The car isn't back on its wheels yet, but things are getting closer.

I did manage to get the original engine block and transmission bolted back together, set in the frame on their mounts, with the rear suspension bolted back in and run up to normal ride height, in order to measure the position of the engine relative to the frame, firewall, driveshaft/pinion angles and so forth in order to be able to position the new one.

The 520 shortblock arrived. Unfortunately, the trucking company apparently managed to put a forklift blade through the crate, knocking the engine off its blocking and out the back side.

Not a pretty sight...

The blade appears to have clobbered the top of the #4 bore - the block is shot, but the rotating and reciprocating bits look okay. More on this bit of nastiness as it develops.

The control arms (original '64 uppers and junkyard '62 lowers) went for powder coating and came back. Joe at Custom Alignment pressed the '62 bushings into the arms for me. I then realized, in trial-fitting the parts to the car in order to measure the spacers needed in front of the control arms, that I'd be better off using rear bushings in all four locations - the shell diameters and lengths are the same front/rear, but the inner bore of the rear bushing is larger at 7/8" - since the lower arm pivots are all in single-shear I'm using all new aircraft-grade bolts and the heavier the better.

Another round of Four-Jackstand Monte and the frame is back out from under the car. This afternoon I wheeled it out into the driveway and flipped it over using the engine hoist, then hooked up the $40 Home Depot sandblaster and began to blast the weld seams along the bottom of the frame rails. Learned a few things in this process:

• Sandblasting is messy, and I need a better mechanism of containing the resulting beach.
• The welds on the frame are pretty ugly, and the 30-grade sand Home Depot sells is a little too large to easily get into and clean paint from the pockets and holes in the welds.

So at this point the underside of the right-hand frame rail is mostly done, but I've only just started on the left side. In the meantime, I'm making a portable blasting box from a cardboard U-Haul moving box - a notch cut in each side to allow me to position it over the rail and on top of a steel drip-pan, a sheet Lexan window in the top to see what I'm doing, and some thick plastic bags to act as seals around the rail and hand-hold gap.

I purchased a 500XL console off eBay; it was cheap enough, but I'd never seen one out of a car before - the thing is immense. It's usable, but somewhat rusty, and missing various little bits. I'm currently awaiting arrival of the latest eBay scrapings: a $100 US Gear/Strange 3.50 ring-and-pinion set (reputedly brand-new) and a $127 9-inch nodular carrier. Plus shipping, of course, and shipping a 9-inch carrier cross-country costs a few bucks.

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