Just a slight update to the suspension.

The donor pieces are now clean and in process of paint and powder coating of which they are nearly done in fact.

I jumped the gun a bit on the suspension update. I had some pics of removing the ball joints and such I thought I'd share. Again there's loads of ways to get to this point, just thought someone might find something here useful.

Turns out all the front upper and lower control arms still had the factory ball joints in them (riveted). I will say this, the mechanical portion of the ball joints still were tight and no loose spots, however the boots were old and deteriorating. If I remember right from this cars logs, the upper bushings were replaced sometime in the late 1980's but even those were deteriorated. I have all new parts for these sooooo it all comes out.

First thing for me is to get the 50+ years of grime off it. That's just me though, I hate getting dirty.

So here are the rivet heads, if drilling them out, vs chiseling, is your goal I would strongly suggest drilling from the ball joint heavy flange side. If you miss off centre the worst thing that can happen is you hit the ball joint flange rather than the control arm.

Plus even though you truly centre punch the swaged rivet head those heads aren't centered over the rivet body. You can see that in the next couple of pictures.

You can use a hand held drill for this, but as I was feeling tired I let the drill press do the majority of the muscle.

When the swaged head of the rivet pops off from drilling I used an air hammer to slug the rivet out the other side. Easy peasy.

Here you can see why it's important to drill into the ball joint flange. I centred the drill on the rivet heads and they were off centre to the body, had I drilled from the other side I would have drilled into the control arm itself, and that would be poor workmanship. As these ball joints are going into the bin, who cares.

If you stick to a solid plan the process goes smoothly and quickly and there are no problems and frustrations to creep in.

The only bits left are removing the shock retainer nuts and pressing out the old bushing. The bushing presses out in the same manner as the rear lower control arms posted above in this thread.

The uppers are dismantled in a similar way, on these since the heavy ball joint flange is atop the arm, you would want to drill from the top in order to save drilling into the arm itself.

This is only a 30 year old bushing and it's absolutely had it.

  The parts are slowly getting there. As for hardware it's easier to replace the generic bits, however the specialty OE hardware is blasted, blackened and stain clear coated. The new hardware that isn't stainless also gets satin clear coated.

I chase the cured powder coat off the threads on the arms and pieces. Kind of tedious, but needs to be done. I also touch up areas on the arms where powder doesn't work into (Faraday effect) with satin black paint.

Now for these threads, I had to buy a die for this size and thread pitch. For something like this there are different grades of dies, and this is an inexpensive maintenance die as it's just cleaning off the paint.

And the white trash wind chimes are nearly done. These I had to paint (POR15) satin black as they are too big for my dinky powder coating oven. I do plan on reusing the old bump stops as I have found, in at least the upper reproduced bump stops, are in fact rubbish. The rubber tears right off if you're putting the suspension back together with no load (body or engine) on the chassis and it bottoms up.

The only part I need to order is the bushings for the panhard bar. There is no common replacement listed at the chain stores or Rock Auto. However Energy Suspension sells generic bushings that fit it.

The bushings I use are Energy Suspension's P/N 9.9106G. The only caveat is you have to use your original inner sleeve. There is also a 0.2" gap in the middle of the housing where the bushings do not touch as these are the closest bushings I can find. But since they are polyurethane and harder than rubber this shouldn't be a problem that and all other dimensions are the same as the originals. I used these on the '66 LTD track bar.

If your inner sleeve is unusable you can order 0.75" OD - 9/16"ID tubing from McMaster in 1 foot sections and cut what you need to make your own sleeve. They sell it in stainless and Chromoly.

UPDATE : Dec 10, 2019

This project is discontinued. The wifey wanted a rat rod originally and this was to be it. However she fell love with a ratty old 1979 Dodge W200 Power Wagon club cab and is her new rat rod. This LTD will be used for parts and the rest taken to the dump. This of course was the original purchase intent. This will be donating its rust hole free frame to my 1968 XL fastback. It has already donated its disc brakes for the wifes 1966 galaxie 500 XL.

Cheers.

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