Vannin' Home Forums General Discussion Readers Rides Chopped 77 dodge van

well this is a good tec tip that i should do in the body work thread .
Surface rust removal ..
The front end was exposed to the front of the garage leaving it more exposed to moisture . There fore was a bit more rusty .
Anyway today i grabed a bottle or Naval Jelly and Rust Mort to tackle this Job .
Funny thing was i ran all over the jersey shore looking for the Naval Jelly in boating shops when Home depot had it all along .


I DA the heavy rust off ..

then i apply the Naval jelly and let it do its job for 10 to 15 minuts .

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I take a scrubby and a fine wire brush to agitate the more stubborn areas .
after a rince you have this ..

you apply more Naval jelly and work the unclean areas


Then you rince it well and let it dry then coat it with rust mort .


this is what you end up with you let it dry and it will make a coating that you clean off brfore paint work with water it make a film that portects the metal when dries .

It looks a lot better!

That's incredible. I had no idea that navel jelly worked like that. Cool!

Thanks Guys for stopping in ..
Next im reaching out of my technical skills ability and Designing a cantilever shock system for this Van . Since the air bag takes the place of the original shock placement i have to relocate it . And as with Dodoge they have a torsion bar that bolts to the bottom control arm that pretty much gets in the way of everything when you try to relocate the shock . FOr get using the front the steering is in the way . So i order up specail shocks and hardware today so i can start mocking everything up .
You can see in the photo i made a wooden cantilever a bit over sized for fitment .( it will be made of steal once im done fitting )
The shock will run parallel with the frame and i'll use one inch tubbing with heim joints from the control arm to the cantilever . I hope this will give me the clearence i need to get shocks back on this van .



Note * round bars in pics are to help guage clearences

here are the custom shocks i ordered . They Have a 5.25 stroke and are the HQ series from RideTech

Those are cool! Engineering ways to make stuff work. That's where the fun is...!

Ok Moving forward .. I went out to the garage and started to try to figure things out and really didn't paln on doing much due to the high humidity . How ever i was a bit worried if any of it might work so i pressed on making a steel version of the cantilever . I didn't have the right thickness of plate steel laying around but i had to start some where .
The tire hit the wood Buck and i had installed the bump stop to make sure i had the right clearence.
1) In order to make this work i would have to build out the bottom control arm (BOXED) for the 5/8s bolt as i need 3.5 inches of clearence for the torsion bar.
2) I need to make the cantilever a 1/4 inch thinner Just to be on the safe side of the tire clearence .
If im successful this Idea just may work , if not i have a plan "B".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rclImq5Uew&list=UUn38FfS2zHePBE9TlsiXHhQ&index=1

You see the cantilevered shocks in some IRS setups. Should work great. Running them back underneath the body?

I need to think about this. My first thought is that you lose the purpose for the shock using this concept.