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 [...]
The previous post talked about the start of restoring and removing the rusty Firebird floorboards and this post will talk about welding the new floorboards in place. First thing that I had to do was clean the areas of the metal where the new weld would be. I usually use a wire wheel brush which is hooked up to a [...]
