Six Months Later

Post date: Jun 18, 2018 1:27:00 AM

A long silence because the car finally went to the body shop - Ward's in Krum, TX. Nearly done, should be home in a few weeks!

The color is the 2015 Corvette blue, PPG 935602. It's real pretty. They got the body work done pretty quick - only used small patches on the quarters and managed to hammer out the huge dent in the left quarter. So now I have a complete quarter panel I need to get rid of. They did have to cut out and re-do the door handles. They said we made a decent attempt at it, but would've had too much filler.

Otherwise I've been prepping for the interior and catching up on projects around the house.

The "assembled" door panels didn't include any of the trim pieces. I threw away one set of door panels, but thankfully the set I had were usable. Still had to do a lot of sanding and polishing to get the stainless looking decent.

I also built the ashwell panels myself. I closed over the ashtray hole, THEN remembered that's where I was going to hide the trunk release. We'll see what happens.

Also sewed the door pulls myself. That was surprisingly slow and difficult. Overall probably 8 hours of sewing across 4 or so attempts. Went through quite a bit of vinyl.

Got two package trays from Year One. The Dark Blue was pretty good but I didn't like that the vinyl was such a different color than the Legendary seat covers. I ripped it apart and Shaun stitched together a long piece and sewed it to the tray. Fingers crossed the seam is centered!

And here's another example of what you do when your parts are worn, parts aren't reproduced, and good old stock is hard to find:

On the left is an old door mechanism. The cars with the backing plate had extra-long shafts, which aren't repoped. In the middle is what you can buy - new mechanism with standard shaft and crank extenders. But then it's far too long! On the right is what you end up with. Shortened short shaft plus shortened and re-drilled extender. Also had to clearance the shaft so the setscrew had a good surface to bite. Should Work Just Fine(tm).

Also painted another batch of interior bits. Took about 1.5 qts of paint

Only have to re-do one part.........

Also got most of the exterior trim powder coated in semi-gloss black by a couple of young guys working out of their house one neighborhood over! Good price, but the finish was a little orange-peely. I sanded down the B85 trim since that's going to be so apparent but I think the rest will look good. Of course I burned edges a few times so the guys got a bit of re-work from me. At least I got to spend quite a bit of time hammering, filing, blasting, sanding and polishing trim. Then realized that it needed to be rough for the powder to stick so everything got blasted again...... At this point the only things staying shiny are the headlight trim and the bumpers. We'll see how it looks.

Also got the windows tinted with some IR and UV blocking 50% stuff and put new defroster grid on the rear window. Got it straighter but still had two bumps. Replaced most of the hardware on the windows, including ordering a neoprene rubber sheet from Grainger's - only 1/10th the cost of buying the "reproduction" insulator. Same thing with the window guides and sweeps - buying the material directly was amazingly cheaper than buying replacement parts. Also got the electric front window kit from NuRelics with the fancy switches. Looks like I can drop in a couple of relays and do a little bit of rewiring and lower the windows from my remote!

Learned some good stuff about window sweeps. Restoration Specialties makes the best stuff out there (Top Catwiskers) and actually have the right stuff for the 70-72 supreme with B85. Several folks don't carry those. So ordered them. The outside ones fitted just great. Then I got the assembled door panels from Legendary and they had some incredibly terrible sweeps on them. So had to yank those off. They're installed with staples through 18ga steel...... At the shop they use a giant stapler. When you're doing it at home you use a drill, pliers, screw drivers, c-clamps and a lot of cuss words. Because it has to be in juuuuust the right place or it looks horrible. The door panels went pretty well, but the quarter panels took a few tries due to the bends. Restoration Specialties also makes (makes!) weatherstrip so I ordered the last few bits I needed, and the plastic window blow out clips. It's the small stuff that takes forever.

Ames is also the only place that carries the seal that goes between the roof rail and the roof. That took a lot of searching. I'm 90% certain it's just normal house weatherstrip but didn't want to guess on the dimensions.

Then there's the seals at the back of the quarter window. It's a Supreme-only thing. No other a-body does it quite like the Supreme apparently..... I eventually found the outer seal at Fusick - and ONLY at Fusick, so they charged appropriately. The inner is similar to a seal used on the Chevelle. The seal itself is the same, but the Cutlass uses 3 clips instead of 2 and they're in different locations. So you just buy the Chevelle seal and modify it, right? Yeah, except those clips are only meant to be installed once (again, through 18ga steel), so their hooks break more often than not. I was able to fashion retension hooks out of some flashing. What's a few more hours making semi-custom stuff that no one will ever see?

Also picked up a bunch of stuff from the Sound Deadener Showdown guy, carpet, door panels and rear seat cover from Legendary, and odds and ends from Ames (only place with a full selection of seat belt covers!) and Fusick.

I had 6.5" 2-way speakers in the door but they're going to be within a hair's breath, if not actually hitting, the stainless trim. So I picked up a 5" component system and will sink the tweeter into the a-pillar cover. Then it appears that all my speakers and my head unit got stolen from the garage. At least I haven't been able to find them after many searches, and those aren't small items........ My sound deadening plan will isolate the trunk so the sub probably won't be very useful. Not sure what I'm going to do about that but it's far, far better than trying to include the trunk and quarters.

Still hunting and pecking on front seats. Leading contender is Procat's Ralley XL. Runner up is the 04-06 GTO seats but they're hard to find at the cheap yards. All of DFW only has one and the interior was already stripped.

Upshot: looks like all my recent just-in-case purchases (windlace, trim parts) were worth it. I'm using mostly parts I've picked up.