Well, today (yesterday) was a great day for working on the car with Ian's help!
We got the stock Panhard bars removed and the stock trailing arms and sway bar removed to be replaced with Spohn tubular upgrades. of course all of the mounting points were painted with POR-15 and all of the hard-to-reach areas once the suspension parts are reinstalled:
We also got the rebuild of the diff done, many years overdue (I know!) but this thing is in perfect condition, the Diff oil is at least 11 years old, having never been changed by either myself or Rocky during UK ownership to my knowledge, so its been in there since Wisconsin... despite that fact the oil was very dark, but overall the same consistency as the replacement 80w-90 oil + a full bottle of GM LSD additive as per Martyn's (and GM's) instructions (received a while ago) which it was replaced with which is good, No grittiness or bits in the oil at all.
I decided NOT to fit the T/A Performance Girdle cover because this would require me to remove the bearing caps from a 100% perfect working rear end in order to fit a "shiny thing" cover, I decided not to mess with something that isn't broken and just paint the cover black at some point when the rest of the axle gets painted.
The reason the Caps need removing is because when the Aussies make the bearing caps for these Borg-Warner 9-Bolt rears they just snap the castings off at the mouldings (see pic above) with a hammer or something which means there's not a flat surface for the girdle bolts to mate too. Nicely done, lazy gits...
The new Spohn and BMR panhard bars and POR-15 painted sway bar with new Poly bushings and end-links were remounted (pics tomorrow)
Tomorrow will entail, fitting the Spohn Trailing arms because POR-15 had to dry today, and if my Rockauto order arrives fitting the new Cruise Control computer.
Other Car-related jobs to follow this week...