The New Project: Part Deux!

[njsteve]

Started working on the car today after being away on a trip. Attempted to get her registered since the forms from Customs finally showed up. Of course once I got there, the DMV lady said I have to contact their headquarters on Monday, since the car is coming from a foreign country. (Of course that advice was completely different from what they told me the last time I was there a couple weeks ago when they said I needed the Customs form to complete the paperwork package.) [img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/rolleyes.gif[/img]

I replaced the leaky valve cover gasket and got the horns working (it was a disconnected wire at the relay - solved that one pretty easily). Click on the photo to hear how she sounds at the moment.

[Xplantdad]

Nice...I love the Pontiac exhaust!

[njsteve]

In today's &quot;Give A Mouse A Cookie&quot; update, it all started this morning with me taking the rear seat out to fix some of the wrinkles in the seat cover. I pulled the back seat and set it in the 80 degree sun for an hour to soften up. Since I wasn't just going to sit around for the hour, I pulled the other seats out...and then the carpet...etc.

Anyway, I had a bag of hog rings so I adjusted and pulled and remounted all the new seat covers till 90% of the wrinkles were gone. They must have been installed in the Canadian winter and ended up being too loose on the seat foams. It worked out very well in the end.



The upright cushions are done, the ones lieing flat are warming up.

[mockingbird812]

Very nice Steve. Good ideas!

[napa68]

Looks great Steve. I've got a friend who purchased a steam cleaner a few years ago. The heat makes ALL the difference.

Tim

[njsteve]

I tried renting a steam cleaner: they wanted $275 for a day rental. Thats cazy! So a friend loaned me his pressure washer and the wife loaned me the washing machne hot water line for the day if I promised to do my own laundry after I hooked the hot water back up. [img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/grin.gif[/img]

[markinnaples]

Nice work, as usual. What is your plan once you get it all cleaned?

[njsteve]

Going back together. The first repairs on the horizon will be the frame rail sections that need to be attended to, then once the repro trunk dropoffs arrive I will have the inner quarter rear portion sectioned in to replace the homemade boxed dropoffs that were installed on the car in the 1980s, so it looks correct. Paint is much farther down the road. I will be driving this one for the summer. [img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/grin.gif[/img]

Of course while everything was out of the car, i noticed the heater core was leaking on to the pass floor, today. I ordered a new one this morning and the interior will wait til that gets done. Glad it happened now and not after i put it all back together.

[njsteve]

Today I tackled the trunk area. This car was Ziebart rustproofed back when it was new and that stuff is nearly impossible to remove. Solvents just smear it. It's almost like roofing tar and it's about 1/8&quot; thick. A different, and thicker, but equally adhesive version was over-applied later, on the GM replacement quarters and tail panel that were replaced in the 1980s. The hot water seemed to work but VERY slowly. Like around 5 seconds of close up blasting to remove one square inch. It was mind-numbing and carpel tunnel initiating to say the least.

Here's the before shots:

[njsteve]

And after about 6 hours of blasting.









I tried to save as much of the original splatter paint but in some spots it came off very eaily while in other areas, it was hard as rock. The Ziebart stuff worked as the only rust I found in the trunk floor were the four tiny pinholes in the lower right of this photo to the left of the drain plug. The rest of the dark areas are due to the surface not being completely dried off yet.