Week #121

I did nothing for 3 weeks after a simple medical procedure the first week of November and then followed that up by doing nothing for most of December. The holidays are all but over and I'm back in the shop to get something done.

I started a couple of project subassemblies that needed doing. One was the mounting plates for the headlights and all related hardware and the others were the splash shields at the rear of the front wheel wells. The splash shields have turned out to be an embarrassing little lesson in "research before you jump" thing. I'll get into that later. The headlight mounting plates were a much more rewarding chore.

These plates are some of the few original parts on this car that could be used so I was going to make every effort to try and use the parts if at all possible. All of these parts were layered with some form of corrosion and were in line for whatever I could do for them. My decisions for what got what coating were as follows... the plates themselves I initially painted a gloss black but later deduced that they must have been bare steel originally with just the blacked out coat on the front. Every one of these plates that I have had have been badly deteriorated. Anyway I left the gloss black coating on the rear of the plates but gave each one a good coat of a flattened black on the front to mimic the blacked out look on the front of the radiator support area. The tension springs and screws along with the long special adjusting screws were targeted for zinc plating using the Eastwood kit. Although a bit tedious and time consuming when doing a pile of screws, they came out perfect. Finally the screws that hold the trim ring around each light along with the bolts that secure the assemblies to the car would be blacked... again using an Eastwood kit. The only other items in this subassembly were the 4 "bowls" that each headlight actually mounts to. These parts are stamped galvanized metal and have that very distinct galvanized pattern in their finish. Not wanting to disturb this finish I once again turned to using the crushed walnut shells in the blasting cabinet at a lowered pressure. Although it did remove a small amount of the galvanizing from the back sides of some of the "bowls", the walnut shells came through again by cleaning the crud from the parts and leaving the original finish.

For those keeping score, cleaning the 4 galvanized "bowls", cleaning and plating/coating the small pile of screws, spraying the fronts of the plates and polishing just one of the headlight trim rings took 5.5 hours with no goofing off. Now you know why it costs a gazillion bucks to have a resto shop do this work.

The splash shields have been quite the patients tester... no ones fault but my own. The issue has been with the rubber material that clips to the top edge of these shields along with the weather strip that clips down the sides. For some reason I had in mind that these soft parts were not available anywhere. I think this might have been true 2 years ago but I never bothered to take a look for them now. I have spent so much time and effort cutting the upper rubber piece from material that I felt was close... and locating correct looking clips and fasteners... and trying to find a suitable replacement for the weather strip. Well after all that I think to try a search for these pieces and see what I find. Right off, Year One has the upper rubber pieces... not that I would spend $50 for them in a million years... but they had them. So I keep looking. I find a place that not only has the upper pieces but have the uppers, the correct weather strip and all correct mounting clips! Granted I haven't actually received them yet and won't know for sure until I do but if you knew how much time I put into that stuff you'd be pissed for me. I don't want to talk about it anymore...