[whateverpratt]

The goal for day 1 was the rear axle swap. It went well. The goal for day 2 was the removal of the front suspension crossmember. I didn't know how involved this would be, and one of the biggest questions I had was whether or not the engine mounts would hold the 350 up without the support of the crossmember (though I had this vague memory that I had read somewhere on here that they would be fine).

We removed the wheels, the front shocks, the old manual steering box (last year I hit up Captain Fab for his power steering box bracket as well as his hydro boost brake brackets since I kept the power hydraulics off of the C30), the idler arm, the brake lines, and then we went to town on the crossmember bolts. There are 3 bolts on each side that vertically secure the crossmember to the frame, and one bolt on each side that secures the motor mount to the crossmember (the other to bolts for the motor mount bracket mount to the top of the frame). Some of those bottom bolts took quite a while to remove since we were leaving everything in place.

Once those were removed, we had the 4 bolts on each side that horizontally secure the crossmember to the frame. The bottom two enter from the frame side and screw into the square nuts that are welded onto the crossmember, and the top two are actual nut and bolts. Lots of wd40, pb blaster, and especially wirebrushing any exposed threads that were able to be reached helped us to not break any of the bolts (all of the old bolts were grade 8, so that helped too).

Then we lowered the crossmember with a jack, and dragged it right out. It really wasn't that bad if you are patient with some of the hard to reach bolts.