58 Cadillac Update

   Pre­lim­i­nary inspec­tion of the inte­rior showed us that the car was com­plete though it had some issues.  The white vinyl, black cloth inte­rior looked less than stel­lar and we had decided that we were going to just tear it all out and re-upholster every­thing.  The vinyl on the seat­ing areas and door pan­els was show­ing what we thought to be mildew stains and spots and there surely was an odor of mildew through­out.  We felt the vinyl was dete­ri­o­rat­ing because it actu­ally was sticky to the touch The head liner had a large tear and will be replaced, the dash and dash pad show no dam­age at all and the seat­ing fab­ric showed only 2 small tears.  The trunk inte­rior is in rea­son­ably good shape with the orig­i­nal car­pet, spare tire and jack­ing instruc­tions still intact, though it has a strong mildew odor

   With a few hours to kill I fig­ured I might as well try to clean the inte­rior to get some idea of the results we would be able to attain.  If noth­ing else, worst case it would give me a chance to bond with my new baby and best case it might actu­ally shine up like a dia­mond in the rough.  Well, the results can only be described as spec­tac­u­lar and even that can­not really describe the trans­for­ma­tion.  I sup­pose being in the fab­ric clean­ing busi­ness may have given me an edge on this project but I have to say the end results exceeded my expec­ta­tions by a fac­tor of ten!!   Hon­estly, there is still soil there, you can’t clean out 50 years of wear, tear and envi­ron­men­tal deposits in one clean­ing but we are now con­fi­dent that we have stopped any fur­ther dete­ri­o­ra­tion from occur­ring.  Not only that, we may have saved our­selves thou­sands in refur­bish­ing costs.

   Totally psy­ched and not ready to quit yet, I decided to put in a bat­tery and power up the elec­tri­cal sys­tem to check it out.  Imag­ine my sur­prise that after two and half decades of sit­ting there most all items were func­tion­ing.  Power door locks all func­tion with the excep­tion of the rear pas­sen­ger door which is stick­ing, all power win­dows run up and down though are going to need some lubri­ca­tion and the dash indi­ca­tor lights appear to be func­tion­ing prop­erly.  The horn sounds, power anten­nae runs up and down with ease and the radio not only works, but sounds great, includ­ing the won­der bar floor switch.  I made no attempt to roll the engine over, that will come later after we have had some time to eval­u­ate its condition.

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