Body's off!!!

I don't know if this will be of any help to anyone out there, but I thought I'd show how I got this thing off. It wasn't as simple as I had first envisioned, but it's done and this is the process I went to in order to get the job done. I had originally intended to lift it with my engine hoist. After all, I'd seen it done on You Tube and it worked for him, right? One of the potential issues with the engine hoist method is, when you get the body high enough, the ram comes in contact with the door, the body rests on the ram, and any further attempts at lifting gets the body all akilter. I wasn't worried about skinning up the door because I'm going to paint it again when all this is finished. However, the engine hoist couldn't get high enough to be able to roll the old chassis from under the suspended body, even with the wheels off and using a set of car dollies under the brake disks. An additional problem was, the rear of the body is quite a bit heavier than the front, causing it to tilt to the rear on the hoist, which also didn't help. So, I thought I'd slide some four by fours between the frame and body, lower the body onto them, and jack the thing up high enough to get the chassis out. It didn't take much of that before I chickened out. I had to raise it higher than my jack stands would go so I started putting them on blocks of wood. It soon occurred to me that, with this method, I was just begging for trouble. The body had to go up pretty far to clear the old suspension under the 4/4s and it has no engine. The new chassis has the engine in it and, by the time I got the thing high enough to clear that, it would be way too prone to tipping over. Then I came up with the idea of pulling it up from supports above it. I bolted 4/4s to the rafters on the four corners, tied them together, about six inches below the lights, with 4/4s front to back on the sides, hung heavy duty ratchet straps from them, attached the straps to the 4/4s I'd already put under the body, and began the process of systematically raising each corner. That worked. The wood, bolts, and ratchet straps weren't all that expensive. Here are some pictures in case my explanation is as clear as mud.