Hemi's 1978 C10 truck

[Hemi]

So @Spencer whispered in my ear. 
Hnnng

 

[Hemi]

Righto, so Bess got over the Hedland before I did due to Covid spec lockdowns , no dramas. Old mate from Swan Towing ( the agent) had a chuckle on the phone and said there were very little brakes, I knew they were garbage so let him know I knew, anyway got over here to grab it and he then mentioned it had NO brakes I like " nah man the fronts are siezed and have no brake pads but the rear 100% works. him = " no they fucking dont, we had to stop it by slamming it into park"
I was all whatever. signed the paperwork and jumped in... hrmm the pedal doesnt feel good.... oh , it has NO brakes at all . either the front pistons have unstuck themselves and leaked all the fluid out , or the rear cylinders have now siezed too, so it was a very exciting drive ~10k's to the place its staying , all while pulling on the handbrake release lever and using the foot hand brake to slow it down, so lol and it was terrible.
So Put the whole brake system minus rotors and master on order from rock auto. 
Went about giving it a wash outside which got rid of alot of the rust stains and gave the interior some love too , so fucking gross. but it looks 1000% better and have been pouring interior protectant on it ( because i dont pay for it) its making a difference but i will need to re-do the dash and floor mat at some point. 

Anyhow, brake stufff showed up yesterday, being the smart person i am I forgot to order new brake pads and had thrown the old ones out when cleaning out the back of the FC soooo that sucks. 
but have new calipers, shoes,hoses,a/c bits, suspension bushes and a couple other bits and bobs, goodness Rock auto is neat! and well priced, the calipers were about $40 aus each , i cant rebuild the fucked ones for that!. 

 

In it's new home for now , its the dry season so will dry out all the moisture thats its got from sitting under a tree in brissy
 

New parts!!
should keep me occupied for a bit, currently trying to track down some oem spindles to put it back to factory height, they seem to be a bit harder to come by, but aill get there. 
 

 

 

One side of the cylinder and shoes done! OMG that was not a pleasant experience and if you have a keen eye , its still not right. FUUUU. These will be discs one day because fuck shoes. 
 

 

Thats it for now , will get up a pic of the intrior once the light has dropped a bit, besides the cracks which you cant do fuck all about its actually pretty good , need to go through and identify all the trim thats broken and replace it at some point.
I love just stearting it up and listening to it rumble.. sooo gooooood. 

[Hemi]

Yay , got the brakes done , the other side was actually easier after a couple beers, found the lack of brakes for the rear, one cylinder let go so thats cool. anyhow started bleeding it... spew.

And the new stuff 
 

And a couple pics of the interior
 

Chur

 

[Hemi]

Righto so while i was away on my swing some more parts showed up , an axle set of wheel nuts ( i dont know why i didnt just get a full set) a belt and the brakes pads!

So over the last couple days I replaced the front end brakes. new calipers,bolts, slide bushes etc, and hoses. 
what a right cunt the hoses were until I remembered an ancient technique.... a chisel to convince the securing speed nut on the inside to wind off. little bit mangled now but the thread part was fine so that's ok. and vice grips cracked the lines. I kind of want to redo them at some point ... totally get how a weekend job turns into the vehicle being pulled apart forever. 
Anyhow while that was happening i was also playing around with de-rusting options. i got some phosphoric acid and threw all the rear brake stuff in to see the go. i actually worked far better then i expected and the results were on the order of hours.
then I got excited and tried to set up a electrolysis rig but my simple trickle charger was dead. Boooo

anyhow pics. 

Old brakes rotors werent done beacuse they have millions of life left and are spensive to get over.

 

And done , all of two items , they took way too long to do . pro tip, dont lose the locating clip that holds the inner brake pads onto the piston. because they are octupus arms spec otherwise. 
 

 

The 'seized' caliper.. piston popped clean out. of course that would happen
 

 

The inside of the caliper.... gross.

 

then some rust removal experiments

One of the adjustors, it got split so the acid could get into everything. 

After, cant remember if i put them in last night or this morning. soo
 

Bolt and nut for holding the brake lines onto the upper control arm

Fizzing away
 

Bolts all done , pretty impressed and for little effort. 

 

Next is to do the suspsension bushes because they look so hideous, and the engine mounts because they are f-f-f-f-f-f-f Fucked

After I get my own place, because things. 

Thank you for visiting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Hemi]

Didnt know where else to put this so will put it in here. 

As I mentioned wanted to give electrolysis a go . after trying to use a battery charger by itself and it not really doing what I wanted ( it kept shutting off , no doubt because it did not detect voltage as the manual says it must detect).
So decided to get around this by running it thorugh a battery, i was worried a battery worth of current would end up cooking something but nah , its just very aggressive, so if you are wanting delicate rust removal you will need to get a dc power supply.
I read up and found the reaction will remove the red rust, convert some red rust to magnetite ( black rust) and evevn turning some of the black rust back to iron given long enough. also that one electrode will produce oxygen or something. 

Anyhow , pretty impressed, tbh the phosphoric acid did just as good job buuuuuuut would get very expensive for large bits, where you could buy a 60L tub or even IBC and the only real cost is the washing soda which is cheap as chips.
also you are not dealing with acids.  Im pretty sure citric acid is cheap enough too so whatever process you choose i spose. 
I noticed that anything left in the phosphoric acid and then just left to dry had a coating which can help it to not rust again.  so maybe could be an idea to electrolysis then paint in phosphoric acid? iunno depends on what you want i spose..

anyhow , pics!
 

 

Bubbling away

Yesterday arvo , maybe 4 hours in?

After a rinse and bit of a brush down , def a difference
 

 

 

This morning after running overnight
 

And after some brushing, big difference photos dont really show how good it is , starting to see native iron too, the bubbles are still raging so there must still be quite a bit to go
 

The Anode, brushed that off and its mainly rusty fluff , but you can def see how its being eaten like threads are there but chunks missing.

 

5 mins after cleaning it and putting back in the tank. 
goes cray cray. 

 

So because this is working so well I decided to hunt for another piece of steel and add another anode because it was really olny treating one end and tapering off towards the other, used light duty cable to do this and its not even remotley warm so must not be a massive amp exercise, the charger is more then keeping up with the battery too . drops to 12.4 then charger pumps it back up to 13..then back down etc. 

Would still like a dc power source to dail in some lushness though. 
also just watched a video on youtube were some crazy german used a dc arc welder and was putting like 30amps or something through it.. wholy fuck it was ruckus, seem to work very quickly but. 
im not keen to die though so a battery will be fine.

 

 

 

 

[Hemi]

Right so ended up buying a house with a lush shed so Bess now has a nice dry home! YAY. Ordered some bits off Rockauto, all OEM, actually got two of most thing because of the freight, wokred out mint
 

 

 

Havent really been doing much because getting used to house and getting some hobbies out of my system but decided to give her a service and replace some bits. replaced oil and filter a while back so that cool, got ahold of some HPR5 for free so even better. 

Today I decided to do the sparkplugs, leads dizzy cap  and trans fluid + filter. 

Sparkplugs uneventful, noted x3 were wet when removed however werent exactlt terrible either, OEM items too so thats nice. 

Then the leads, i swear to god i swapped them out in sequence but then come unstuck when one looked too long, so i removed them, and forgot where they all went, was also going to replce the dizzy cap but it looked 100% and repinning the terminals went straight in the too hard basket. so got that all done and started her up.... idled like shit , i reached over the engine to wiggle the dizzy and it backfired about 30mm from my face. fuck me my ears were ringing, knew exactly what I had done wrong as it happened years ago with the escort.... i put the leads on in numerical order instead of firing.. fucking DURP. 
So i rememdied that and funny enough all the leads were much better. YAY! She runs really well now and what i thought was an out of tune carb and just being lazy was either leads or spark plugs not being happy, she purrs.

Next was the trans, i got so close to getting the CBF's but today was 38 and dry so was okish to be outside so after a beer decided to hook in and get it done.
The manual made it sound like a 2 min job. cept for the rear pan bolts which are obscured by the xmember, fucking thanks GM real nice. anyhow that was easy enough to deal with by unbolting the trans from the xmember and jacking the tail up enough to get a 1/4" socket in. what a mess. next service if i have a welder im going to make a boss and put a plug in. 
Anyhow looked at the pan and spewed, looked at the filter and spewed , compared old vs new fluid...and spewed. 
 

 

 

I then realised i had biffed the rest of my fancy pants atf... so many nonce things!
So will grab some tomorrow and hopefully the trans might be a bit happier, really tempted to flush it given what i found but i dont think its worth it right now so will leave it be and deal to that maybe when i do the boss mod. 

Anyhow thats it for now, doing this got me in the mood to do a few toher thigns too like the suspension bushes and all sorts so hopefully that continues , YAY!

Also realised that the C10 engine bay and quite comfortably fit x1 Hemi in it, because I got sick of reaching over the grille to do the leads. 

 

 

[Hemi]

Well , been feeling a bit under the weather lately so what started as me warming Bess up just to get fluids everywhere ended up with me going "fuckit" and sending her a bit. 
man,made alot more smoke then I realised, the Firies were called- oopsie daisey.
She did mint if not a bit lazy, but im happy as ive never bothered to do anything silly in her.

Did improve my mood a touch and had a little chuckle to myself when the brigade did show up
 

 

 

[Hemi]

Holy long time batman . well not much has been going on tbh, just sitting under cover. anyway im currently playing around with refrigeration and as a result have started collecting all the gear to work on the stuff. finally this week the vacuum pump showed up , some people in spam might have seen me just send some lpg into the a/c system and seeing what happened , amazingly it worked and not too bad. but i had no idea what was in the system prior and had not vac'd it down so with the pump now in my hands i vented the system and then put in under vacuum for an hour and then left it sitting while i went off on a mission inland. came back and needle had barely moved after 6t hours , sweeet. i had picked up some camp stove bottle with a Butane , iso-butane, propane mix , which with all their vapor pressuresw and boiling points should work mint. ( something like @ 1 bar butane is 0 deg c , iso is -12 and propane -42 or something like that. 
anyway pretty much used 480 grams and that got it unfrozen, at 20 psi low side and just starting to rise, so hopefully should have enough liquid in the system to stay happy , i could have calculated it but tbh im having a play and getting a feel for how thing react is what im doing it for . 
Im blown away that the system still work on this vehicle . like i remember driving it back from melbourne when i bought it and it kept losing power in a cyclic fashoin, i didnt click until i had pulled over for a piss and heard the a/c kick in and went" the a/c system is degassed. so the thing was pumping for hours with no gas in it. so thought the pump would be fucked. 
nah oil coming out was clean and no unhappy noises. stoked!

anyway photos

 

[Hemi]

[Hemi]

[Hemi]

[Hemi]

Here is a photo of me feeding lpg into the system , it would fill the glass with liquid and id just wait until it all evaporated and the pressure stabilised and put in more. 

after everything was said and done the vent straight off the evap was sitting at a solid 10 deg C and the core was condensing water mint , accumulator was cool but not cold and you could feel the liquid blasting into it. perfect!

so there you go.