Sunday, April 23, 2017

Lemons Coronet Update

The team was back at it today in Augusta, Georgia where the car currently resides.  The checklist to be ready for shakedown testing in early May at Carolina Motorsports Park is looming large.
Always more fun when there's more than 1 racecar around.

Big thanks to one of our newer teammates, Landon who is storing the car for now and let us use his shop space to work on the car alongside his own racecar. Up first we needed to service the rear axles and brakes, so I got to work removing the drum brakes and axles. 
With a bit of muscle and a ratchet, the rear axles pop right out.

We uncovered a little wear on the rear driver axle, so we'll investigate further next weekend but suspect a failed wheel bearing was allowing it to shift inboard too much and contacted the inside of the differential.  
On the left, you can see metal material that's been transferred onto the axle.  On the right, this one is like new. 

Up front, we refreshed the slightly larger calipers we sourced and got to work tearing down the front suspension.  Several bushings were completely torn up and the ball joints were looking questionable. We all voted to make the car safer to drive, so we'll be servicing all of those components. 
This pretty much sums up the overall state of a lot of suspension components.

While I was going through latex gloves at an unrivaled pace with the mix of axle grease, gear oil, and brake fluid, Landon was tackling the slick new hood pins up front.  While the factory hood latch was okay, the Coronet has one heavy duty hunk of steel covering the motor, so we wanted to really keep it in place.  We'll chalk that up to a safety improvement as well. 
New hood pin installed. Nice and flush mount unit to preserve that awesome 70s aerodynamic body.

Luke, our electrical guru was busy inside the car buried in copper, relays, and switches.  The car is getting very close to having full road-worthy lighting.  On Friday I transferred the title to myself from the previous owner in Texas, so we will have the option to street drive the car for testing or transportation to events or just bringing it out to cars and coffee if we want. 
Luke making spaghetti.

Today we also test fit a new routing for the brake ducts (because hauling down a heavy old car with drums in the back is going to need some serious cooling). We also managed to fix some failed valve spring retainers thanks to a good find at a local junkyard by Kyle.  

Old calipers get new gaskets and pistons.
Next weekend the full team will be back at it, possibly for a 2 day weekend to finalize the car for track time.  Everything is going to start coming together really quick and we're excited as ever. 

Shortly after this photo it exploded into a hundred pieces and a cloud of dust. More abused suspension components.

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