Front beam cleaning and evaluation

After a little running around this morning, I scored the POR 15 paint, put the torsion arms and the front beam brackets in a degreaser for a good long soaking.  I do want to check the torsion arms for straightness against my NOS torsion arms before I paint them - just so I don't waste the time/money on something that's not going to be put into service.

I got a pretty good start on the paint removal process - the wire wheel gave up the ghost and I didn't have a replacement.  I'll have to pick one up either tonight or tomorrow to do the bulk of what's left before I move on to other means of paint removal.  I will prep and then, hopefully, on Thursday, paint the parts with the POR 15.

 It's getting there - not quite clean enough to paint but progress is headed in the right direction.

 Now that it's cleaned up - the scrapes on the back side of the bottom show some additional scrapes.  Seems pretty fair to say that this car hit something quite hard.

 I uncovered the beam number - 384743 - behind rust and paint.  I'm hoping that I can paint the beam in a way that'll keep this stamping visible.

Once I can determine that the beam is good to go, I'll clean off some of the welding splatter and then paint it.

 I forget which side this came from but it crumbled very easily.  50 years of service is a long time for a bakelite part - even if most of that time was spent in a garage.  This little car went fishing - a lot - and in some places it shows.

I reached out to Mario at T3HQ and he was able to find the right size in his stock and get them to DHL so that they'll arrive before I need them.

 The upper bushing between the beam bracket and the body under the fuel tank - the left side is obviously the original 50 year old part and the left side is a reproduced original part.  I have a few sets of the new parts so I figured it's a good time to replace these since this is the better looking original part.

 The lower bushing between the beam bracket and the body under the fuel tank.

Quite a difference.

 The upper grease seals for the beam were in surprisingly nice condition for their age - they'll be replaced with NOS parts as I have spares.  I want to make sure that I get the front end rebuilt to as close to 'great' as I can.

The lower seals are also in great shape - although they were a bit stretched out and a bit rubbery.

Again, replacing them with NOS parts to make sure everything is snug and as nice as I can make it.

The steering box went back to Tim for evaluation.  It had about 100 miles on it and it was one of his first rebuilds - he's going to check it over and let me know what is going on/gone wrong.  I'll decide what to do with it once he's finished his evaluation.