The last cou­ple of days have not seen much activ­ity as we have been get­ting a real del­uge here in Mass­a­chu­setts.  With no glass and trim holes all over the body I don’t dare bring her out.  Her maiden voy­age last week­end exposed a few glitches, the brake sys­tem is mar­ginal at best and we are going to have to re-bleed the sys­tem as the pedal is far to low.  The engine runs very smooth at idle but gets some­what rough and occa­sion­ally stalls when actu­ally mov­ing the car, a buddy of mine will be in to adjust that big old Rochester 4 bar­rel and smooth her out.  We also found a minor oil leak some­where at the back of the block, I know it’s not the rear seal or the valve cov­ers, but sus­pect either the oil pres­sure sen­sor or pos­si­bly the seal on the val­ley pan.  The prob­lem is both are very hard to visu­ally inspect with­out tear­ing down stuff, so I will try to inspect fur­ther with a mir­ror today before we go further.

The paint job issue is an irri­ta­tion, peo­ple are jerk­ing me around left and right, I had hoped to have it out for paint while away, but that’s not going to hap­pen.  I under­stand peo­ple being busy, but if you are not inter­ested then just say so, don’t string me along.…..  I’ll give them the ben­e­fit of the doubt for now and will not sling mud at the moment so they shall remain name­less, but if they con­tinue I’ll put it up for all to see.  I’m not look­ing for a spe­cial deal just plain old cus­tomer ser­vice, my time is worth some­thing too, and I’m not going to chase any­one around to give them my money.

Mary Lee and I will be away for 18 days leav­ing on April 6th, I’ll try to get one more update in before we leave, other than that we will be back at it the end of April.

Share on Facebook

Tweet

A day that will go down in infamy.… OK maybe not quite, but the “Gray Lady” made her debut this after­noon when we took her down off the jack stands, and fired her up.  For the first time in more than 25 years she rolled out of the garage under her own power, made a few turns around the lot and even went up and down the street (yeah I know that is a no no).  The fend­ers have been re-installed and we are almost ready for paint.  She surely is not the sparkling jewel she will become over the next cou­ple of months, but when we replace her “gray coat” and add back all of the bling she will stand out in all her glory.…

Fit and fin­ish of all of the trim will take a con­sid­er­able amount of time, body clips will have to be fab­ri­cated or pur­chased, a lot of chrome has been re-plated and a lot more will have to be pol­ished out and buffed.  While out, the power win­dow actu­a­tors will be cleaned, rebuilt and lubed before going back in and the inte­rior door pan­els may be recov­ered as we put her innards back together.  Look­ing back, I’m amazed to be where we are in less than 9 months and excited to see her look­ing some­what like a car again after look­ing at that pile of parts on the garage floor for so long…

Share on Facebook

Tweet

OK, I’ll admit I could have done a bet­ter job esti­mat­ing my costs, but the fig­ures com­ing in for paint are really depress­ing…  The first shop I talked with esti­mated the mate­ri­als alone at 3K, with labor to be much more.  We are in the range of 10K for a paint job!!  I’m not happy about that and in fact, if I put ten thou­sand dol­lars worth of paint on this car I’m never going to want to drive it.  Don’t know where this is going yet, but I do have another appoint­ment for an esti­mate on Sun­day.  Hope­fully it is going to come down out of the stratosphere.

On a brighter note, you know we are get­ting closer to the com­ing out party when the license plate arrives.  What do ya think?  Is this going to look cool attached to that 3 acres of chrome called the front and rear bumpers?  Sun­day is going to be bet­ter, I just feel it.

Share on Facebook

Tweet

   I have been busy try­ing to prep the “Gray Lady” for prep and paint.  At this stage we have removed all of the trim and badges (and there is a ton of it).  All of the doors, except the front pas­sen­ger one have been gut­ted, win­dows removed, lock assem­blies off and door han­dles removed.  This week I am con­cen­trat­ing on get­ting the front fend­ers repaired.  Way back when, we found a min­i­mal amount of rot on the lower fender tabs when we pulled the rocker pan­els, so much so that they were no longer attached to the body, they were almost com­pletely rot­ted off.

    I have been toy­ing with this sit­u­a­tion for some time.  Even went so far as to pur­chase a pair of replace­ment fend­ers from out West.  Unfor­tu­nately, while they had no can­cer, they had much sur­face rust, that would require media blast­ing and prim­ing on the inside before I could even begin to think about putting them on the car.  I felt my orig­i­nals were in much bet­ter shape despite hav­ing the tabs rusted off.  Oth­ers agreed with me and so I’ve now decided to just cut the tabs off the replace­ments and weld them on to my orig­i­nals, using both sets of fend­ers to make one rock solid pair.  So all of the fend­ers are head­ing out to the weld­ing shop today.

     Hon­estly, I had no idea that prep and paint was going to be so expen­sive.  It surely is going to put me way over bud­get on this project, final num­bers are not in yet, but they are scary already.

     Till next time.….….….…

Share on Facebook

Tweet

Happy St. Paddy’s day to all… Even if you are only Irish for the day!  Here in the People’s Repub­lic of Tax­achusetts we cel­e­brate it in a spe­cial way, but only if you are an employee of the State!  Today is the hol­i­day aptly named “Evac­u­a­tion Day”, where State employee’s evac­u­ate their posi­tions with pay to drink and party on the tax­payer funded “dime”.  One might ask, why “Evac­u­a­tion Day”, and the sim­ple answer is that as arro­gant and con­de­send­ing as our politi­cians are they sim­ply do not have the “cojones” to call it what it is.

   Spring has sprung here in Mass­a­chu­setts, it was 60 here yes­ter­day, and we are back to busily work­ing to prep the “Gray Lady” for her trip to the paint shop.  We are strip­ping her of all trim, remov­ing the win­dows and track assem­blies and hope to have her in the shop by the first week of April.  The front fend­ers are back on, and the hood will go back later in the week.

   Briefly, to recap, we now have a com­pletely re-built rolling chas­sis and once paint­ing is com­pleted, we will have her out on her first “road trip” hope­fully some­time in early June.  What a cool Birth­day gift that would be for me!

Share on Facebook

Tweet