Pretty productive day today on the car. The black rivets came today so I was able to get things rolling. First, I have to complain about the rivets. They are GM specialty rivets I picked up from TheClipLink.com. They look nice, but the paint chips off very easily – at least the paint on the first box of rivets did. I will probably go over the first rivets I used later with black touchup paint and make them look a little cleaner. The 2nd and 3rd boxes looked alot better, though.
Anyways, before riveting any panels to the frame you need to put down some silicone sealant – incredibly messy stuff, and it gets over everything. Don’t sweat it though, because once it dries you can just ‘rub’ it off easily. Today I set and riveted the front and rear splash guards, front and rear inner wheel wells, lower radiator tray, and finished up the footboxes. Everything is extremely solid. I used a 2″ spacing anywhere I am riveting to the frame, and 1.5″ when riveting to another aluminum panel.
Once the panels were set I mounted the front suspension – it is useful to have two people for this. My coilover mounts for the lower arms are on backorder, so mounting the coils will have to wait for now. The steering rods that connect to the front suspension are about 3/4″ too long so those will have to be trimmed. This is typical and mostly everyone has to do this. The suspension install is pretty simple and straight forward – just make sure the lower arm cam bolt washers stay in their ‘grooves’ on the frame so you can torque the bolt down to its tighest fit. You can do the footboxes before doing the suspension too, even though the manual has you do the suspension first – you can still get a wrench in there to hold the bolt to torque it to spec.
Next up is the rear suspension, riveting the engine panels, and radiator install.