Bear Patrol's Blog is back baby!

Well, I've officially put off blogging about the car for long enough. After working on the car tonight, I realized I haven't posted anything about about 2012 build, and worse yet, nothing about our first results. Being that I've been such a slacker, I'm going to group some of the work together, since I can show beginning to end work, rather then just saying we did this on this weekend. First off, thanks to my lovely fiance for being understanding of the time required to build and maintain this car. And also, thanks to all that helped work on the car, you know who you are (yes, I'm too lazy to type them all out). Our big project for this year was refreshing the suspension of our 1992 Lexus SC400. Thankfully some online places like www.lexuspartsnow.com have online diagrams, or at least they used to, and better pricing then dealerships. We were also lucky to find an SC400 in the local u-pull yard, so we got lots of our spare parts for cheap. Lets get started, if this was the good, the bad, and the ugly, we didn't really have any good, except for air tools and WD40.

Needless to say, things weren't as they were supposed to be. We're pretty sure this is residual damage from our Road America 2011 crash. Once we got the bolt out, we quickly figured out why it was so hard to get out of the hole...

Yeah, Jeremy's a little perplexed by the whole thing.

It was also quickly apparent just how far gone our right front wheel bearing was.  Notice the top steering knuckle with the nice shiney gold colored hub nut.  Then compare to the dark, burned looking one on the bottom steering knuckle.  Not good.

Next on the way out was the rear subframe and suspension.  It didn't come out quite as easily as we thought, and it was a big heavy b*tch.  Hence my salutation to it.

As you can see here, we now have more then 2 spindles and hubs.  We got lucky with the junkyard find, so we picked up some extras.  You can also see the beginning of our lower control arm rebuild.  Gotta love integrated ball joints...

The hatred with the rear suspension continues.  When just unbolting stuff isn't good enough, get out the grinders, and make sparks.  We were planning to replace all the hardware, with new, unrusted pieced, that were actually adjustable, so we just went to town on the old ones.

And of course we won.  All the various control arms came off, the rear hubs were disassembled, and the axles were pulled.  

The bare subframe is ready to head down to Northfield.  My dad sand blasted away all the rust, which was much nice to work with.

Before sending it for the sandblasting, we had to weld up some patches for rust spots too.  Next time maybe we won't start with a northern car.

Got the rear differential apart for inspection, and apparently we forgot to change the fluid 2 years ago when we got the car.  Hawhoops.  Man did that stuff smell.  So we went and picked up a "new" one from a local junkyard as well.  It was easier then trying to replace bearings.

And the first parts to get the clean treatment were the aluminum rear upper control arms.  The ball joints tested out fine, so we just cleaned them up with a wire wheel, and preserved the fancy shine with some glossy clearcoat!

After sandblasting the "new" rear differential, we got to painting it as well, in hopes of preventing future rust.

Okay, I lied, this is all I'm writing tonight.  I'll try to get another update with more info some time in the next 6 months.  ;)