The guy who bought my 85 stopped by in it a few weekends ago. He's not a computer guy and when I sold it to him, I said it would be just a minute to convert it back to carb. He went ahead and bought the Holley HP EFI setup and said he was going to put that in and learn. Well, when he came by he had put a carb on it. LOL. And new tires...not sure what he did with the drag radials that had less than 1000 miles on them, but the fronts were a dry rotted mess. It still sounds as good as I remember. But you know what, I didn't miss it.
So, not sure if anyone on StangNet cares for my thread becoming FalconNet, but here it is. I've been piddling, but haven't had a lot of time to work on the PBF. Took a week at Memorial Day to go to Gulf Shores and drink rum like water. I have really dry feet and despite lathering them up with some kind of concoction my wife gave me, the 2nd day the soles of my feet didn't like walking across the sand and shells to our chairs and split open. I suffered thru it until Friday...my left sole was split wide open and I was drinking rum at 8am to help kill the pain. I actually stayed in the room all day keeping my feet up and icing them intermittently. It took about 2 weeks for that to get over. She bought some stuff called O'Keefes Healthy Feet. Man, I wish I knew about this stuff 5 years ago. I imagine I'll deal with this on my hands and feet the rest of my life. My dad has the same issue, except his hands are worse. The skin on his fingers will crack open sometimes.
Anyway, the vacation and foot wound took me out a couple of weeks. Then, we are really really busy at work. And having to work some Saturdays. So after working 8-10 hrs a day 6 days a week, I have just been a couch potato on Sundays.
And then there was Father's Day. My stepson and DiL came over with the baby. She was talking about how she must've gotten food poisoning on Friday night and were just starting to feel a bit better. Monday morning when I woke up my wife was in the bathroom spraying out of both ends. Needless to say, a terrible stomach bug was an unwelcome visitor. I missed the first 2 days off work sick in 17 years. I didn't get stuck on the toilet too long, but I ran a fever and felt like I had been hit by a Mack truck towing an M1A1 Abrams. Every joint hurt...even my knuckles. I finally feel somewhat normal after 2 weeks, but still not exactly right.
On Prime Day I looked for any deals on a Plasma/Tig machine. Not necessarily a Prime Day deal, but I bought an Amico CTS-160. DC Tig, Plasma, Stick. It was less than $500. I'm mainly interested in the plasma for now and it seems to work great. Makes short work of the rusted out floor. I need to buy an argon bottle and play with the TIG function. I will probably use that to try and do some more rust repair on the windshield channel.
Saturday and yesterday, I was working to clean out the car to start cutting out the floors and put subframe connectors in. One thing I was worried about was all the rust and having the cowl out makes the car very flimsy. So I started by putting a brace from kick panel to kick panel to tie the rockers so they can't spread out. I then noticed the back of the front frame rails, which was the floor supports in the car were not even. I started playing with the jack and realized that the weight of the front end would flex the firewall and allow the entire front end to move up and down over an inch. After a bunch of web research, I've come to the conclusion that the rockers and frame rails should be parallel, so I bought a digital angle finder and started blocking the car up yesterday. It's got a decent twist to it. The car is level side to side, the rockers and drivers frame rail are within .1 degree, but the passenger rail is 3 degrees up. I put two tires and wheels on the front corner and it's still up a little. I need more weight to get the rail parallel when I weld the subframe connector in. It will also get locked in when the cowl gets welded back in and with the bars that will come off the dash bar and go to the shock towers.
I went and bought a piece of 1x1 tubing and welded across the rockers at the pinch weld to lock the passenger end of the front frame rails down. This will let me get the subfame connectors in after I cut more of the floor out. I think it will be possible to put them in from the top and weld them in pretty solid. I plan on making a roll over jig soon, so I can roll it on its side and finish the underneath welding a lot easier. I'm not sure if I am going to buy floor plans for just sheet steel and fill in the floor after the cage installation. I already have some 2x3x.120 tubing on the way to make outriggers for the cage, since I would trust putting the cage on a replacement floor anyway.
One cool side effect of the rust out floors. They are so rusted, I just took the painter scraper and a hammer and peeled them off the rocker and most of the frame rail. The frame rail must be galvanized because it's perfect and the rocker is in decent shape....but no drilling of 100's of spot welds! Yay me.
Pics for those who don't want to read this useless diatribe: