The Big Teardown

We were prepared with saws grinders, and nearly any cutting device you can imagine. Anticipating the worst we dug into the car. For the last two weeks we have been soaking the bolts in penetrating oil, especially the bolts that looked excessively rusty hoping that we could save ourselves a few headaches. In the end, it seemed to work! This thing came right apart.

Paul Massey from Five Guys Racing (sorry, should be FIRE GUYS RACING) has been a bit starved for car building action recently since he lives over 200 miles from his teams shop and he came down to dig into the car. From our team John, Matt W, Evan, Susan and myself were all digging in. We left the knuckle bashing to Susan however…

Matt W and I got started early, taking off the main components and wondering where the rust would stop us. Things came apart smoothly as we went along. It was immediately apparent exactly how much Matt W knows about these cars. He is able to shout from across the car that you are going to need a 26mm wrench and that it is going to have this trick and if you wave a magic wand, the special one from Germany, in a clockwise motion over it first then it will come out just fine. Each time we hear him say one of his helpful hints we take note cause they all seemed too work exactly as they should!

Evan, John and Paul showed up and the teardown really took off. This thing came apart down to a skeleton of its former self in no time and I am impressed how much of the tar board and seam sealer we were able to tackle last night as well.

After a really solid work evening we have only the transaxle to remove before we split the body and pan. Once we do that, well the real work begins. Lots of rust repair will be high on the list before we can start the build. We will be removing the transaxle and working toward splitting the pan in a couple weeks. In the mean time we will be heading out to spectate the Pikes Peak international Hill climb next week. If you are going, look us up!