3 years later...

The HG wagon at a club event 

Has it really been 3 years?

Shortly after my last post in early 2012 I purchased a HG Premier wagon to replace my ute. This vehicle became the primary focus for several months, getting it up the scratch, both in appearance and reliability to become my new daily driver. It's actually pretty nice to drive, and looks awesome from a few feet away. Up close the paint is old and patchy, but it's a cool machine. 

New tie-rods and ball joints
can be seen here.

Anyway then I got sick. Pretty much all major projects were put on hold until I got to a better place with my health which took a couple of years. The Corona sat still gathering dust supported on axle stands as I'd taken all of the front end out.

2 weeks ago I was cleaning the shed and suddenly decided to get back into it. And a busy fortnight it's been! Back in 2012 I'd had the control arms rebuilt, new pivots, bushes and ball joints. Given the rarity of parts it ended up costing over $700 for the four of them, mainly because the pivots were so hard to come by. So I re-installed these, rebuilt the front brakes with new cylinders and cleaned them up. The shoes are still at about 60% so I refitted them after a clean. New tie rods, idler arm, and sway bushes and after a grease up we were back on the ground after 3 years!

Bootlid repaired.

In between this I had been attacking the body work. You may recall I had some 'pinholes' in the chassis rail. Well as always this was actually worse than it looked, and I had a friend weld them up with new sections installed. He also welded up a split in the engine bay, and some mild repairs to the guard. A swipe of body filler and the guards are pretty smooth.

All of the doors have pin holes in the corners. I've treated these, but I've chosen the fill them, rather than cut and weld. Only one of them I think would warrant a cut and weld, but at this stage I'm looking to get it back on the road and looking neat. It's not a concours resto.

Tomorrow I will start the pre-painting rub down. Once resprayed I'll refit the motor and gearbox. The gearbox was rebuilt back in 2012 by the same person who did the diff, probably unnecessarily now in hindsight. The rebuilder told me it'd gone on for another 10 years like it was, worn from age, with 1960's tolerances, but serviceable. I still got it completely rebuilt, so there's probably 40 years of life in it again.
The motor however, I'll probably just do some gaskets and give it a clean. A compression test was done when I bought it, with readings over 130 on every cylinder, so it's probably unnecessary to pull down. I might get the head redone for unleaded later down the track, but just dose it with lead replacer in the mean time.