13 replies to this topic

[Bagman]

So, I've never really worked on a car chassis before, so here is a short journal into my adventure rebuilding the entire front end of my Monaco.

Here are the pictures (the first 11 were already posted when I bought the car). I labeled all the pictures, but I'll give a little bit text below on how things are going so far. I'll post more pictures as I complete the project this weekend (hopefully).
Picasa Web Albums - ryan.albarelli - monaco

Documentation at hand:
Haynes manual for Chrysler RWD
Chrysler 1974 Chassis Manual

Plan:
Original plan was just to replace the ball joints and shocks. Take pictures and mark every part. Never throw anything away. The more I got into the project, the more I realized I just wanted to replace everything and do a really nice job. In the end, everything from between wheel and the firewall was rebuilt.

Removed the wheel.
Removed the brake caliper and hung it up. This took a bit of gentle hammering to get loose.
Unloaded the torsion bars and removed that piece from the lower arm
Removed the brake caliper mount.
Detached the upper ball joint*
Removed the upper control arm*
Removed the dust cap and outer wheel bearing
Removed the rotor
Removed the rotor splash guard
Detached the steering knuckle from the spindle and the tie rod ends
Detached the lower ball joint (could only be done with a pickle fork after removing the entire spindle assembly)
Set the spindle assembly aside
Pressed out the lower ball joint
Detached the strut rod
Detached the sway bar
Removed the torsion bar retaining clip
Removed the lower arm. This took a couple hammer blows from the front side to knock the torsion bar loose and towards the back.
*Had to reattach the upper arm so I could use a big pipe wrench to remove the threaded ball joint. Not waiting for the 2-1/8" socket was a big waste of time, as using the pipe wrench took an hour and a half per side. I should have not removed the upper arm or balljoint until I removed the rotor

Repeated on the right side

Removed the tie rods from the center steering bar
Removed the center steering bar by using the pickle fork on both sides
Removed the idler arm, took a couple hammer blows
Removed the pitman arm with a puller. Took a lot of tension on the puller before it snapped off (rather loudly)

Removed the steering gear, this was the hardest part by far. Between the steering gear and the firewall is a steering coupler and associated rod. There is almost no play between them, and the steering gear has to move toward the back of the car to come off. The best way is probably to detach the column from the floor inside to give more clearance, but I didn't do that. I was able to detach the coupler rod from the flexible coupler near the firewall, and then muscle the whole thing loose.

At this point all items were removed.

Items that were replaced, all rubber with polyurethane parts (cop suspension, right?) I'll post the exact part numbers sometime, but there are a couple of places on the web where all the moog parts are listed:
Steering gear (rebuilt from O'Reilly, probably should have gotten a firmfeel?)
Steering coupler rebuild kit (the pot housing was the only part to stay)
Brake calipers (rebuilt from O'Reilly)
Brake rotors
Brake hoses
Upper control arm bushings (poly)
Lower control arm bushings (poly, had to machine down a B body one)
Sway bar bushings (poly, had to machine the hole wider on a B body one)
Sway bar connecting rod bushings (poly)
Pitman arm
Idler arm
Tie rod ends (4)
Strut rod bushings (poly)
Wheel bearings
Ball joints (4)
Shocks (regular, forgot to buy cop ones, an easy item to replace later)

Not having a sandblaster, I carefully cleaned every part using my grinder wheel with a brush wheel that I got from lowers. It really worked great, except for the stamped arms. I used a smaller brush on a battery drill to get those parts. This took probably an entire week of time. Using an electric drill and brush attachment, I cleaned all the dirt and rust from the entire wheel well area and frame pieces (where the arms attach). This took an afternoon each, and created a huge dust cloud from all the dirt that came off. I did not take all of it down to the metal, as the existing coating was hard to get off and I got it to a "good enough" state.

Once everything was cleaned, all parts had the machined faces (i.e. faces that will mate or have nuts tightened against them) taped off. I first tried a rubberized spray I got from O'Reilly that was the cheap one they had. I bought several cans of this, but this turned into a giant waste of time. No matter how many coats I put on, or how well I dried and cured them, it would just come off to the touch. I ended up buying a can of the Duplicolor rubberized spray and wow did it work great. Just one coat on top of my failed work and it was in great shape. I used the Duplicolor on the chassis parts as well. The duplicolor had a great black color as well, unlike the other one which was rather brown.

Replacing the control arm bushings
When replacing with poly bushings, you re-use the metal parts, so there was no need to get a special press to remove the bushing shells. Instead, I used a drill bit and spent about 10 minutes drilling the rubber bushing out, until I could grab some and yank it all out. Drilling in rubber is interested to say the least. The pivot arm won't come out without removing the shells, so I just lubed up the new bushings and slid them into place. I used an ad-hoc press the bushing all the way in (didn't take much pressure).

Last weekend I had my neighbor press out the lower control arm shaft, and then I used a screwdriver to remove the old rubber bushing from the shell still in the lower arm. This is where things get tricky, as (as far as I can tell), nobody makes a polyurethane lower control arm bushing. I measured the existing shell, the old bushing, and machine what I thought would work well. After lubing the parts up, I just put it all in a vise using a metal sheet and tin can lin on the bushing side to stabilize it and tightened to press the bushing in. This actually took about a dozen tries as the flanged bushing head wants to slide sideways unless you just get lucky. I used a large socket to press it the rest of the way in until my flanged edge caught on the inside. I then lubed up the shaft and used my ad-hoc press to press it in. This did not take much pressure either.

Assembly:
Installing the steering gear was a bigger pain than removing it because of the clearance issue. I had to loosen the backside nuts on the coupler near the firewall to give another 1/8" to try and wedge it all together. The other hard part is that my coupler would not slide onto the shaft without hammering. Once things were fought into place, I had to hammer on the coupler to get it to go on. This caused the lid and rubber piece to come loose. Once it was hammered on, I had to try and crimp it all back together while in place, and hammer in that stupid pin.

Flushing the steering fluid proved to be more of a pain than advertised (partly due to my mistake). I pointed the return hose into a bucket and filled up the reservoir with new fluid. The guide says to disconnect the coil and just crank the engine and let it pump the fluid through the system. After several attempts at this, no fluid was pumped at all. I disconnected the pressure hose from the steering gear and had my wife crank the engine some more, but still nothing came out. I decided that maybe it needed to have the engine running, so I got into the car and started it up. Problem was that I forgot to reattach the pressure hose to the gear box. I also underestimated the displacement of the pump, so in about a 1 second time span I saw the entire quart of fluid geyser up from the engine compartment while I frantically switched off the engine. Basically it pumped the whole reservoir through the pressure hose which was pointed at the gear box intake, which then bounced back and all over the frame that I had spent a lot of time painting. After an hour of cleaning up, I hooked everything up as before and had my wife start the car. It pushed the entire reservoir through the system and into my bucket in about 1 second again. I did this a couple times then gave up since I was out of fluid. After that, I just filled up the reservoir, hooked up the hoses, and started up the engine. I turned the wheel slowly a lot to bleed out the air and make sure everything was working ok. I hate steering fluid.

Tonight I attached the new pitman and idler arms. When I was tightening the steering center bar into the pitman arm with a castle nut, I ran out of thread before reaching the 40lbs of torque called for. Not sure what else to do there, so I just put the cotter pin in and called it good.

All of the replacement parts, shipping, paint, couple mistakes, etc. have cost over $1000. Also spent was about $500 filling out my tools (heavy duty floor jack, lot of second hand stuff from a mechanic going out of business, breaker bar, large socket, pullers). I know some or most of what I replaced probably was working fine, but I don't spend often and wanted the full experience and wanted to know that I put it all together with new parts in good condition.

Hopefully I can get everything put together by this weekend, although there are a lot of unknowns left to face.

-Ryan

[Steam McQueen]

Wow. Great post, Ryan. In the near future there's gonna be a dedicated section on this site which deals with Bluesmobile "How-To" info and stuff. This post is excellent!! Thanks, man.

[Ghostbluesman]

Awesome post, Ryan!
I wished I could be that thorough in documenting my build; I'll be posting my progress, but with a few "gaps" in coverage, to be sure........I just simply forget to take pictures when I'm elbow-deep in grease!
Rob

[CHRISTINE58]

Yes, great post indeed!!

Rob, we need some upto date pics of your dodge too!!

[TK826]

That is a major accomplishment for someone who hasn't done it before.
It seems like there were a few nightmares involved as well.

Big Kudos to you!

[Steam McQueen]

What a car! Cool pic!

[Bagman]

Rebuild is complete, I added some more photos. I can't gauge how well things improved because the alignment is way off, despite my efforts to maintain it. I'll get that fixed this week sometime. Right now it just smells like burning rubber after driving it around the block once!

[Steam McQueen]

Great pic here, Bagman. A Dodge in the driveway!

[TI4438]

Does anyone have a Blumo that was not originally green?Must have been a popular color.

[76Bluesmobile]

My 1976 was beige in color - called Golden Fawn and was 1 of 2,973 produced with that option out of the total of 53,085 Monacos that were produced in 76 - 17,424 2-doors and 35,661 4-doors. I have come across several green cars myself TI and I am sure that it was a fad back then.

[Mr Mercer]

TI4438 said:

Does anyone have a Blumo that was not originally green?Must have been a popular color.

Mine was gold and still in pretty good shape for original paint .

Attached Files

•  gold.jpg   205.46K   10 downloads

[Ghostbluesman]

We just bought a 74 Plymouth Duster with a 318/904 for my oldest son....and it's GOLD!
Rob

[sigmfsk]

Great information and pics, Bagman.

I just love this board. You know what the number one hit on google is for "1974 Monaco Rotor"? : this thread.

We're number one!

Attached Files

•  IMG_4542.jpg   69.96K   8 downloads

[ChiTownJohn]

NIce job Bag, getting in there w/ your hands seems to be the best way to learn, ive done a couple of things in a garage that for me were big job's.

I just watched a bud of mine do a power sterring flush, suck out all fluid w/ a baster, then add this stuff (37 dollars for a large bottle, they dont even sell it most places, difficult to get.)
work the wheel a few times, suck it back out w/ the baster, repeat till big bottle is gone! like 6 or 7 times! Then add new fluid and maybe suck out one more time. Long prcess there but I guess it's great to clean the little valves or ports in the pump.

Again great Job Bagman! Good Luck!

john