Working again

This past weekend, I participated in my first car cruise. It was not Cobras, it was a Model A car club near Champaign, IL. Unfortunately, the weather was awful; so much rain that we could not take the Model A out and many of the roads were closed due to flooding. It was still great fun, as there were 2 owners whose cars were more suited to the bad weather, and 2 others who drove different classic cars from the 40s, one a Ford, the other a DeSoto. I even saw a Cobra driving by us on the way home near Champaign, a beautiful burgundy car with white stripes. Sadly though, the pictures I took with my cell phone cannot easily be moved to my computer thanks to Verizon Wireless' decision to disable the ability of Motorola phones to use the USB port when the phones are part of their network. Bad Verizon!

I came back from my weekend with Sue to find that the socket I was waiting for has come in and I was very anxious to get back to my build. I put the ball joints in my freezer for an hour to get them to shrink up enough to go into the receptacles. Needless to say, that is a tight fit. I ended up not really having to use my torch to heat up the receptacles. And the socket worked great to get them tightened all the way. Here are a couple of pictures showing the upper and lower control arms with the ball joints installed.




Next, I started to install the front spindles where the brakes and wheels will be installed and where the steering system will be connected.


I still need to completely tighten these nuts, as it is pretty difficult to tighten without moving the spindle out of position. Then the final step of this chapter will be to install the front shocks that my mom put together a couple of weeks ago. Then it will be on to the steering system.