Last night I got a call from the title company letting me know that the truck title was in the mail.  So disassembly begins today.  I started with the hood, and thanks to a YouTube video I watched last night, I was able to remove the hood by myself.  Next, the grille, front fenders, both inner and outer, finally, the seat and the dash.  It all went quickly, as they had been apart before, and Matt had only installed a few bolts to hold things together.  I also had to remove the steering column, luckily the steering wheel was only finger tight and the steering box came right out.

This gave me a chance to take a good look at the metalwork and check for rust.  There’s certainly a bunch of surface rust, mostly where the paint is missing, but there just isn’t any remaining rot!  The new sheetmetal looks great, the workmanship up close is as good as I thought.  The only real rust I saw was in the vicinity of the passenger’s side rear cab corner.  It looks pretty good, but there might be a little rust around the bottom.   The driver’s side was replaced, and Matt bought the passenger’s side but didn’t install it as it didn’t look too bad.  I’ll wait until after media blast and see how it looks.

There are only 6 bolts holding the cab to the frame.  One large bolt on each side at the front and 2 smaller ones on each side to a strange shackle arrangement that holds the cab up at the rear.  Once the cab was unbolted, I had a chance to try and lift it up to see how heavy it was.  Even with the doors installed, it’s still not very heavy – maybe a couple of hundred pounds?  Four guys could probably lift it off, but I was alone.  I was trying to think of a clever system to lift the cab off the frame, but eventually I just ended up with a couple of eye-bolts screwed into the ceiling trusses with a nylon strap hooked between them.  I just opened the doors and passes the nylon straps through the door openings and ratchetted the cab up to the garage ceiling.  It lifted just high enough to clear the frame.

I just rolled the frame out from under the cab and down the driveway, using wheel chocks to be sure it didn’t roll too far and out into the street.   So now the frame is gone, and the cab is hanging from the ceiling in the garage.  It looked reasonably stable, but I had visions in my mind of eye-bolts pulling out of the ceiling and the cab crashing to the floor.  It was certainly high enough to cause serious damage if it did fall.  The other thing I realized is that while ratchet type nylon straps are great to lift the cab, there is no way to slowly lower it!  Of course the cab was also much too high to be reached with the floor jack. 

So I just took my time, and with a series of blocks of wood, jack stands, and the floor jack, I slowly lowered the cab onto 4 jack stands.  It was now a much more comfortable 20” off the floor, but the jack stands were not too stable, so I left the nylon strap connected to the eye-bolts as insurance.  I now had a little more room in the garage, and I moved some of the rustier parts from the front clip to the back porch, and left the front fenders and the seat in the garage out of the weather.  Tomorrow, I will see about getting rid of the chassis and building a wooden cab dolly on casters.

In the morning, I called around to several of the “We Buy Junk Cars” places in the Orlando area, and most were uninterested in even picking it up, never mind giving me money for it.  I did find one who said they might be able to come pick it up if I paid them, but they never got back to me with a price.  In the end, I gave up and put an ad on Craigslist offering the rolling chassis with engine and transmission for free if someone would come pick it up.  I thought about putting a “Free” sign on it, but I was concerned that someone might just steal parts off the chassis and make it more difficult to haul away.  So, for now, I’m keeping my fingers crossed with Craigslist.

Next, it was off to Home Depot to get some 2x4’s, casters, and construction screws.  The cab dolly is basically a 50” x 42” square, 16” tall with 4” tall casters.  It went together easily and I was able to lift the cab again with the nylon strap and slide the dolly underneath.  The cab is much more stable sitting on the dolly, but I still need to drill the holes through the body mount locations to bolt the cab to the dolly.   It looks like the transmission opening will be fine, the driveshaft clearance is good, but the cab toe board will need to be cut to clear the transmission bell housing.  Rather than trying to figure out the cut for the transmission tunnel on a cab suspended from the ceiling as I try to lower it on the frame, the engineer in me has me creating a mockup of the floor/firewall out of foam-core board.  It’s better to do the initial cut based on the foam-core board mockup and just do the final trim while trying to set the cab in place. 

While working on the mock-up, I got a couple of emails from Craigslist.  The first wanted to set something for Sunday, and I told him that would be fine, but if someone came by earlier, it would be gone.  The second was just a phone number and an “I want it”.  I called the number and some guy named Joe asked if it was still available, and when I said sure, he said he would need to check on a trailer.  He called back in a couple of minutes and said he would be over in about an hour and a half.  Sure enough, Joe showed up in about an hour with a trailer and we loaded the chassis.  He was a nice retired guy, working on a 48 Chevy coupe, with a friend also working on a Chevy 5-window.  It was great to have the driveway back!