took care of was finishing the access panel for the opening in the drivers footbox.

Using two quarter-turn fasteners, the panel clips over the access hole. There was no way to use normal pop-rivets for this, so I used J.B. Weld to hold the clips to the panel.

The panel covers the opening fairly nicely. Its not perfect but I also cut the opening and panel with a jigsaw and metal blade, and did the bend by eye in my undersized vice. I think once its painted, it’ll be fine.

Unfortunately the rearward clip snapped off , as it wasn’t sitting right and there was very little surface for the JB Weld to bond to.

Most of the front suspension has been temporarily installed all this time. The bolts were in there just to hold the bits together. Most had no nuts and even those that did were not torqued down. After a trip to Sears to pick up a 15/16″ wrench and another 3/4″ wrench, I started torquing down all the bolts, as well as getting the castle nuts on the lower control arm ball joints.

After getting everything but the lower control arm mounting bolts on the chassis torqued, I got Jen to stand on the car with me to simulate the weight of the engine and set at least a “close enough” initial ride-height by jacking the car up by the tires. Word to the wise, don’t boost yourself up onto the chassis while someone is leaning over you. I have a bruised noggin and Jen has a bruised forehead and a bit tongue. A few turns of the torque wrench and the front end was all buttoned up. All that is left is to run the rear brake lines, fuel lines and torque up the rears and I’ll be able to both roll the car out of the garage as well as order the engine.

Lastly I got most of the engine bay sheetmetal drilled. Another hour and I’ll have enough done to pull it all and get it painted or powdercoated.

Here are a bunch of pictures of the results: