I bought my '79 in 2013, and used it as my daily driver in the salt and snow of northern Utah for 5 years. I've finally worked up the motivation to do a small restoration, and figured I might as well document it and ask questions as I go.

This is a picture of the car the day I brought it home, on March 22 2013.


Over the next few years it got side pipes, an auto to T5 swap, and some small maintenance items and racked up 20k miles or so as my reliable daily driver. In 2017 I wiped a lobe on the cam, and didnt have the budget to fix it right so I bought a cheap K5 Blazer and started driving that. I still used the Corvette when the K5 was down for repairs, and even with a wiped cam it still fired up and got me where I needed to go. I ended up moving away from Utah for work, and last spring I road tripped the car from UT to southern California running on 7 cylinders (driving was cheaper than renting a trailer), and its been parked for just over a year.



I've posted in a couple other threads, so some of you know the motor came out earlier this month and I am shopping for suspension and steering parts. I want to clean up the engine compartment, rebuild the front suspension and steering, redo the brakes, drop in a crate motor and get the car back on the road. It needs a new rear spring, but that will turn into a rebuild of the whole rear end and I might put it off for another year. I am working outside and I dont really have the space to pull the body at this point, so hopefully I can avoid too much scope creep on this project.


I took today off work and pulled the front suspension and steering, and opened up one of the brake calipers. Pics below are how the car looks today, and I have a couple questions based on what I found so far:

• The caliper sleeves look fairly pitted. I am assuming this means they are not stainless sleeved and I need to replace them?
• The one front rotor I measured is at 1.236-1.237 thickness and does not appear to be grooved. It has some light rust from sitting outside, but I think that will clean off with a couple hard applications of the brakes. If the other rotors measure the same, can I replace the pads and keep my current rotors without issue? They are still above the 1.215" min thickness, but I definitely don't want to wear out the rotors before the new pads.

 

Were your calipers leaking, do you know about shimming the rotors for runout?

 

Braking system (including calipers) was not leaking at all. I could probably put this one back together and leave the rest of the calipers alone, but I am going to do a junkyard hydroboost swap anyway and if I have to bleed all the lines, I'd rather just fix the calipers properly.

I do know about shimming the rotors, but I am not currently planning to remove them (still have factory rivets). Would you recommend replacing the rotors too while everything is apart, or leaving them alone for awhile based on the 1.236" measured thickness (I think the spec is 1.215-1.250 or so)?

 

Ok. Let the argument begin. It looks like they are sleeved but I can't be sure. Do you feel an actual pit or is it more of a stain? If it's a stain I'd take a scotch Brite pad and see if it polishes up. I'd recomended an o ring caliper kit the arent as fussy as the lip seals about run out and they are just easier .good luck. Are you sure California allows people to actually do work on your own car anymore?

 

I hit it with scotchbrite and removed most of the orange rust color, but there are definitely pits in the liner. I cant get a needle pick gauge inside the sleeve to measure, but they are probably .005-.010 deep.
The brakes worked fine before, but after opening up this caliper I think its probably responsible to replace them.

Regarding your second question, it seems like CA does not really allow people to do much of anything useful. I moved here from UT a couple years back for work and it was a culture shock, to say the least. Have to smog my cars, cant carry my guns, cant buy good solvents, need to pay a special tax and get a state-issued ID card to buy ammunition, etc...

 

sounds like a good reason to move back to me

 

I would have a go at polishing those marks out with some 1000 wet/ dry sand paper in there. If those marks don't disappear reasonably quick though you would need to replace as your best option.

Those bores do look to be resleeved, probably with just a steel sleeve though.

Is there much pitting on the piston ? Especially around where the rubber seal sat ?

 

I was with you until you said, "it was my daily driver in the salt and snow"........... stopped reading after that .......

 

Hahaha. Its a car, and it was made to drive. So sure, you need to be a bit careful and spray down the undercarriage once a week, but really you should be doing that with any car.

I own a truck now and drive that in bad weather, but for ~4 years all I had was my C3. Given the choice between driving it every day or not owning it, I know what I picked

 

No it's not really a car at all. At least not by today's standard of the word. I guess I'll have to accept that you and I may see a Corvette very differently. I could never imagine a car this impractical as a daily driver. If I couldn't afford at least a beater for the winter months......I go without the car until I could but that's just me.

I see it this way because it'ss an old car with none of the creature comforts and very little to recommend it as anything more than a toy or antique that really shouldn't see the salt and crap winter subjects it to. Worse still because it;s old you're going to have to work on it to keep it going. I don't ever want to work on the frustration that is a lot of rust and corrosion much less put money into it.

That said.....maybe I'm wrong.......it is an old car and if someone intends to just drive it into the ground that's a whole other line of thinking I wouldn't quibble with though I would ask if there aren't much better choices for a car used this way as well.

 

Since the last post, I've got a few things done:

• Cleaned up and painted all the power steering parts
• "Rebuilt" the steering cylinder with new seals,and replaced idler arm
• Painted new calipers
• Finished my blasting cabinet, and 3 phase Bridgeport spindle motor-powered air compressor
• Dismantled and blasted all control arms
• Painted and replaced bushings in the lower control arms, uppers will get paint and bushings tomorrow

I am having a problem with the reassembled lower control arms, however. I didnt do a good job of taking pictures when I knocked out the old bushing sleeves, but most of them had worn through the rubber and were metal on metal anyway. With the new parts installed, the arm assembly with bushings is much wider than the cross shaft. There is also a small gap between the end of the cross shaft and the inner bushing sleeve. All bushings are fully seated in the control arm. If anyone has done this job recently and remembers how the upper arm and cross shaft looks when correctly assembled, I would appreciate any input.











Here are some more pictures for fun. All the parts looked about like this when I started. I cheated and took pics of the uppers, since I don't have any "before" images of the lowers:





Nice clean steering parts and calipers:







Painted control arms



My DIY compressor, blast cabinet and cover finally operational. I wish I could get the compressor much further away from the blaster to keep abrasive dust out of it, but I don't have another place to put it. I guess I'll just keep up with the filter and oil changes and see how long the cheap pump lives...

 

Can't help with the lower arm pictures from my own car because I swapped out the lower arms for VBPs transverse spring set up........but there has to be detailed pictures on the "net" to help you out with anything you're not absolutely sure about.
Lot's of photos in this: http://www.superchevy.com/how-to/cha...ont-suspension