Here's the first project I'm going to blog about, it is a friend's '67 Camaro. He was driving home one evening and a deer jumped out in front of him. He dodged the deer and slid into a curb. No one was hurt except for the car. It has two damaged wheels and bent A arms on the left front corner. We only had to tow it a mile so decided a tow dolly was the easiest way to move it to a place we could work on it.

Car had a flat front tire when we loaded it up, the left rear tire blew out a quarter mile from the garage. Moral: don't trust a bent wheel at all.

   The car had three good tires when we drove it on to the dolly, the flat tire on the front left was driven over wood blocks to help ease it up the dolly's ramp and into the saddle. Halfway through our one mile trip, the left rear tire blew out. By the time we got to the garage it was shredded. I later discovered the cause was the bent axle shaft on the left rear corner combined with the wider-than-stock tires rubbing on the air shock's inlet nozzle which eventually gouged a hole in the inner sidewall.

 

Picture showing damage to wheels and left front suspension. The rear axle shaft was bent as well and will be replaced. Notice the big brake rotors on the left. The car has a healthy 454 engine and drum brakes all around. The friend who owns the car doesn't want to lose control again, so he contacted CPP for their big brake kit.

   The car is an RS model and was originally equipped with with a 327 cubic inch engine and a four-speed transmission. The previous owner swapped in a 454 engine from an '81 truck, a Tremec TKO-500 transmission, and a few basic bolt-ons to subtly improve performance. Stock suspension and drum brakes were still all around. My friend contacted Classic Performance parts to order their Complete front/rear Big Brake Kit. To repair the damage to the suspension, he also ordered CPP's Pro Touring Stage II kit, which includes tubular control arms, QA-1 adjustable shocks, (adjustable coil-over fronts,) and beefy multi-leaf rear springs.

   Lets start tearing into this car and getting things cleaned up for the new parts.

Close up of the front wheel, it took the majority of the impact.

   The front end came apart with the standard amount of fuss you'd expect from a 45-year-old car. Since there are plenty of sites demonstrating how to do this, Iwon't bore you with all of that. I will mention it took us three hours to get the first side apart and about one hour to get the second side apart--pretty typical when starting a DIY project in your garage.

   Although it took a long time, the front didn't reveal any surprises. The rear was a different story though. A lot of times when you look at tech sections in car magazines, the cars are clean and un-messed-around-with. However, this particular car is a case of reality: we found numerous examples of poor repair and techniques on this car, the first of which is missing or damaged bolts being replaced with welds. If a factory went through the trouble to bolt things together, there is probably a good reason for it. Typically it's cheaper and faster to weld parts on the assembly line than it is to bolt them. Factories will often bolt things together when there is reason to disassemble them. These reasons include such things as maintenance, periodic inspections, and repairs. In this particular case, it appeared that some one tried to remove the rear springs and in doing so lost one bolt and couldn't get two others removed. In the picture below, you can see how the case of the missing bolt was "fixed" with a weld--a poor weld at that.

Here's a prime example of a bad repair. Someone either found that the bolt for this spring hanger was missing or broke the bolt and decided to weld the spring hanger to the frame of the car. Not cool.

Ever heard the phrase "If you want something done right do it yourself?" This is exactly why I believe in DIY. I have a hard time believing any owner of a classic muscle car would intentionally do this. What I think happened is an owner dropped the car off at a mechanic expecting the rear bushings to get replaced. When the mechanic started taking things apart, he reached a point where the job was taking too long to be profitable so put the car back together with the old bushing still in place and ruined it for the next guy. That next guy apparently was us, and, yes, we decided to do it right. The suspension kit from CPP included new hardware to replace the old bolts used on the spring hangers. Unfortunately, the process of disassembling the rear suspension destroyed the original hangers (we had to minimize damage to the frame of the car while cutting the welds. This resulted in cutting into the hangers).

This is a tab on the right side spring hanger. We had to cut them off the car with a cut-off wheel.

   Once the spring hangers were removed from the car, the rest of the rear suspension came apart as one would expect. To improve access to the rear shackles, we decided to drop the gas tank, which will benefit us later since the fuel gauge isn't working, and we have new gauges to install later.

Two examples of shoddy workmanship in one photo! look closely at the fuel tank supports, and at the top left of the photo, and you can see edges of the original trunk floor. Sometime in the life of the car, someone tried to replace the trunk floor, but did not fit it well and left gaps. Also notice the rusty patch in the middle--sometime after the new trunk floor was installed, someone cut the center out. I imagine the intent was to service the fuel gauge sender with out lowering the tank.

   Currently, the car sits on jack stands with no suspension or wheels under it. Our next step is to kill rust and remove grime. Unless there is anything remarkable in that process, my next blog entry will show the car with some shiny new parts on it. -JW