{"id":94716,"date":"2024-02-09T07:04:59","date_gmt":"2024-02-09T15:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/?p=94716"},"modified":"2024-02-09T07:04:59","modified_gmt":"2024-02-09T15:04:59","slug":"setting-up-shop-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/setting-up-shop-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Setting Up Shop Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Wayne Scraba breaks down the best way to organize your shop for a major build. <\/h2>\n\n\n\n


Plenty of folks envision themselves building a car from the ground up. It\u2019s easy enough to grab a mental image of assembling perfectly polished chrome and stainless trim onto an equally pristine, beautifully painted body shell. Unfortunately, reality often has a way of crashing head-on into visions. Before you can get to that perfectly polished chrome and stainless (not to mention that perfectly painted body shell), you have to somehow arrive at that point. That means plenty of hours of sweat, dusted knuckles and \u201cdirty\u201d tear down labor (not to mention dollars). It also means you\u2019ll be faced with a need for space to pull the car apart.

Now, there have been articles and even books written with the premise you can simply take a piece off a car, restore it or rebuild it or modify it, put it back on the car and move on. It\u2019s piecemeal build. But the reality is, you\u2019ll never attain the same results as you will with a comprehensive \u201cbody off build\u201d.

To do that comprehensive body off build, what you need to do is to establish a functional workshop and simultaneously set up a spot (or more than one spot) to store pieces. Of course, a huge, fully equipped (and nearly empty) shop is perfect for this, but plenty of us just don\u2019t have that luxury. When the accompanying photos were taken, I was in that same boat. We had downsized and as a consequence, I moved away from 1,000+ square feet of dedicated shop space to a basic 24X26 two car garage (but hey, now I\u2019m back to a dream 1,100 square foot shop and a 3,000 square foot Quonset for storage, but that\u2019s another story). Part of that old garage was occupied by my old hot rod Buick Regal. As a result, things were a wee bit crowded. Now, I\u2019ve built cars in plenty of different environments. And some of my favorites actually came out of a crammed one car garage.

When space isn\u2019t a problem, there are probably no hard and fast rules for tearing down a car. Yank the engine and trans, take off the exhaust system, drop the gas tank and you\u2019re a long way into the tear down. For crowded garages you have to take a different approach. Here\u2019s my order of business for a complete tear down in a small garage:

(1) Remove front sheet metal & bumpers
(2) Strip luggage compartment
(3) Remove and strip doors
(4) Remove exterior trim
(5) Strip interior (except for instrument panel and steering column)
(6) Remove remaining side window glass
(7) Remove wiring harnesses
(8) Remove cooling system & heater
(9) Remove exhaust system & brake lines (service brakes and park brake)
(10) Remove engine and transmission
(11) Remove fuel system
(12) Strip balance of car

The reason I use the above process is it leaves the car as a manageable \u201croller\u201d for the longest possible period of time. If I need to push it outside so that the doors can fully swing open, it\u2019s easy enough. In fact, it also leaves the car more or less operable for a relatively lengthy stretch of time. This system allows me to peel off and deal with the big sheet metal pieces first without tripping over the engine, transmission and other bulky (and usually heavy) hardware that by nature, must be stored on the floor. Once the steps are finished, I end up with a rolling chassis that can either be stripped further (and bolted to a rotisserie) or simply rolled onto a trailer as-is and taken to a body shop. Either way, the above twelve steps keep my workspace \u201cflowing\u201d.

For more, check out the accompanying slide show. And stay tuned! In our next issue, we\u2019ll lay out even more things to consider when \u201csetting up shop\u201d. Watch for it.

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