Friday, July 29, 2011

Restoration tip: Prepare complete sub-assemblies

When doing a restoration some things are immediately obvious and others are obvious once they have been pointed out a first time. I believe that the latter applies to this tip. The tip is to prepare all of your assemblies AS COMPLETE AS POSSIBLE in preparation for future installation. This includes all the hardware down to the smallest detail. There are three main reasons for this:

1. It reduces the number of stray parts awaiting assembly that can become lost.
2. It allows for better visualization of built assemblies
3. It allows time to source out missing hardware

Expanding on the 3rd point, you would be amazed how much time is lost looking for hardware during re-assembly. It is the #1 reason for loosing momentum and really slows a project down. By preparing sub-assemblies with all the hardware, the final assembly will go much faster with less stress all around.

Here is a photo of the steering parts all prepped and ready to go. Before this photo was taken, the parts were scattered over 6 bags with no real feel for how the finished assemblies look. Now they look just like the parts diagram and will install in minutes.


2 comments:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 3, 2014 at 10:52 PM

    Aren't the steering rack mounts and nuts originally yellow Zinc ?

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  2. Dino 246January 7, 2014 at 9:33 AM

    In our case the nuts were clear zinc without any doubt. We inspected the original ones under a loupe to confirm this. The early cars used much less yellow zinc than the later ones so you will find a lot more yellow fasteners on an E series Dino and almost no clear zinc on a 308

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