JKEY

Hello Everybody,

I picked up this 62 Impala 4 door hard top over the weekend. Currently it has a 283 and a powerglide, 4 wheel manual drum brakes, etc. The 283 has been messed with a little by somebody over the last 61 years, it has an old quadrajet on it and an HEI distributor. I may mess with it for a while just to have something to keep it running while I get the cash built up as I go along.

You may have noticed, I titled this thread "A New Dad's Build". 6 weeks ago today, my wife and I had our first child, so as many of you know her and our daughter are by far the number 1 priority. Parts will be purchased as cheaply as I can find quality stuff, and will happen a little at a time. I'm guessing this will be a 5 to 10 year project all in, so if you are looking for a project to follow that will be done in a few months, that's definitely not what I'm working with. This isn't my first project, or my first LS swap. My dad and I built my first car when I was 14, and a couple of years ago we built '68 Chevy which we put a 5.3 into. I'm familiar with the territory.

Anyways, back to the Impala:
The car is incredibly solid for an $800 car. The pictures for once actually make it look worse than it is. The floors are rock solid, the trunk and most of the wheel wells and such are solid as well. When we looked at the car the trunk literally had water standing in it from recent rains, so we quickly popped the drain plugs out when we got it on the trailer. Both rocker panels are basically gone, the passenger side quarter panel is totally shot, and the drivers quarter needs a little bit of patch work. The passenger side doors have a few small rust areas in them, but I'm hoping I can get away with patching them instead of having to totally reskin the doors. The frame is totally solid, but needs 62 years of dirt and grime knocked off of it. The hood is rusted through in several spots so it will get replaced along the way as well. Parts and pieces will come with time, as it is I have a ton of cleaning up, sanding, painting and such that I can keep myself busy with.

In terms of the swap, my idea is a 5.3 with a 4L80, built to probably 450hp or so, plenty to get the ol' girl moving but not anything stupid. After all, this is going to be a family cruiser. There are plenty of salvage yards around me, so finding what I need won't be hard at all, just gotta get the funds built up. Here are a couple of photos of my new muse.

G Atsma

Congratulations on your new family member!
First a cool fact- a stock 5.3 will clean your present engine's clock by a good shot.
For what you want to do, a slightly warmed over 5.3 with a mild cam and a healthy 4L60E will move that car smartly
5.3's came in 1500 series pickups, Tahoes, and Subs, and never came with 4L80E trannies as they came only behind 6.0 engines.
A 4L60E in good shape is healthy enough to handle this load. They live under Suburbans and Tahoes for 200+k miles all the time.
Your budgetary considerations drive my remarks above.

JKEY

I have decided to just get the 283 and the power glide out, and go with a 5.3, 4L60E combination. The 283 was going to need me to spend some money on it that would just be a total waste when the time came to swap it for the LS.

Along with this, I am working towards getting the body off of the frame so that I can be thorough with getting the underside of the body, and the all of the frame cleaned up. Here are a few progress pictures from this last weekend. As it turns out, only 4 bolts were holding the passenger side fender and wheel well on, however the driver side had all of the bolts, and I ended up having to cut all but 2 of them. The driver's side fender has some rust in the lower section, but I believe it should be fairly simple to just patch it. Both sides have rust damage on the rockers and supports, so I will be going through getting that all fixed as well. The next step is to get the interior all cleaned out so that I can take the front and rear glass out to avoid cracking it when I lift the body off of it. So far I have spent nothing more than a few hours labor, and $75 for new locks all the way around. I wont worry about putting them in yet, but I ordered them before I decided to take the body off.

I have good Friday off, so a long weekend with nice weather will hopefully allow me to get the fuel tank out, the interior all out, and at least get started on getting the body mounts, grounds, and glass out. I hope to have the body off of it by the week of the 16th. I'll probably start cutting out some of the cancer from the rockers as well to see what is or isn't behind it and to get a game plan for how to fix it. As with any 4-door build, nobody makes a full rocker replacement, so it will be a trip down to the local farm store to get some metal to fix them up at some point.

I quickly realized that even at 24, sitting behind a desk all day has taken a toll on my physical shape. I was a bit sore for a couple days, but I'll take it as a way to get a bit more active than before. Here are a few more pictures from the aftermath of this weekend.

Project GatTagO

iTrader: (7)

Some of that frame rust looks pretty bad...But I love the 4 door!

Andrew

JKEY

It definitely has some cancer, but luckily the floors, including the trunk, and the actual frame itself are in really good shape. I'm pretty certain everything associated with the rockers are going to need to be replaced or patched, but the floor supports are all solid as well, so I am hoping that I really don't have to get too overly deep into it to get all the rust out of it.

JKEY

I was able to get the interior completely out of the car this weekend. Unfortunately the floors, and more importantly, one of the braces, was a little bit worse than I was expecting. It is nothing that scares me, but it slows down my timeline for getting the body off. I don't want to risk tweaking anything, so I will have to wait on that until I can get all of the floor and bracing metal work done. It is no where near the worst I have worked on, but it needs a bit more than I was expecting it to.

I think the bigger win for the weekend was getting all of the rats/mice/squirrel nest materials out of it. The seat frames all look to be in good shape, but of course the covers and foam are all destroyed. There are some guys local to me that I plan to have redo the seats, so I am glad the frames are in good shape. Something is kind of wonky on the slider for the front seat, so I will have to look at that, I'm guessing its just old springs not quite standing up to the task after 60 years. The bolts for the front seat all came out easy, which was a blessing. I don't know that I would have a tool that could have gotten to the bolts to cut them if I had to do that.

I picked up some Rustoleum Stop Rust primer and paint from the local hardware store. I figure I'll get the good parts of the floor all cleaned up and see how that goes. I have always used POR15 in the past, but the last time I used it, I was unimpressed by the job it did. I am hoping the Rustoleum stuff works well as it is a bit cheaper and I can get it from the hardware store in town. I'm a firm believer in leaving as much original metal as I can, so I will be patching the bad spots instead of doing the the whole pans.

My wife has been after me to give the ol' girl a name. I've never named one of my cars before, so I'm not sure where to start. Anybody have any ideas?

Enjoy some rusty pictures!

JKEY

Well its been well over a month since I last updated this thread. Admittedly, not much has changed as I have been busy finishing up my night classes for the semester and have had several family related events going on the last few weeks. Anyhow here is an update. Since the last time I updated this thread, I have spent quite a bit of time, and gone through several harbor freight cutting disks getting started on rust repair. I started with removing the passenger side front pan section that I needed to replace. Admittedly I thought that would be a pretty quick cut, trim, and replace job, and it grew. As I had suspected, the entire inner and outer rocker panel of the passenger side needs to be replaced. I started with a small section before changing gears to work on the whole rocker panel assembly from the front to the back. I have to do it in sections as I rarely have the time to dedicate to doing the whole thing, and with the car being outside, I don't want to leave anything overly exposed for any longer than I have too.

Pictures of the floor, patch, and the inner rocker. Honestly, its worse than was expected, but I'm just going to keep on trucking with replacing it all. Luckily the rockers for this car are basically flat steel, so aside from a few trimmings here and there, its all basically flat.



I cut this piece out of a good section of the hood. I haven't cleaned it up yet as I am not ready to put it in.

This what I found once I trimmed out a bit more of the floor. Lots of rust.



An example of what is left of the rocker panels.




From here, I spent some time working on fixing the most inner portion of the rocker panel so that I would have a solid "zero" point of sorts to build everything else off of. Don't judge my welds too harshly, all I have is a 110v harbor freight welder. Its all thoroughly stuck, and I'll grind it all down nice and smooth before the floor gets put back in. I'm planning to do the remainder of the inner rocker from the outside of the car to avoid having to remove anymore of the floor than absolutely necessary.



Last weekend I had a few hours to myself in the shop, and I decided I wanted to bite off a piece of this elephant that I could have done in the few hours that I had. The first thing that came to mind was the passenger side lower fender mount. I've included pictures of what the original one looked like once I cut it off the car. Lucky for me there were easy places on the car to reference for positioning and straight cuts. I didn't weld it back on yet, as there is a lot of metal work yet to do behind it. This time around the welding worked much better, granted I was welding on much newer, cleaner, and thicker metal, so it was a lot more forgiving to my lack of talents. I was pretty proud of myself for how this turned out. I'm sure someone with more tools and expertise than I have would have cut the shape as one piece and used a brake to get the angle, but I don't have access to a brake so I made it work. Its not perfect by any stretch, and I still need to add one small bracing piece to the inside side, but I'm happy with it and the angles, and measurements all look to be correct, which was vital to getting the front end to line up one day.








I started working this week on what goes behind all of that and becomes a brace up the toe board. Through some trial and error I have the shape that I want, but its not done, and no where near picture worthy yet. I'll of course update again when the time comes. I'm always learning when I work on these old cars, whether its the history of how they did it back in the day, or how to make a cheapo welder do what I need it to, or what kind of "tooling" I may have that will give me the results I want. It's all part of the fun for me.

cl08

iTrader: (5)

I have a question, you think its possible to pull the passenger side fender with the bumper still attached?
Love the crew cab impie!
Here is my 62

Parker Lewis

Great progress so far. It takes time, so keep up the good work. And that photo of the mice/squirrel nests.....I can smell that photo through my computer screen! Any of us that's ever come across those nest know that smell instantly.

JKEY

My car didn't have the bumpers on it, but in looking at how they go on, I think its possible. The way I did everything was to take out the headlights, and work my way in from there. Most of the bolts come up from the bottom so that should help you, but I had trouble with most of the nut plates spinning on the top side. Some of them I was able to soak with WD-40 and get on with a pair of vise-grips to hold in place, but several of them I just had to cut the bolt heads off because I didn't have a way to get to them on the topside of the wheel opening. I would definitely say its possible, and assuming the bolts all come out easily, probably not too terribly difficult.

JKEY

Thanks! My wife just about lost her lunch the first time I opened the door and picked up the seat to show her the nest. Needless to say, I was on my own for getting that cleaned out!