Project Shoestring – Part 1 - May 24, 2020

Wow – I just looked back and it’s been just over two years since I wrote “Project Shoestring Begins”. Where does time go? Well in my case, I, like a lot of active, older people have learned to not sit still too long as it’s a good prescription for an untimely death. And since I am not ready for that one, I keep moving. Since I wrote that post, I have completely, save for the outer walls rebuilt a 3-bedroom house and sold it. That was a 8+ month project – they take a bit of time when you are doing 90+% of the work by yourself. And before I was quite done with that I started on a deck project for an old high school friend. One of those that started off rather small in scope and grew from there. Between weather issues, getting sick a couple of times and attending a wedding in Vegas, that little project went along for about 5 months but the owner was happy and that’s what counts.

So here we are again talking about my 1955 Chevy 210 bracket car. And I am sure there will be interruptions in this project again; it simply cannot be helped but we have made some really good progress. For starters just getting the car over to were I could work on it took a bit of doing along with some weather cooperation. We are back in our wet winter conditions again so you have to pick your days to do certain things carefully. I finally hit a few days where it didn’t rain and the ground actually dried out a bit. I grabbed the golf cart and decided it was now or never getting on with this project. First problem was the car had sunk it’s tires a bit into the ground and the golf cart was having nothing of it. I could rock the car a bit but there was no possibility that the golf cart had enough muscle to pull it out. So I went and got the truck but I had a slight dilemma there as I did not want to pull the Chevy out and have it smash into the back of my truck! I had to be very careful just to ease it out of it’s stuck spot and make sure that I kept any forward motion of the car to an absolute minimal. Thankfully I succeeded and was then able to hook the golf cart to the car to make the rest of the journey up to the garage. Now I admit that sounds easy but honestly I could only move the car about 20-25 feet at a time before I would have to re-adjust the steering of the front tires. Seems that one tire would point straight ahead and the other was about 30 degrees off in a different direction. Once I got the car up to the garage, I wanted to get it cleaned out before rolling it in to a bay but I also have to take one of the race cars out to make that happen.

The following day, I started cleaning up the interior and trunk space. The car came with everything from pennies and hairpins to replacement sheet metal panels. I was happy to see the replacement panels as those will save me a lot of money. And they were a surprise being buried under all kinds of other items. I also started removing the front roll pan that goes just behind the front bumper. All of these pieces are in pretty decent shape and as I get them cleaned up, you will find them for sale in my store area. There was still a lot more debris to clear out of the car but it would have to wait just a bit.

My grandson, Jackson, is now staying with us for a bit and I was happy to find out that he was a willing partner in helping get the car cleaned out. I really wasn’t too sure how it would go but he dug in and helped get not only the debris cleaned up but also got just about all the old wiring removed. The next day, we had some better weather and worked on the car again. My goal that day was to get the entire stock suspension removed from the car along with the radiator and support pieces. We placed the car on jackstands for safety, then proceeded with removing the disc brake kit that was on the car, the entire steering box setup, steering linkage and pulled the spindles off. None of these parts are going to be used by me again. Some stuff will be sold and the rest will go to the metal recycler. We then removed the radiator parts and pulled the a-arms off, top and bottom. Jackson did a lot of this work himself and learned a couple of new tricks along the way.

Right now the next steps are a bit confused. With my grandson’s help this part of the project moved along a lot quicker than I expected so as I said before, we made some really nice progress on it. I think I am at a point where I need to move the racecar out of the shop and prep that area to start constructing the new racing frame for the ’55. I am getting pumped up about this car coming together now.

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