At this point there isn't much left in the interior of the van to remove before I can consider this thing empty. I just had to remove the rear HVAC box and the trim panel on the sliding door. In order to remove the HVAC box I had to slide under the van at the left rear corner to disconnect the bolt that held the double AC line. Since the box was already disconnected, once the tube connection was free, the HVAC box was free. Looking at the assembly, I'll have to try and remove the entire HVAC line in order to be able to use this assembly on the 46 Ford, much less any other HVAC system. We'll see. There are aftermarket systems out there that may very well end up being the better solution than to try and make this stuff fit and spend more time, and probably just as much money, to do so. I could just buy the aftermarket shit and just make the AC lines from kit to connect this hardware and still spend the same amount of money and lesser time. We'll see. With the sliding door being the only thing left to work on, I decided to turn my attention to a few other things, just to try and clear up other loose ends on the body since my plan was to remove the body from the frame. I pulled the running boards on both sides since I had already disconnected the front portion of each running board when I pulled the fenders off. The running boards were held in place with simple 7/16" bolts in a more "makeshift" manner so it wasn't like it was a super professional installation. I most likely won't even try to sell this stuff versus just scrapping this shit. Now here's where things get sticky. My original plan was to pull the van body from the frame and use the frame for the 51 Chevy panel truck build. I wanted to look at the frame to see where the body mounts were in preparation to pull the body or at least get the bolts free so the body can be pulled later. At the same time I wanted to look at the AC line to see what it would take to get it removed as well, if I want to be able to use the rear HVAC box. After looking at everything I found that the van is a semi-unibody. The front suspension and K-member are part of a subframe that is bolted to the van's body, which from the firewall back, is a unibody. Even if I removed the front subframe, the van would still be a complete body/frame setup with the rear suspension and rear end attached. What this means is the body is going to be permanently rolling. I even visited the idea of using the front subframe on the 51 Chevy but the dimensions of the 51's frame and the dimensions of the van's subframe are way off. It would take too much fab work to attach the van's subframe to the 51's frame. While this might seem like a major setback, it really isn't. What it means is I won't have to worry about trying to build a foundation to set the van's body on for the doghouse build. It means all I have to do is just roll the body over to the build site where I want to set the doghouse up and just build the thing out, it will sit on all four wheels just like the car chicken coops. It also means that this unit can be easily moved if we ever decided upon relocating elsewhere and wanted to be able to take this "outbuilding" with us. As for the 51 Chevy build, this puts me back at one of the old plans I had before, which was to use the S10 as a donor chassis for that build, all the way up to even using the S10's powertrain (after modification of course) to power the truck. This would obviously mean I'd have to remove major parts of the S10 like the bed and cab, along with the front clip. I could technically leave the powertrain and exhaust in place and just drop the 51 Chevy body on the frame and secure everything then remove the other hardware like unnecessary wiring and hoses. With the way I've been chopping cars, I could probably get such a chop done pretty fast. I'd hate to chop this truck as it's a perfectly good running truck. The only way I'd refrain from this is to find another S10 rolling chassis and use it for the build. I do have another V8 engine and a transmission that can be donated to the build, so this is an option. I would also have to come up with a viable application for the S10 as well that would warrant me saving this truck. There are several ways these builds can go but we won't know until we get close to that point. In the meantime, the minivan doghouse needs to get built.
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