Body Meets Chassis

This was an exciting day, we were finally about to see the body on the chassis that we had planned for years at this point. After many projects and interruptions, we were finally making progress, and this was some really visible progress.

Up, Up, and Away

The first step was lifting the body off of the rotisserie. The hardest part was finding the right way to lift the body, the height of the rotisserie and the length of the arms of out 2-post lift were working against us. Once it was in the air, we marked approximately where we might need to cut more. At this point, we didn't want to cut too much, because it's much easier to cut twice.

Once the body was in the air, we slid the new chassis underneath. The chassis has the same mockup engine that we used to mock the LSX454Runner previously as the actual engine is in pieces waiting to be rebuilt. As we began lowering the body, it became clear that we would need to cut more than we had already.

We kept lowering the body to get a better idea of where we needed to cut and how much. At this time we found that we needed to cut the ears off of the rear of the chassis. We believe the chassis must have been made for a later C3 corvette because the rear bumper mounting points and the gas tank crossmember mounts are different than the original chassis.

Measure Twice, Cut Three Times

We marked more and more areas to cut and started to cut them, then checked them again and cut again. We dropped the body almost all the way and realized we needed to cut most of the transmission tunnel all the way out. This left us with a big hole in the rear that we expected, and another big hole in the front of the floor that we weren't really expecting. The main cause of this was the engine sitting relatively high, and the engine sitting centered. This put the torque tube very high and too far to the driver's side. The stock engine in a C3 sits, I believe, about an inch and a half offset to the passenger side. GM did this for the benefit of the weight offset and to save room to fit a big block in the cars. We removed the C5 engine mount bushings which are fluid filled rubber chunks, and placed a block of aluminum under the mounts and offset the engine about 3/4 of an inch to the passenger side and about 1/2 of an inch lower.

Now we were able to get the body all the way down to just about sit on the frame, but before we let it all the way down, we lined the body up as well as we could. This isn't the final install, so we were just trying to get everything close enough to get a good idea of the wheel placement and clearances.

The Body has Landed

We placed the new body mounts and finally set the body down. Our next step was to lift the body and new chassis into the air and inspect the clearances and positioning of everything from below.

With everything looking good, and nothing obviously wrong underneath, we lowered the chassis to sit on the ground without any dollies underneath. This was a neat sight, the car is much lower than I was expecting, but it looks like the ride height would actually need to be even lower. Regardless, I was really happy with the way the car was looking already.

With the tentative placement of the engine, we wanted to see what the intake would look like. After placing the intake in place, we also wanted to check the clearance for the hood. We just placed that in situ, but did not get any pictures unfortunately.

After we were satisfied with the body on the chassis, we slid the car out of the way of the lift.

The next steps will be to try to get a plan together for the floor in the rear, the wheel wells, and the transmission tunnel. Quick measurements say the seats will definitely not fit right now. The front of the transaxle is much further forward than I was expecting, so that presents a big problem. I have seen some cars that cut down the front of the transaxle, which might be the direction that we have to go. That would have to be after the body comes off again.

Until then, enjoy some glam shots of the car on the chassis.