[njsteve]

I also started working on getting the grill in place because I got tried of seeing the toothless grin of the purple mobile every time I opened the garage.

That was a little more involved than I thought. The reproduction grill is a great piece, in and of itself. It's the stupid stuff that "soiled my good mood" (a quote from the now framed, two page critique written by my then 6 year-old daughter concerning the behavior of her 1 year old little brother). The headlight buckets have two small Philips head screws that go through two holes in the outer perimeter. The screws go through the headlight buckets and into two white plastic inserts that snap into the inside of the fender edge.

First the headlight buckets don't fit because the inserts are twice as long as they need to be and won't let the headlight bucket even get into place. Then, once I sawed off half the height, the headlight bucket would actually go into place. The new problem was that the predrilled holes were about 1/4" away from the actual inserts. Not even close. So I pull out the headlight buckets and look at the hole. On the back side of the headlight inserts is a small raised, reinforced area where the hole should be. Now how frikken hard should it be to actually drill the mounting holes in that exact spot like the original buckets had, versus just randomly drilling a couple holes within a 1/2" or so???? Oh, and of course they were kind enough to include four chrome bevel headed Philips headed screws that were the size of something you would attach decking to your back porch with. If actually used, they would have instantly shattered the plastic once they were tightened into the much smaller countersunk hole in the plastic. Therefore, I once again went rummaging through my buckets of bolts and found the correct sized, tiny, bevel headed chrome screws for the buckets and used those instead.

So I had to drill new holes and then fill the old ones in the recently painted buckets. Luckily I had some leftover sparkley paint from the shaker. Once that was done, the grill bolted up nicely. The only finagling was to remove the two front bumper bolts so the elastomeric bumper could be lowered a couple inches to allow the grill to clear without scratching the paint.

I was also able to "adjust" the factory hood pins to clear the holes in the hood. The hood pin mounting flange is a separate bracket on the front of each fender edge, inside the engine compartment. They are painted with the car and not really adjustable. Even though the hole in the mounting plate lines up with the hole in the hood when viewed from above, the pin itself pokes up through at an odd angle which doesn't work. So I used the old factory "adjustment" method. I placed a 1/2" deep well socket over the hood pin, attached a 12" extension to the socket, and gently bent forward just a hair. Voila, the two pins aligns up perfectly now! And the pièce de résistance was finding a pair of original 1970 flat, hairpin, hood pin clips in my box of old emblems in the closet. (same place I found the 340 emblems!)