After over 10 years of pausing work on the 68 bird, I decided to pick up where I left off. The body panels were still off the car. I had to hammer out some dings. Then rework the metal patch that was welded in the bottom side by grinding out some edges. A little more weld was added and then [...]
After the fail with hoisting the engine on a lift plate, I decided to just use a engine lift bar. The bar or beam basically hangs over the middle of the engine and has four chains which can be bolted down to the 4 sides of the block. Once you have the engine lift bar bolted down, you can slowly [...]
There are a few different ways to pull out an engine and I was trying to find the best option. For my first attempt, I decided to lift the engine with a bracket bolted down to the intake manifold. With the carburetor removed, an engine lift manifold bracket can be tightened down to the surface. I learned a lesson here [...]
Now that the Firebird's front bumper and most of the front end is removed as shown before, I started digging in deeper to remove the engine. For this to happen, I removed the front fender wheel wells which was located as a separate layer of sheet metal under the front quarter panels. Some old cars have them connected to the [...]
After the Firebird's interior floorboards were replaced, I decided to start working on the engine and front end area. Our plans were to rebuild the engine with new aftermarket aluminum heads and clean it up. The best way to remove the engine/ transmission is to remove the whole front end and since it was very rusty up there, it definitely [...]
I showed before a post about the process of welding in the new floorboards, but forgot to post a final restored picture of the Firebird's floorboards with a new coat of paint. You can see below an enlarged photo of the 68' Firebird's new floorboards. Looks a lot better than the old rusty floorboards. The paint I used was an [...]
