ABANDONED Dodge Challenger Rescued After 35 Years Part 3 Suspension Rebuild

Our abandoned Challenger that sat for 35 years has finally had the engine pulled, as you saw in the last video. Now that we have that out of the way, we're going to drop the front suspension and totally rebuild it. I can see why. Oh, there's a hard spot right there. And now I'm stuck. Right in this area. There's a spot right there that's catching it, so we'll just have to avoid that altogether. But instead of dropping it out piece by piece, I'm going to actually just unbolt the shock, upper control arm, brake line, and then unbolt the entire crossmember and drop it out as one piece. That way I can assemble it all inside the shop. Okay, so with the bolts out on the upper control arm, you should be able to pry it loose and get the work out of its spot. So a side note right here, you'll see this thing actually jump off of the jack. Now, this is me making a mistake that I've made in the past and I should know better, but I got in a hurry and didn't do it. Whenever you are working on a car with torsion bar suspension like this Challenger, let's say that the engine has been removed, you do need to unspring the torsion bars, take the tension off of them, because what will happen is what happens in the video. Let's go a little more. Look at that. That's that one a lot easier. Looks like an explosion has occurred in here. Got the crossmember pretty much disassembled besides the strut rods. Everything's been torn apart. But what I want to do here, I'm not going to reuse these upper control arms. So I figured all I need is the spindles. So I'm going to take these outside, pressure wash it, and any other kind of part that I want that's got a bunch of grease on it, and completely clean it up so it'll be easier to work on, and then clean it up to paint it whenever that time comes. But I just don't want to have to mess with all this nonsense. I mean, look how nasty that stuff is. So if we can get rid of all this gunk here before we start working on it, it'll be a lot easier. So you just saw me pull out the old original pivot shaft. Not only are we going to replace that with new bushings, but they're polygraphite bushings. So these are from PST, Performance Suspension Technology, and I ordered these and I think they're going to be a welcome upgrade. Now on the Charger, I only went with the polygraphite replacement bushing. I didn't actually go with these greasable pivot shafts like they have from their online site. I actually just reused my old ones. But these are greasable, so I'll install those as well as these lower control arm stiffening plates. What they do is they'll weld to the bottom here. You see you've got your access holes to access your torsion bar adjustment bolt as well as your bump stop adjustment, or not your adjustment, but your bump stop bolt. So these will weld on and then we'll clean it up and make it look pretty nice and we'll paint it when it's all said and done. And I also got new torsion bar adjusters just to be on the safe side because those bolts are pretty old and pretty rusty. They could snap at any moment. So just to be on the safe side, we got all that. And I do have new shocks, so don't worry about that. We'll just replace those when the time comes. I'm going to weld this old pivot shaft metal bushing and I'm going to weld that to this old one here. Then you'll have to press it out going back this way. So my welds hold up. Found a new bolt. I'll weld this on there and see if that actually works. The weld kept breaking on the other one. Surely enough, it went right through. There it is. Plain and simple. Okay, I've got these lower control arm braces just mocked up. They're laying on here. I'm just going to lay a spot weld right here in the middle and then I can work my way around on the edges to make sure that it actually contours to the lower control arm shape. Go to the other side. Now we'll shape it up. You can see what I did. Just took a pair of vice grips, clamped each corner down, put a spot weld on it. That way it'll hold it in place and then I will go back and fill in all the rest of the areas. So hanging over here is our lower control arms. Now all I've done is scuffed them up, cleaned them up really nicely just so the paint will stick and we've removed our lower bushing. You saw that for the pivot as well as the torsion bar adjustment. We took those out and then you just saw us weld in our structural bracing here and my welds are decent. Not perfect, but they'll definitely do the job. So we've scuffed all that up. The reason I removed our adjustment here for the torsion bar is that I have a new one, so we'll put that in as soon as we paint it. So let's get the primer. So while I'm clearing out my lower control arms, I figured I'd hang up my inner and outer tie rod ends of their sleeves, pivot arms, idler arm, and the center link all together just so that I could clear it all at one time and get it all done. So I'll clear these and then I'll do the lower control arms as well. These are brand new from PST as far as everything but the center link is from PST, so performance suspension technology. I went with them because I use all this stuff on the Charger as well and I really like the quality of it. So I'm going to use it again. It's all just factory replacement stuff, inner and outer tie rods, sleeves, idler arm, pivot arm, and the center link like I said. So we'll clear all this and then just keep it from rusting because all this is going to turn to rust if we don't because there's no coating from it when they send it to you and I spent a lot of time cleaning up that center link and I wanted to make sure that it didn't rust again. So I did this with the Charger and I'm really impressed by how well it held up. So once it's all finished, I'll show you what it's supposed to look like all together because this is not the configuration it's meant to be in. So while we wait for the paint to dry on the lower control arms, we're going to press in our pivots into our new polygraphite bushings. Quick note, you'll notice that I put a bolt, this is actually an old bolt from the old pivot, onto the end of the threads so that way while I'm pressing this in, I'm not going to damage my threads. A little bit of WD-40 makes it go a whole lot smoother. Okay, we'll do this to the other side and we're done. So what makes these new pivots from PST pretty neat is that they are greasable on the end. So you've got your grease fitting right here and all that does is throw it in and then you can see these little channels. I don't know if you can tell, focus on that for you. You can see the little channels, the grease will go down through that and there's actually holes. So here's the one I haven't installed yet. You can see these holes and that's where the grease is going to come out. So it'll actually fill in all of that because on the factory one, we don't have that. So that's just going to help with wear and tear and make sure that it's going to last a lot longer. So finally, we have pretty much what is almost a complete front suspension that's been repainted and I'm not going to brag, but I got to say it looks pretty good. So let's go over what's new and what's being reused. So the biggest piece that we're reusing was our factory crossmember. So all I did was sand it down, then paint it with primer, two coats of black, clear, and I did that with pretty much everything that I painted besides the stuff that I left natural, but we'll go over that in a second. And I did not change the strut rod bushings because I will be going with adjustable ones. So I just left them in there for the time being. Up front, you'll notice this massive inch and a quarter hollow sway bar that that's from Hellwig. So that's new. We've got our factory control arms and you saw me weld in these stiffening plates as well as adding in new torsion bar adjustments. And I forgot to order bump stops, but I'll do that too. Painted those. We've got drill slotted rotors from Power Stop. These came from Rock Auto and factory style calipers. And all I did was clear coat them with two coats of clear. We've got tubular upper control arms from PST as well as the factory spindles, factory caliber brackets. So all that I just repainted. And then we have a lower ball joint and that came from PST as well as the stuff that we got back here that I'll show you. So right here, we've got the original center link attached to a new Pitman arm, a new Idler arm. And then on each end, I have inner and outer tie rods with a sleeve and everything but the center link came from PST because the center link was factory. And then I reused these dust shields, just repainted them. Made it look pretty nice. So for shocks, we're going with the KYB gas adjust. I went with these on the Charger. I really like the way that they handle. They're not over the top firm feeling, but they do offer a lot of stiffening and a lot more drivability as far as an old car goes. So factor in stiffer sway bar and stiffer riding shocks. This thing's going to handle like it's on rails and that's what we want. So we've got stiffened up lower control arms, tubular uppers. So a lot of stuff is going in to make this thing handle like a new car. And that's really what I want. That was a goal with this thing. So we're going to stop, go, and handle just like a new car should. And that's what I really want to get out of this Challenger. It's been sitting for 35 years. And there's the basic assembly for the suspension, at least minus the steering box and the brakes and the upper control arms. But you got to get the idea. Obviously, we need to get alignment when we get to that point. Just had them threaded out so I could bolt everything together. But you can see our spindles meeting up with our tie rods, our lower control arms. Steering box will go right here whenever the time comes. And then what I like to do is actually put the upper control arms in the car because I think it's actually easier to do it that way. If you go ahead and just do it like this when you're putting in the car and then have the upper control arm lower into the spindle, I just think it's easier to do it like that. But before we do all that, we'll get the steering box in. And then when it's mounted, we'll put all of our brakes on. It's just easier, again, to do it that way. I don't want to scuff up my rotors sliding across the ground. So we'll put all that on. And then the sway bar will have to go on after the fact because we have to have at least some kind of load on the suspension. But you can kind of see a lot of that hard work has finally paid off. This is a lot of countless hours of scraping and cleaning and sanding, painting. There's a lot of work all in the suspension parts right here. Don't get in a hurry because you will get irritated because there's a lot of tiny moving components that need to be fixed and cleaned up. But once you get it all together and back, it really pays off. And I'll be honest with you, looking at this all assembled really makes me excited to see this back in the car. And all of our front suspension and crossmember and brakes will go into the car in the next episode of the Abandoned Challenger Rescued after 35 years. So that's going to do it for today's video, guys. We got a lot done to the car. We totally ripped out the front suspension, tore it down, cleaned it up, and then we added in some really cool upgrades that I'm excited for. So in the next episode, we'll actually put all of this back in, including our new brakes, everything. We'll put it back in the car. And then after we do that, I think it's about time we tore into the original 318 and figure out why it was stuck. I'm really curious, and I know a lot of you want to know what happened. So in the next video, we're going to be tearing down the original 318. But that'll do it for today's video, guys. If you enjoyed it, please leave a like down below. If you have any questions for me, feel free to leave a comment. You can also send me an email at the very end of the video. Order your t-shirts and your stickers. Don't forget, we've got the new Challenger shirts coming out, guys. It's a pre-order, so go to my website. The link is in the description. Go pre-order your shirt for the Challenger. I think it's a pretty awesome shirt, and I'm excited for it. And I hope you guys really enjoy it. So as soon as we get a certain amount of orders, I'll go ahead and send them all out. But I just want to thank you guys so much for allowing this series to go so big and do the things that it's doing, because it's amazing. It's really shot up the channel here in the recent couple weeks and months. And I'm really excited about what's going to happen in the future. And I hope you guys enjoy what's going on with this Challenger. And we've just got a whole lot more to go, even though we've made a lot of progress. But it's good progress. I'm excited for it. So like I said, guys, I hope you enjoyed this video. And again, we'll be tearing into that 318, installing our suspension, and hopefully getting this thing back on four wheels. So that's all for today. Thank you again, and I'll see you in the next one.