Corvette Has Nuts!

While I fixed the door, my friend had removed both front upper control arms and changed their bushings and joints. We also cleaned and painted the parts now that it was easy. They had accumulated quite a lot of mud, oil and other sludge during their life... Lower control arms would have to wait until later because their removal is a bigger job and would leave the car unmovable for at least a week. We couldn't do that in the garage as the car needed to be moved out after weekends and evenings.

We also started the rear overhaul by removing the driver side trailing arm. And holy shit was it hard! We had to heat the bolts red hot and burn the old bushings to get it out. When we finally got them off the car, we cleaned and painted the parts, installed new bushings and used new bolts to put the car back together. Changing the bearings was not possible at the time as I had forgot to order shims.

We also tested and installed some of the new electrical parts. After installing the headlight switch, it seemed that all the lights worked. Some bulbs were broken but at least we seemed to have working wiring. Boy were we over optimistic...

I also installed new vacuum relays for the lights and some new vacuum hoses. After this, the lights did raise but quite slowly. Especially on the driver side. Possibly the actuator there was leaking so I ordered a new sealing kit for it.

Oh, and we also noticed that the locking mechanism in passenger door was not working. If you closed the door, it was really hard to get it open again. I took the lock home and seemed that someone had had the same problem. The locking mechanism was bent so I straightened it. On its own it seemed to work fine but when put back in the car, it still didn't work no matter how I tuned the mechanism rods. Eventually I had to buy another used mechanism to get the door open normally.

Oh, and the nuts. While I was going through the "trunk" of the car, I looked through the rear wiring harness hole and saw something. I started digging with a wire and found these:

Seems that some American Chip 'n' Dale had used the car as a nest :) Luckily they had not chewed through the wiring...