Unpacking

With my red car in the shop, I turned to unpacking the rest of the parts and making sense of everything. Both cars came packed to the gills with parts, plus I had a bulk carrier container full of heavier bits such as engines. I emptied the cars out quickly and organized the parts into piles; body parts such as rear cowls, fenders, engine covers, etc. I packed away in a relatively dry area. I had twelve wheels, I put them out in the yard so I could do battle with removing the tires essentially glued onto the rims for 50 years.

The engines presented the biggest challenge. I couldn’t get into the container to get a footing to lift the engines, and the walls of the container (3 or 4 feet) were too high to lean over and yank out a 100+ lb. engine with swingarm. So, I had to build a hoist and pulley system. I used some old swingset A frames and went attached a rope pulley to middle. After that I had my daughter ratchet the hoist, lift the engines, then I swung them out and onto a dolly, where I could move them around easily.

I think it took 4 times longer to rig up the tooling to do the job than to do the actual job itself. As I came to find out, that would be par for the course with this project. It was also the start of our dog Gabby's love hate relationship with the cars. She's not so happy to be surrounded with engine parts!