With the front end completely broken down to the bare frames (what's left of them), the next order of business is the back of the car body. This is going to be tricky as all the lift points for a floor jack (rear end, spring shackles, leaf springs) will all be removed. That leaves the torque boxes (where the front of the leaf springs are bolted, or the edges of the torque boxes where they transition over to the rocker panels or the rear floor. That's all fine and dandy except for one problem - all this shit is rusted to complete dust. I had to come up with a creative yet crude way to lift the ass end of this body up with a minimum of further damage while allowing me to remove the weight of the rear end hardware. After an attempt at just trying to place masonry blocks under the rocker arm areas, which resulted in the ends of the rocker arms crushing dangerously, I had to come up with another creative way to do this sketchy shit. I ended up using one of the 2x8 boards that will later go between two drums as a support piece to take some of the weight by spreading it across the board and supporting it on the masonry blocks. It wasn't quite that easy though. The rocker arm areas would still try to crush under the downward force from the weight of the rear end on it. My solution to this problem: I cut a 2x4 into a couple long pieces that I propped on the rear floor just over the 2x8 and propped the top ends of the boards along the top of the door sill at the roof, using those points to take up some of the forces that are trying to further destroy the rest of the rear body of the car. After removing the rear wheels when I jacked up the rear end to get the back of the body off the ground, I lowered the rear end back down and as things settled, the forces transferred through everything. The 2x8 took up a lot of the force, warping under the weight and the 2x4's took a lot of weight, pushing up against the edges of the door sill and roof, keeping the middle of the body from imploding. Since I didn't want to leave the 2x8 under the warping force of holding the car body up, I ended up taking the floor jack and a piece of 8x8 wood chunk, placing the wood on top of the jack cup and jacking up the 2x8 as close to the middle as possible, removing as much of the warpage as possible for the time being until we can finish the removal of the hardware in the rear. I can imagine that when the rear end and leaf springs are gone from under the body, the rear will probably be pretty light just as well. We're not talking light enough for one man to lift up but light enough that the engine crane can do the job while being anchored to the body in a way where the already rusty body won't further disintegrate when I attempt to lift it up high to set it on the drums and boards. Once the car is on the drums, I can then shift my focus onto getting the powertrain mounted in the truck frame. I already am in the process of getting the powertrain ready by getting ready to install the intake manifold and the rear sump oil pan. I will have to add a different set of engine mounts to allow the V8 to set on the mounts of the Ranger, which according to research, is just a couple of fox body Mustang engine mounts. I still have to install the wheels pulled from the 65 onto the truck frame to allow for easy moving. Once the powerplant is in place I can then stage the frame and start the final approach for the frame to get it mounted with the body. This will be another monumental moment in the course of our project history as I'll have morphed a car body to a truck frame and get into the advance stages of getting another car rolling that hasn't been rolling in over 15 years.
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