Wire Brushing Some Wheel Parts

This week I started by installing the new bolt for the K-member. Here is a picture of the new bolt and washer:

Here is a picture of the original bolt:

I painted over the other four bolts on the K-member, however it never occurred to me I might want to check to make sure they are properly torqued. So after installing the new bolt I torqued all six bolts to factory specs. I will now need to touch up all six bolts with POR-15.

After the parts Sara painted were completely dry, I took them down from the ceiling and boxed them up until I am ready to reinstall them. Sara did a great job painting these!

This shot is purely for reference. These are the strut tower brackets. They are not marked left and right, so this picture illustrates the driver side and passenger side, respectively.

On both Wednesday and Thursday night Sara's dad came over to help wire brush some of the wheel parts, including the control arms (A-arms) which he did a wonderful job on. Thanks Dad!

Below are pictures of the parts we brushed clean Wednesday and Thursday night:

Today after work I removed the torque arm.

This required removing two bolts.

Here is the torque arm once it was out of the car. This is ready to be wire brushed and prepped for painting.

This is where we left off painting the drive tunnel. Notice the layers of grease and dirt that need to be scraped off.

This is looking down the drive tunnel. You can see where I did some test scraping on the driver side.

This is a picture looking from the drive tunnel under the passenger side.

This is a picture looking from the drive tunnel under the driver side.

These are the two heat shields that are mounted above the catalytic converter. I removed both of these this afternoon so they can be cleaned and painted. 

The larger of the two heat shields has a bent corner which I will need to straighten before painting.

After experimenting with several different methods of attacking and removing the crud from the underbody I determined I needed a bigger wire brush with a larger surface area. After dinner we went to Menards and picked one up. I plan to try my new brush out first thing tomorrow morning.