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The last steel tool i touched in my garage stuck to my hands. It’s a bit cold out there. I’m doing some planning and shopping for a garage heater.
Someone showed me this:
I usually detest fiberglass plastered all over, but that van on the bottom, is that a nifty designed extractor hood on an econoline? I think it is! Don’t know if that design is amazing, ridiculous, pointless, stupid, or just plain bad, but it’s definitely multiple of those things. Looking top down it appears like the entire engine is behind the hood:
The only thing sticking out is the serpentine belt, all the pulleys, and the fan. I doubt an extractor hood would help or even be useful, but it made me think a minute. Not about anything i’m going to do, just bench racing/building in my brain. Looks like the shape of the hood just in front of the extractor part would ‘motivate’ air through the extractor, too… Moving on to something i’m actually planning on doing…
The fender liner is steel, made in 2 parts, and rust has formed where they join:
The front panel goes up to the front of the body, while the rear panel makes up the driver’s side floor. The two panels join directly above the wheel.
I like the idea i’ve seen where people modify a bunch of the front end of the vehicle to come off as a single unit, attached with brackets or some such. I doubt a fiberglass front end shell is available for crazy van people, and I want to keep it steel anyway. it looks like the front panel in that wheel well liner mounts to a bunch of stuff in the front corner, so if that wheel well liner joint is where i make the split, (and maybe split the panel above it too), it would remove everything in the front with minimal complication. By this I mean the body. Everything mounted inside those panels would need to be addressed, but that’s for future planning to solve. Also I would have to figure out how to change 2 of the fender bolt locations. Even the bracing between the front part and a body mount connects to the front wheel well liner part only:
Here’s where the wrench gets thrown into the situation… That side-on picture above, you can see the rear panel i’m talking about which makes up the floor, it has a hole in it. That’s fine. In front of that the panels makes up the bottom of a trap that collected leaves and created a compost pile. You can see the plastic flap there. A cubic foot of compost, rich black compost, came out of there. I think water in there started corrosion in one of the flanges, that ran down and caused the floor to rot. I thought “Fine, i’ll just remove that panel, fix the rust, and get up into that compost chamber and fix that”. If you look, it’s a huge panel. HUGE. It also goes under what appears to be a support frame for the body, which then bolts to the frame through body mounts.
Looks like I won’t be removing it, but I WILL be cutting into it. That’ll be fun. Should I make a removable panel at the bottom of that compost chamber? It would help me clean it out in the future and potentialy fix more corrosion if it shows up later. Obviously I’ll have to cut out a bit of the floor and weld on new metal, too. Fortunately that whole support frame thing, which is above the body mounts, looks fine and i’m perfectly happy to leave it alone. This is good news since I can’t remove the body from the frame anyway. There appears to be a rubber grommet filling a hole in it. I assume this is from the undercoating, since they filled stuff with tar, too. If i feel the need to fill the thing with more rust stopping tar or wax or whatever the cool kids are using these days, i’ll have access, so I got that going for me, which is nice.
Nobody stopped in to tell me i’m psychotic/idiotic for doing this to a van? That’s good! 😀
To catch you up to where I’m at, i started tearing apart the front. Peeled away all the layers until I found an engine hidden in there
Started bagging fasteners to keep them straight
and dug into the body/undercoating
I also found a new foot-vent
Also made a tear down video:
My plan for this project involves fixing the rust, followed by rebuilding the engine/drive train, then once it’s moving under it’s own power again I want to do the interior, probably with less floral pillows. I’d also like the back to hold a bunch of tools as I want this to be a tow/support vehicle. I know this is more of a mechanical forum so updates might be a bit sparse until I break into that, but i have big plans. I would like to rebuild the engine and convert it to megasquirt EFI, plus whatever scope creep happens to occur. I never sell anything, so if i’m keeping this thing forever I might as well make it what I want.
I’m splitting the first post into 2 so i fit the image requirements.
Much of the exhaust is gone. I suspect it’s in a ditch somewhere in upstate NY (i used to live in Binghamton for a while), but i can’t be sure.
The interior is predictably old looking:
The engine is a fuel injected 302, AOD tranny, 8.8″ open rear end.
At the start of the project it leaked oil, coolant was slowly disappearing somewhere, and it didn’t idle great when cold in our WI winters. Other than that, it ran and drove fine. Pretty much everything worked except the AC and the temperature gauge, not long ago I even drove it from NY to WI in a 1 day trip. Never had a problem. It just took 70 gallons of gas, 5 quarts of oil, and a jug of antifreeze to make it here. It has 2 gas tanks, a few performance mods from it’s days of towing a 26′ travel trailer, air shocks in the rear, a class 5 load distributing hitch, and some other goodies mostly related to power/cooling needed to tow a trailer.
I plan to tear it apart and do everything short of frame-off restoration. I would do that too, but i’m pretty sure I can’t get the body off the frame. The body mounts all look good anyway. I want to redo the interior, rebuild the engine, repaint it, make it a better tow vehicle (car trailer now instead of travel trailer), road trip machine, and overall just keep my hands busy. I don’t really plan on ever finishing it, im keeping it forever anyway. You’ll probably say i’m crazy for doing all of this to a van, it’s a stranger build than a Fairmont i’m sure, but I like it anyway.
Did I mention Extra lights? extra lights rock:
I have a walkaround vid here but there’s probably nothing in there I didn’t mention in the post above