one year down

So teaching swatted out my progress pretty hard like I expected.  Should pay for the fuel injection and then some, so worth it.  I just found out I will teach in the Fall again, so this is turning into a good bit of income on the side to fund vacations and car stuff without touching my primary income. If I can just get a few more tree surgery gigs...

Anyway this month makes one year done on the project.  I feel like I took on many of the harder problems in the build, and have good, safe, and innovative solutions to show for the effort.  I have spent almost nothing, learned a lot of new things about cars, and about how to make things.  I am very happy with where I am at.

I am burning up some vacation this week and have gotten out there a bit.  I have some progress to report:

Steering / suspension: 
I bought the bump steer kit from Maximum motorsports and a 5/8 drill bit from Mcmaster and drilled my knuckles out with my neighbor's mill.

So then I could put the struts, knuckles, brakes and new links in to see how everything fits:

 

I will have to move the brake hose attachment points aft about 8 inches but I have parts to do that.  Bottom line is this can be on its wheel now whenever I want, and I can steer it with the steering wheel.  Really psyched about that.  I will set bump and toe later in the project.  The kit came with Nylock nuts.  I will probably add a cotter pin to the mix for good measure.  For now I will swap to non nylock so that I don't waste the nylock feature when I know stuff will come apart again.

 

Clutch:

I mounted the slave cylinder to the car.  I will beef this up a little later:

 

 As you can see above, I found a brake line that is 3/8-24 male on the slave cylinder end and 7/16-24 on the female end for my flare nut. I don't even remember now the trickery I used to find this, but it is a Dorman hose H64843 available from anywhere, and really cheap.


 I took the little push rod and threaded one end, ane threaded one end to mate to a rod end, and lathed a groove to receive the dust boot:

 

Here it is with the hardware that will hook to the clutch arm: 

 

Now I am looking at where the accessories wil sit, the belt routing and tensioner, and the radiator.  I want to be sure that I hve clearance for everything.  I through back on the ront of the car that has been off for so long to check how all this will fit.  The engine looks like it belongs in there, and the suspension looks like I never touched it: