Happy New Year! Hope the holidays found you and your families all well.
I thought things would have progressed a little more consistently at this point but it's been one battle after another with the tedious. Think you have all the parts?....think again ......and back to trying to find them and wait for them to come in. The devil is still very much in the details.
After getting all of the window regulators rebuilt with new rollers and installing the glass, I find out (the hard way) that the aftermarket rollers are not really the correct ones. The after market rollers are just a plastic wheel very loosely fitted on a rivet. The originals were a two piece design that had a wafer washer in the middle to take out the slack.....and it makes a huge difference on how the windows fit in the channels and ride along the way. I finally found someone who makes them for early Corvettes (and of course, Corvette prices!) so, out the windows came again to re-do all the wheels.
After doing the windows (twice), the door skins went back on (again) and time for the final fitment of the door gaps and fender. Another tedious job but all the work put into adding material to the doors to get the gaps right as well as bringing the surfaces up level with the fenders and quarters to make the car flat.....was alllll worth it.
Thought I had a better picture but this was the only one:
And just for more fun.....the skins came back off to do the final glass adjustments to the weather strips (that was a HUGE job to get it all to fit right and ride ride....glad that part is over). Another good thing about the door skins being removable; I just left them off for now which keeps them from getting scratched while moving around the rest of the car!
When I had originally pulled the front trim off the car, I rebuilt and polished/ painted everything before wrapping it up in brown paper and storing it in bins. At this point, I thought I would just be un-wrapping everything and putting the front end back together....nope. What I forgot was that about 90% of the original hardware didn't hold this together. I had everything in there from machine screws to sheet rock screws to body bolts holding it all together originally. went back through the original body manual and figured out all the original hardware so I could put it together correctly.
Again, not much is made for this car aftermarket wise. My front chrome was in pretty decent shape outside of some usual pitting and wear and tear. I cleaned up all the chrome (I use 0000 steel wool and Mother's Mag Polish) and re-sprayed the dull aluminum in-between the grills. What I also forgot about was some of the broken cast pieces that I said would fix at a later time.....well; now it's later.
The headlight assemblies are pot metal and have stud mounts in the back that attach to the inner fender well. They are notorious for snapping off as there is not much supporting them. I had originally tried re-attaching them with JB weld but realized that not only did I not grind the chrome off first but there was not much support there for them to begin with (they snapped off again pretty easily).
Wanted to try and re-assemble with Muggy Weld but didn't want to chance ruining the chrome with the heat and have to get them plated. I improvised with some stainless washers for where the base broke off, aluminum angles for support with machine screws, ground off the chrome and back to the JB weld. It's not pretty but it's working well and mostly hidden behind the grill.
Still waiting for more hardware to arrive so haven't been able to get the front end assembled just yet.....
Switching gears to the rear window- there's a heavy pot metal ribbed molding that runs along the bottom of the window. It has studs that go through the body and held on with cut-nuts......for the life of me, I cannot understand the use of cut-nuts on pot metal. One little turn and the pot metal is stripped and your screwed....literally.
Got pretty luck on this molding, however. The studs were about 1/4 inch diameter and tampered at the end slight. Perfect fit for a 1/4-20 tap! I used some cutting fluid and gently cut the studs (hoping the studs would not snap off in the process). Boom! worked great and left a small shoulder at the base for going through the sheet metal (shown with a bead of dum-dum prior to assembly).
I used a thick stainless steel spacer washer for the base (to clear the shoulder and provide support agains the body when assembling) as well as a stainless barrel nut to spread the stress over the entire stud when tightening.
The molding went on flawlessly. The nuts also gave me just a little more torque to suck the molding into the body and squeeze the dum-dum tight. Would not have been able to do that with the original cut-nuts.
And it's pictures like this that keep me staring at the car and not getting more done!