I'm in the final stage before being able to fire up the Dodge for a test run and drive at this point. I managed to get the set of shocks that I ordered from online. Installing these things went pretty smoothly up until I got to the rear shocks. The bolts that held the shocks at the top were pretty rusted in as well as the nuts that held them at the bottom. I ended up having to use the impact wrench to break the top bolts loose. In the process I smashed my thumb with the jumping wrench that I used to hold the other end of the bolt when the impact wrench was trying to drive the bolt loose. That bolt still wouldn't budge, I ended up having to use the reciprocating saw to cut the thing in half to free the old shock. After that piss off moment I had to fight the bottom bolts, one of which came loose with some ease but still was tough. The other bottom bolt was a real motherfucker. That thing wouldn't come loose even with the impact driver. I ended up using the die grinder to cut a couple of slits into the nut which helped free up the thing enough for the impact driver to bust the nut loose. At that point I had to use the shitty nut to gauge what size it was so I can get a replacement nut for the bottom of the shock.
With the shocks in place I moved on to the last big thing I had to take care of, which was hooking up the alternator. This really wasn't much to worry about, the voltage regulator was never removed when I pulled a lot of other hardware and old wiring from the car. The alternator that I used was the old unit from the 440 engine. The voltage regulator has only two wires coming from it and the alternator has two field coil connections. According to the schematic I found, one field connection gets straight power and the other one gets the regulated power from the voltage regulator. The voltage regulator gets straight power on its other connection. It didn't take long to hook the wires up, it was more trying to run the wires along the same channels that other wires are directed in order to keep them neat. Even the wire feeding power from the alternator back to the battery was routed along the main paths that I routed other wires. Of course it took a lot of wire in order to accomplish this but in the end its a lot better than having random wires routed all over the top of the engine and over and under things in one big mess. I used a good number of wire ties and some soldering and heat shrink tubing to connect shorter lengths of wire together to make the entire run on each circuit. Since I trimmed all of the bulk wire into manageable pieces I had to use the pieces from my new stock instead of grabbing a regular roll and cutting from that. I'd rather use my scrap stock first before cutting from bulk rolls. Anyway, I got the whole circuit done so the alternator should be ready to go. Since I'm so close I decided to take the driveshaft to one of the local driveline shops so they can lengthen the shaft to accommodate the Dodge's powertrain. They should be done with the thing sometime earlier this week. With that, I should be able to hook everything up and put transmission oil into the transmission. I'll end up getting a few gallons of gas to check the tank and make sure it doesn't leak then at that point I will be able to crank the engine over. Barring any mistake I've made in hooking everything up or a malfunctioning device, the engine should start up. We shall soon see.
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