Beginning to look like a car!

Record rains continue and summer heat will arrive this next weekend. Meanwhile, though not accomplishing much of importance, I did finish color sanding and cutting with compound and buffer. I'll wait to polish after it's running and ready to hit the road. Also finished a few visuals of body and trim installations. Both bumpers, along with the rear wings are now in place. I had planned to leave off the rear bumper guards, but if I do, the point where the wings attach to the bumper look unfinished, so for at least the time being, the guards remain.


Installed the trunk latch and release button along with the trunk seal. Looks like I will have to further slot the adjustment screws to make the trunk fit tighter.

The grille is in place and adjusted. That involved a lot of tweaking, but it came out okay.


Door handles also work fine so I should be able to glue in the seals. I will have to make some hinge adjustments on the doors as I'm not satisfied with the way they fit.


The hood paint job looked really bad so I'm working on it again. It apparently suffered hail damage at some point and despite a lot of leveling and sanding, there were too many shallow depressions visible while sitting behind the wheel and looking over the hood, so it's back to blocking with a long board.

As posted a few months ago, the hood really should have been replaced with a better one before even starting to repair it.

I finally created a tool to make it easier to attach the door-window frame cat whiskers to the stainless steel trim parts. Now it now takes only a minute to clamp the parts together and drill holes for the staples to fit. Trying to use the original hole staple locations was a big pain and very labor intensive, and I wasn't eager to use pop rivets.

Both doors will be ready to install the power window hardware as soon as the re-chromed window frames are done. No word from the plating shop yet, but I didn't expect them to be done this soon.

Not sure what to use to plug the holes for the door locks, but will probably just install the unused key receptacles for looks only. If I eventually decide to install locks, I'll use solenoids and hidden buttons or a remote.

I'll probably work on the headliner next. It needs to be in place before I can permanently install the "flipper" assemblies above the doors. I need to decide what method to use to attach the fabric to the sheet metal as the stock flexible vinyl molding is not reproduced and the original is in bad shape. The shell will have to be propped in place so I can try out a few ideas for mounting before I order the fabric.