Preparing chassis for front suspension kit installation.

With the frame back from sandblast I ordered the front end suspension kit from Street Rod Engineering.

While frame was out for sandblast I cleaned all of the old undercoat from the body

 I used this Roto-Strip tool on my drill to remove the old undercoat, it worked excellent and made short work of the job.

 I applied a coat of Por-15 for a hard glassy smooth protective base coat.

 The entire bottom of the body was rust free...Nice!

Removed the body from the chassis. Removed the front and rear axle and then drilled all of the factory cold rivets from the suspension mounting points.

Removed the engine and transmission and donated to local high school. Front axle sold for $50.00 and other items went on ebay.

Removed floorboard, toe board, made a scribe line on the frame to notate where the front axle was located then removed the trunk lid and rear fenders.

The next step was to disassemble the car down to the bare frame.

 With help from my Daughter we removed the front end body parts.

Removing the anti-roll bar assembly to accommodate engine/transmission removal.

First Project: Dash Board Sheetmetal

 The dash was actually in pretty good shape.

Several holes were drilled under the original radio control head area. The size lead me to believe they were probably for toggle switches. I believe this car did not originally come with a radio because there was no evidence of antenna mounting holes on the cowl and a radio delete cover bearing the Plymouth logo was in the pile of parts that came with the car. You can see in the photo above a light spot on the dash where the delete cover was covering the radio control holes and the two mounting holes for it on each side of where the frequency indicator would have been.

After sand blasting the dash I welded up all of the unwanted holes and ground them smooth. It took very little hammer and dolly work to get everything back to it's original shape. The three large holes I left untouched in the photo above are for the windshield regulator (top center), the cigarette lighter and ashtray (bottom left and right) which I would later use for air conditioning vents.