5875 Front end - Before & After

[DMCNY]

I've finally finished cleaning up the front end of 5875 to a more presentable condition. It's not perfect or Concours condition, but was in need of some serious attention.

It has taken over a month of working on it just about every night after work and days off. Just about all front end parts were removed, cleaned, sandblasted or scrubbed, repainted, or re-plated and reassembled.

Also replaced some hardware with stainless, angle drive, lower speedo cable, torn rack and tie-rod boots, steering column bushing and did a 4-Wheel alignment.

Here are some before and after pics.

Thanks for looking.

(The Before)


















(After)

[Chris Burns]

Great job!

[protodelorean]

Nice job! They are SO nice to work on when they're clean like that.

[Morpheus]

Looks great!

[Loach43]

Many hours well spent. Looks fantastic!

[Mark D]

Looks great! I'm in the middle of doing the same type of restoration, and this is some excellent motivation for me to keep pressing forward.

[Jonathan]

Looks very nice Andy, great job. Out of curiosity, were you considering installing the front end recall kit reinforcement plates?

[jackb]

Scrolling through the before pics, I thought to myself, well, it's not that bad, I;ve certainly seen worse. Then I got the the first after picture, and my eyes got wide and I said out loud "Holy Shit". Amazing.

[DMCNY]

Thanks for all the great comments everyone!

Looks very nice Andy, great job. Out of curiosity, were you considering installing the front end recall kit reinforcement plates?

Jonathan, I had considered it. I researched the kit as best I could to find out why it was nessesary and exactly what it does. According to the recall, it was based on sway-bar end nuts coming off and ball joint nuts coming off and possibly causing damage.

Here is more description on the recall.

http://www.automotix.net/autorepair/.../23609-recall/

My car is a Oct '81 build. This puts it in or around the time of the recall being reported. 5875 already had the sway-bar end lock nuts installed (double-nutted with original) and upper and lower ball joint castle nuts with cotter pins installed. If this was something that was done by the factory or done by a selling dealer I could not tell, but was done.

Looking at the side brackets for the recall kit, you can see that it simply has 3 holes for the bracket to mount. 2 are used with the exsisting sway-bar bushing clamps and 1 on the side of the frame used with the exsisting radiator support bracket. IMO this does nothing to strengthen anything and only merly acts as an additional spacer. I could not justify buying the kit.

I looked the frame over with a fine toothed comb and could not find any areas of cracking or stress points. I also figured the car has made it fine like this for 30 years without a problem so I didn't see the need. Plus the car is mostly just a weekend warrior for me anyway.

This in no way implies to others that they shouldn't purchace the recall kit or if anyone already has one on thier car that I think they wasted thier time, it's just my opinion. I'm no engineer.

There are more detailed pictures with descriptions of before and after pics in my albums, too for anyone interested.

Thanks again!

[john 05141]

Wow!!
Very nice, I must say. You did an excellent Job.

John