During Blazer Bash it became obvious that I was getting some pretty significant body flex. Not really a big surprise considering it is a first gen with no cage and a body lift, but it made a lot of noise and I decided I needed to see what I could do to fix it.
Obviously a cage is what is really needed, but I don't have the tools (bender) for that at the moment, so I'm going to tackle low hanging fruit first. Mostly this will just be tightening all of the body mounts and checking the bushings, but while looking around underneath, I realized that I never got around to reinstalling the back piece of the torsion boxes. They've been left off since I painted the truck over 15 years ago.
Luckily I still had them kicking around, but they were very rusty and needed to be cleaned up. I wanted to get them as rust free as possible so I decided to give electrolysis rust removal a try. The only out of pocket cost was a $4 box of
laundry soda from walmart, so why not? I used some old rebar I had laying around to capture the rust and used by battery charger for the power.
I gotta say, the results were impressive and easy to do.
In the above pic you can see the initial results. You can see the line where the top of the part was sticking out of the water so still has rust. The rebar was rust free when I started so you can see how much was removed from the parts. There was some sort of undercoating on the torsion box ends so that part is still black, but all of the exposed metal was nice and clean once the process was finished.
I left them sitting in the water over night, then flipped them over and left them in another night. That was probably overkill since most of the rust was gone within a few hours. Once the parts were rust free, I hit them with primer and repainted them and got them installed.
I wish I could say the rest of the under carriage was as rust free as the box ends, but it's a start. I did have 2 bolts that were broke under the passenger side that I couldn't get out, but hopefully I still got enough extra support out of these that it'll quiet the body down some.
