I was thinking about freshening up the suspension!

[jlenownnab]

Hardway, your engine compartment is outstanding! That is truly what I would like mine to be like. I don't know if I am that disciplined to see it through that far. You said your rubber is all correct, I am finding a lot of the hoses not available, any suggestions where to look besides MSA, Z Car Depot, Z Car Source and Z Connection? I would really like to replace all of them while car is torn down.

[Hardway]

I have all the little grommets and stuff but not all the hoses are correct.  Many of them are supposed to be cloth wrapped but availability for those types of hoses is very limited and they are easily 5X - 10X would regular non-wrapped hoses cost.  All of the vendors you mentioned above are good but I will also add Banzai Motorworks http://zzxdatsun.com/  Mike's website does not support online shopping but his products are top notch.  He carries a lot of the misc. parts and pieces that are usually missing from our cars.  They really help to "complete" things.

[jlenownnab]

I will check him out, thankyou. 

Here are some pics from todays efforts, I should post a picture of my bloody busted knuckles.

Opinions on my drivers side frame rail would be appreciated. I don't know if I should go back silver or black it out. I think silver would look detailed and would be easier to do??

I will detail the bay and components more once its back together and everything is where it belongs.

[Captain Obvious]

I don't have anything to add about the suspension work, but from looking at your brake booster, it's clear that you had a master cylinder rear seal failure at some time in the past. And if that's the case, it's likely that you've got old moisture laden brake fluid festering inside the booster eating the paint and rusting the metal bits. The longer it's in there, the worse things will be.

[jlenownnab]

I was thinking that was old. It was dry on tear down. any recommendations?

[Captain Obvious]

it being dry when you removed the master cylinder means that someone, prior to you, has already replaced the failed master cylinder. That's good. And depending on how quickly they noticed and addressed the issue, your booster may not have sucked in a lot of fluid.

You can check for fluid inside by pulling off the aluminum parallelogram where the master cylinder mounts. Then pry out the vacuum seal and remove the output shaft (the part that pokes the master cylinder). Once you have that output shaft out of the way, you can look inside and see if it's wet. Maybe stick a paper towel in the hole and reach around to see if it mops up anything?

If the paint inside isn't peeling, and the spring is all shiny like, then you're probably OK.

And then you can spent an hour or more trying to fish your reaction disk (which fell out of place when you removed the output shaft) out of the clamshell.

[jlenownnab]

I will check it out in the morning, thankyou. I'm sure if the reaction disk can fall in it will.

[Captain Obvious]

Haha, right you are! Glad to help. Unless you're in a hurry though, I'd suggest you give it a day or so to see if anyone else chimes in with simpler / better ways to check for fluid inside there? Fishing that disk out is a PITA.

[jlenownnab]

No hurry here, waiting on Fed Ex. I really screwed up.... I swear when I did my 70's bushings I cut the sleeves out of Trans cross member and mustache. Now I'm waiting on  oem  bushings for mustache and I have to get cross member out of my parts car.

[Captain Obvious]

So from that, I'm guessing that you were planning to use poly and didn't realize that you need to leave the outer sleeves intact and just get rid of the inner sleeve and the rubber? If that's the case, then that's a bummer.

So, were you actually able to find new OEM style moustache bar bushings? I thought those were NLA and gone from the face of the earth.

[jlenownnab]

I got the Prothane kit, OEMS at MSA, $30 each. Trans cross member na

[Captain Obvious]

Gotcha. I thought the OEM style moustache bar bushings were impossible to find.

Good luck with the work, and if it comes to it, I've had my brake booster opened up recently and have a bunch of pics and knowledge of the internals. Short story is that I bought a rebuilt booster a little while ago and wasn't satisfied with it, so during this off season, I took my original one and the rebuilt one both apart and reassembled one good unit from the best parts from the two. And even with going through that effort, there were a couple metal parts for which I didn't have a badly corroded replacement, so I made some new parts out of stainless so they wouldn't suffer the same rusting problems as my originals.

Anyway... I hope you don't drop the reaction disk, and I hope you don't have to take the booster apart.