Week #116

Among the best looking areas on high end restorations are wheel wells with new, properly textured undercoating. I have always wondered were this great looking undercoating material could be bought. It surely wasn't the stuff you bought at the car parts store in the big spray cans... I've used that before and although it does the trick, it just wasn't that pebble grained coating that looked so good. Enter my body guy Tim. He's been applying this stuff for years and could hardly wait to share the source and the know-how to apply it.

Apparently his only source is a vendor who kinda travels around. He catches up with the vendor from time to time but hadn't contacted him in a while. I was ready now. Being the great guy that Tim is, he let me take home his remaining stash along with the special applicator gun. He gave me a couple of pointers about "shooting" it and sent me on my way. It only took a second of spraying on a scrap piece of metal to get the idea of how it laid down. It was going to be no problem to get the desired texture I wanted. after a little time spent taping up around the wheel wells and a small bit of planning I jumped right in spraying the rear wells. At first I was going to avoid any "overspray" of material outside the wheel well, but I decided to continue with the "factory" theme.  I purposely hit the frame rails a bit more than than they were being naturally hit just to drive home the effect.  With the car being on the rotisserie, getting material evenly coated everywhere in the wheel house was no problem.  My only concern was in letting the goop built up too much in any one spot allowing it to sag... luckily this didn't happen.  The rear houses turned out beautifully if I do say so myself.

I was planning to do the front wheel wells on this same day but after studying things up front I decided to hold off until I could gather some reference material on just where the coating went and what was "masked" from being coated.  The insides of my fenders were never cleaned of the original undercoating so I plan on just hitting these areas with some black paint.  The wheel side of the inner fender will take a bit more research.

Since the rear wheel wells were now coated I thought that this might be a great time to install the gas tank.  I pulled all the gas tank related parts down from where ever they had been stored and laid them out for review.  These new parts included the tank itself, the support straps, J bolts and special correct nuts, pick-up/sending unit with filter sock and pad for the top of the tank.  After installing the sending unit into the tank I positioned myself under the car to install the whole deal.  After one test fit it was clear that the straps needed some major bending to even come close to allowing the tank to seat properly.  After several bends all seemed to fit but due to the fact that the car was as high as it was on the rotisserie, I just didn't have enough hands to install the thing by myself.  My nieghbor buddy Jon wasn't home so I had to come up with something.  Then it dawned on me... you dumbass, the friggin car is on a rotisserie... turn the friggin thing upside down!!  I had not had the car completely upside down before, there had never really been a reason, having the bottom vertical was all that was ever required.  I loosened the rig up and rotated the car enough to where the tank would at least not fall off giving me enough help to get it installed.  This was the answer and the installation went smoothly.  I then installed the vent lines that are mounted at the top rear of the trunk and lined up all the hard lines with the "ports" on the tank.  The vent lines come with some tubing and clamps to connect to the tank.  I cut these to size and put them in place but I need to find the correct pliers for securing these special clamps.  I will need these pliers as I will be using these clamps throughout the fuel line system.

As far as I was concerned, the car did not need to be on the rotisserie any longer.  I spent the next hour or so transferring the car back to my dollie attachments and returning it to the ground.  I will be putting the rotisserie back up in it's storage area and who knows if I'll ever even use it again.

Before calling it quits I installed the rear axel bumpers that mount to the inside of the arc at the rear frame rails.  I have new reproductions along with the original bolts.  The repops are nice but not exactly like the originals.  The originals have some ridges molded into the rubber that are missing on the repros.  My originals aren't really bad and I may try to bring them back to life.  If they clean up really nice I may swap them out.