UPDATE: 7/8/07

Well, worked on the car some more today and we had a bit of a setback. We got everything completely unhooked and disconnected, figured the best place to set up the block and tackle rig, got the sling on the car, measured everything and while we figured it was going to be close with the height we had to work with but we would have just enough room to raise the body, roll the chassis out from underneath it (we put the wheels back on and dropped the car off the stands). Than we figured that since we had about 10 people there today we could manually lift it up the extra amount ourselves to get it placed on the body dolly.
Ummm...... NO.
Not even close in the slightest in having enough height to get the body lifted enough to roll the chassis out from under the car. DAMN!

We tossed around a number of ideas but the best one we could come up with involves building and mounting up some strong support beams up near the top of the underside of the roof structure of the car port we are working in. This will give us about 3 to 4 additional feet than we currently have to work with.
We ran out to Lowe's, got the lumber and hardware and called it a day and next Sunday we will get the support beams put up, re-rig the block & tackle and get the body lifted.
Also next Sunday while a few of the guys are working on the support structure for the lifting 2 others of us will take the frame down to my buddy's workplace and sandblast it. Once we all saw the frame we all agreed it definitely needs to be sandblasted. The frame is solid, no rust rot or rusted out areas anywhere but it does have fairly heavy surface rust that we definitely want to get cleaned up plus the frame came from a car that had been in a fire and while the frame didn't seem to suffer any fire damage at all there are remments of melted rubber from hoses and melted fiberglass on the frame in a few places and we all just feel better getting the frame down to clean bare metal to inspect it even better. Than we will paint it and after painting it we will also oil the inside of the frame rails since we won't be able to get the insides of the rails painted.

More than a little bit dissappointing not getting the body off today as we had planned but hopefully we will get things going better next Sunday.

 

I remember a post here where someone was taking a body off in a limited height area - they stuck a cherry picker through the doors and lifted it that way.

 

This may not be the point of the problem you had - but just in case - We were doing the body off on our 72 and didn't have enough "lift" or height with the engine hoist we were using. So a few of us fairly inteligent adults started on designs to build up the hoist and/or lower the car when my son said - "why don't you just tie knots in the 4 nylon sling webs to shorten them up" well we did and it worked perfectly and yes the knots came right out when we were done. Guess I need to listen a little more to that kid.

 

would be a great idea but the sling already was knotted to shorten it up! We were afraid that knotting it any shorter would cause too much strain and pressure against the body panels during the lift

 

I had a height problem I removed the gas tank - give you about a foot? (height of the tank 300-400mm).

 

well, a good day working on the '80 project car we are doing the frame swap on.

At 8am we had the replacement frame at my buddy's workplace and started the sandblasting. It came out looking great.
We than inspected the frame VERY carefully since it did come from a car that had been in a fire. The frame looks great - Absolutely no issues at all with ANY rust problems, all the rust was surface rust only that completely disappeared after the sandblasting. No signs of stress or cracking anywhere. It's a good, very solid frame. The only "issues" with the frame is that the rear must have been hit at some point since the passenger side rear bumper mount bracket is slightly bent but that shouldn't be too bad to straighten up and the car may have been towed once (maybe from the rearend accident that bent the bracket mount?) because it looks like a hook was inserted into one of the frame rail holes in the front and it SLIGHTLY pulled the metal around the hole out about 2-3mm. It's also in a place that doesn't effect anything so we don't consider this even an issue to be concerned about.
I managed to get the first coat of primer on the frame also since we didn't want to leave the bare metal unprotected since it's so humid here now plus we are expecting rain. Tomorrow we will get another coat of primer on than on Tuesday i'll start in on the top coat of semi-gloss black paint

After getting back from sandblasting we built the support for the body lift block & tackle rig. We got that built and were finally able to get the body lifted up. The only issue that cropped up during that was that we hadn't realized that the rear rubber bumber basically has to come off to get the brakets out to lift the body but we discovered our mistake quickly and got that done and than the body lifted up easily and quickly. We got the body up on the body dolly and had a chance to inspect the old frame. We did find a few problem areas besides the big crack in the front. We did NOT find 22 cracks as we were told but we did find areas that we were told about which had been described to us as "it looks like someone had gotten a welder for xmas and decided to learn on this car"
how this for one of those areas:

not a pretty weld is that??

We decided to call it day at this point around 4:30pm and next week we will pull the motor/tranny out of the frame and get the trailing arms, and other suspension parts all removed.

Here is a link to all of the pics from today:
http://www.vetteclub.org/1980_Project/projectpics3.html

 

Don't normally hang out in the C3 section but I know some of you guys, Kevin from VetsbyDesign is working on a project for me. I think what your doing is the epitome of what the Corvette culture is all about, a big to all that are involved I'll send a donation off to the PayPal addy, good luck with the build and keep the updates coming.

 

That sucks what happened to the kid....I spent all my money when i was 16 on an 89 the guy told me was in perfect condition. he was a preacher too so i figured i could trust him..... the clutch went out when i was driving it home. luckily i knew someone with tools, bought a service manual and the part. and spent all day and night becoming a mechanic, drove it home the next day and hit a deer....im now 17 and still dont have enough money to fix it properly...but it gets me from A to B and its still a corvette.......Cracked frame is a little worse than what ive had to deal with so far. id love to send some money or help, but college and my car have my funds pretty occupied at the moment.....

good luck

 

in most states 17 is under age and he cannot legally enter into any contract that is binding. Should be able to take the seller to court and get his money back.

Again, just one opinion

 

Thanks Don!!!

 

Hey Barry - any updates?

Hope all is going well

 

What's the status of this project? Anyone heard anything?

 

I was recently wondering the same thing. Inquiring minds want to know.

 

I followed the link above and there it shows the progress.....and completion of the project. Great job!

This is what the Corvette hobby is all about.

 

I decided to track down this old thread to post some super-delayed follow up information to this project. This thread was made for my car that I bought when I was 15-16 (I forget at this point but I definitely did NOT have a license when I first test drove it). The things that this club, corvette owners, and random forum members did for me was absolutely amazing and has really left a lasting impression on me as a person and a corvette owner....since I obviously have not gotten rid of my first car.

Once this project was completed, I got to drive my new-framed corvette around during my senior year of high school. After graduation I moved down to Blacksburg VA to attend Virginia Tech and, as a cheap-living college student, I never got the luxury of having a place to store my vette. So for this reason it sat under a cover at my parents house during my college years. After bouncing around North Carolina for a bit, I eventually found my way to Maryland where I insisted (to my wife) that our house have a set garage space so that my corvette can make the trip from my parents house to mine and live for good. So a couple years ago now, I got her towed down and parked in my very own garage with tools and everything!

Last year, while I was digging into fixing up some faded interior trim pieces, I found that not only were some of the interior channels of the birdcage rusting, but the metal floors were completely rusted away. So for the past 12 months I've been tearing the interior out, cutting out the floors, replacing them, sealing them, coating everything, replacing all hardware, replacing ALL wiring everywhere in the car, replacing all trim and dash pieces, and doing whole bunch of other stuff that I'm sure I've forgotten about at this point. I have plenty of pictures that I'll be sharing as well. But just wanted to make an initial post to say that I did not "trade my vette in for a blinged out Honda" that one forum member suggested I do not do about 11 years ago when this original story was posted.

-Mort

 

This story restores my faith in mankind.

 

I appreciate this old thread immensely and want to keep it going as long as my Vette is going, which should be a pretty long time. So this post is almost 12 and half years since its original posting, and several more months since I actually purchased my first Vette (and car) and I still got work to do. I don't consider myself someone who can restore cars to show quality but since the frame on mine was replaced, a long with 50% of the rest of the parts, I think that ship has sailed for me. So now it's just a matter of making this one my own.





Those are a few snaps of us replacing the rusted out floor pans on the 80. I was hoping I'd be able to just buff off the rust but the first attempt with a brass wire wheel busted a huge hole through the floor. So out they came. This was an involved one but it forced me to buy a welder and learn to weld (with the help of a certified welder of course).




Once I finished getting the floors in, I coated every inch of them with frame coating and sealed all welds and seams with whatever Eastwood products said they'd do the job. After this came new carpets and putting the seats back in. I tried to prioritize all the work that I have to do by cost and what I cared about, and frankly seats came towards the bottom. So because of this, I threw some seat covers on the older seats and mounted them back in.



To finish off the interior I installed a new dash (on top of the new dash harness which is a whole post in itself) then installed the refurbed speedo and center gauges along with a little custom radio I fabbed up. I didn't particularly want an old school one and the new kenwoods didn't tickle my fancy so I went full bluetooth.







At this point 95% of the interior done with the door panels and some rear compartment trim to take care of. More to come.

 

Quick post on the doors. I took them all apart since the windows never really worked right, the panels were trashed from the prior owner, and wanted to get rid of as much of the power windows and wiring in general that I could.


Door panels off.

Stripping the old covering from the panels and ready for some love.

Door guts redone and all the old power window stuff removed and new manual gears, slides, and whatnot all installed and lubricated.

Still have to finish the panels but that seems like a warm weather job to me. (currently low 30s hear in Maryland and no heat in the garage)

 

One of the bigger disappointments was what I found in the birdcage when I took off some of the interior paneling and the outer T-top moldings.






I cleaned everything there up, filled some ugly holes, and coated everything. Hoping that will all hold up!





CERTAINLY not perfect, but hopefully it'll keep new rust out and whats still there good. Since the molding covers all that (and since I'll NEVER sell the car) I feel relatively comfortable with how it turned out. And thats my birdcage.

 

This car has always had an extremely ugly engine bay. The prior owner didn't have good taste I suppose. It had an aftermarket engine so I never felt too concerned with replacing components. I have a list of about 150 items that I did/changed but I won't copy that whole list. The big ones are:

- new fuel sender and pump
- new intake
- new radiator (old one completely rusted out)
- new head gasket
- new radiator
- new exhaust ( yet to be fully hooked up because I changed my mind on what I wanted last month)
- new valve covers
- ALL new wires and hoses everywhere (seriously not a single old wire or hose in this compartment)
- new fluids and filters
- new Borgerson steering system
- and ya know some other stuff











I haven't yet taken a picture of it today but once I get the exhaust plumbed up its ready to start for real. I drove it around the block with the old exhaust a couple weeks ago which is the first time is moved more than 10 feet since 2009. So it was pretty exciting. Though I didnt hear some nasty clunking from the rear....so that will likely be next on the list. That in addition to swapping this ole girl over to a manual....gotta have a stick. More to come.