012 - Finally Building

The nice thing about building a car is there are roughly two billion steps plus or minus 3.  Some of those steps have a very specific order like getting ready for work in the morning.  You could drive to work before you got dressed but it's not recommended.  Just like you could try to start the car before installing the gas tank, but probably without much success.

However there are plenty of other steps that can happen at various stages throughout the build, so if we get stalled in one area because we're waiting on a part or just got confused or bored we can move on to another area.

And so... that's kind of how we've started this build.  A little bit of this, and a little bit of that.  Some of what follows may read as "blah, blah, blah", and if it does then please enjoy the pictures.  The take away is we're making progress on the car!

First up was the steering rack and lower control arms.  With the steering rack, there's a funny little stainless steel safety loop that was rough around the edges.  There are a lot of parts like this that were cut out on a CNC laser and need to be cleaned up and deburred.  Some view this as tedious but for me grabbing a file, sandpaper, and scotch Brite to clean up a rough cut piece is incredibly satisfying.  It's one of those weird little details that will get buried deep in the car and never seen again, but I'll know it's there, and I'll know it has been done right.  And that is enough.





Next we got distracted by the engine, and swapped out the oil pan for a low profile unit from Moroso.  The stock oil pan was too deep and would literally drag on the ground when installed in this car.  We also had to pull the oil cooler because space is at a premium and as designed it wouldn't fit.  The stand allows us to rotate the engine with the oil pan facing up which made this job really easy if not a little oily and slimy.  







Continuing with the engine we attached the mounts for installing into the chassis, pulled the intake manifold to be stored for much further along in the build and added a lifting plate in its place.  That will make sense later.





Next after a little digging around we found the shocks which needed assembling.  Conveniently there are four shocks and four Garcias!  So we each assembled one of these pretty red Koni units that came valved and adjusted for the car straight from the factory so it's pretty much plug and play.




I also found some stainless steel spacers for the shocks that needed deburring and polishing.  My happy place.  That's it for now.  I may ramble off topic in the next post.  No promises.





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