Sweet! My jug shipped!
Well I got some more time to work on my car at work the other day and I decided to take apart the windshield washer jug to see where it was leaking. Unfortunately there was a big ass crack along the seam that would be pretty hard to fix. I had heard that GM actually still made these things for my car (weird) so I ordered a brand new one for $20 shipped. Nice!
It said the part was “on-order” and could take 7 days to 2 weeks before it SHIPS! But I just got my tracking number! Woo hoo! I bet no one has ever been so excited over a jug! Ha ha!
Work in progress…
There’s a kind of an annoyingly hectic joy that comes with restoring a car and trying to drive it at the same time. Although I don’t really consider what I’m doing a restoration. Just fixing stuff. Add random weather in the mix, and it’s a wonder I get anything done on the car at all! If I had a garage it’d be a little different story. But for now I have to take over the warehouse at work.
I think I’m getting close to the halfway point on this little project. The board is out. The old fabric and the foam is out. I still need to get the sail panels out and get them stripped. Then just need to do a little repair to the board and start gluing the new fabric on.
Here’s some pics as of this afternoon:
This is all the old foam. Yummy. Some of it was still in pretty good shape beneath where the sun visors are. The original color of the foam is kinda a banana yellow. Apparently after 22 years of heat and humidity, rotten orange is the color it becomes. Quite crumbly.
Here’s the actual rigid board that the old material was on. It’s all scraped and sanded and just about ready for the new stuff. It’s a material similar to the rigid poster board you can buy at Wal-Mart or what not. It’s got a thick paper glued to each side of a stiff foam. Some of it has deteriorated around where the seatbelts go to the roof. I’ll patch it up enough to give the new foam something to stick to, and the molding should hold it all in place once I get it back together.
This is what my car looks like right now, hehe. Wires everywhere! You can see the sail panels by the rear window that are sagging a bit that I still need to remove and recover. It’s the usual chaotic destruction that I drive around with for a while when I’m working on these kind of projects. Luckily (usually) when I get it all put back together it looks better than before. Let’s hope that’s the case this time.
I’ll be out of town this weekend going to Andrea’s nephew’s 1st birthday party. So the project is on hold until then. But hopefully early next week it’s all done and ready to go. Next update when she’s done!
02.28.07It’s nice to have a project again.
Well a few weeks ago I ordered new headliner material for my car. It’s just been sitting in my office at work because it’s been so friggin’ cold out I didn’t feel like messing with it. Last thing I need is to be cold and frustrated working with brittle plastic. NOT a recipe for success! But today was beautiful so I took it upon myself to get started on the project.
Like most of the projects I do what I dread the most is usually the easiest and what I think is going to be easy inevitably leads me to cussing and breaking things. While the trim around the headliner popped right off, the dome light was held on by one screw and three washer clips. Gimme a break! Why would you not just use four screws? You saved 2 cents per car to ensure that no one could take the dome light out without destroying those clips? Thanks, Oldsmobile. Thanks.
But I got it all apart. It’s old and crumbly, that’s for sure, but there’s some fresh new material waiting to be glued to the board I pulled out. And behind that board. For some weird reason someone taped the final factory build sheet to the top of that board. So this sheet has been riding around in my roof for the last 22 years!
Click to zoom in.
This sheet lists every option that this car came with (which is a lot!) and also mentions that the car was built in Linden, New Jersey and shipped to Grainsfield, KS. Kinda neat to find a little tidbit like that tucked away somewhere so random.
I’ll try to remember to get some pics of it torn apart tomorrow. It’s quite the mess! And I’ll be sure to post the finished product!
10.25.06A lil’ history.
Well, this all started probably a month ago when I decided to take an alternate drive out to Hays to visit Biebs. I decided to take Old Highway 40 instead of boring ol’ I-70 the whole way. It was a really pretty drive, and a lot of old downtown areas. There were also a lot of old stone buildings too. Outside of Junction City, I drove by an old schoolhouse. I remember as a kid, driving up to Sabetha, and when we’d get close to Junction City, Mom would tell us to look off to the south and you could see her old house, and that it was an old stone church.
I thought for sure this was the place!
I was wrong. But hey! In my defense, it’s not like I had ever seen the place before! I had been talking to Grandma on the phone for a while and she said it was further down the road. About 6 miles from Junction City. A couple days later, I got some pictures in the mail of the old house.
I think I recognize those pillows!
And I also got a few pictures of family.
So armed with this new information and a rare sunny day, I set out to find the place as it exsists today.
The guy that Grandma sold the house to, Lyman Budden still owns it. I got to talk to him a bit, and he’s a pretty interesting guy. He put the addition on the front. Said he pulled it in on a trailer with a pick-up truck, backed up the the house, then let the air out of the tires of the trailer to set it down and hasn’t moved it since! He said he bought the house back in the day for $10,000. Now the road that heads up to the house is a paved path. There’s several small buildings he built around it for vehicles and equipment. And from what it looks like a lot more trees.
As we chatted, he talked about shortly after he moved in, and he was out in the pasture northeast of the house, and he found a bunch of marbels on the ground. He raked them up and still has them to this day! Think mom, and uncle David played with these?
The old guy sure liked to talk, and while I found it interesting, I think he’s a bit of a storyteller. He said he took these marbels to an antique shop in Junction City and a guy told him there was a marbel in there worth $1200, and that that whole dish was worth $1500. I find that hard to believe, but then again…I don’t know much about marbles!
One last question was…was it a schoolhouse, or was it a church? Grandma kept saying it was a schoolhouse, Mom always said it was a church. Maybe it was used as both. But the corner stone displays the date the building was erected, and that it was…a church.
“In memory of Chas N. Mc??? by his wife Susan.”
So it’s been an exciting adventure for me at least. I find things like this interesting. Imagining what it was like to be around then, all the stories these places could tell. I hope you find it interesting as well!
08.23.06Thar be sound in them speakers!
I got the radio put in, the front dash put back together, and the amp and subs hooked up. So I can hear music now! Now I just need to get the rear speakers and get those installed, and I guess it will be done. That and figure out how to set my clock. But it’s nice to have my dash back! I’d update with pictures in the morning.
Edit: Here’s the pics.
What a Disaster
Maybe it’s my youthful ignorance, but anymore it seems like nothing is as it seems. The radio in my Toronado was in far from mint condition when I got the car. The display didn’t work, and none of the tone controls worked. It pretty much just turned on, and turned up. I could listen to the radio and that was about it. But it was a Bose system. It sounded decent, but never really got loud. I wanted to upgrade the stereo and hopefully get a little more out of the Bose speakers that I was sure still had some life left in them.
And then.
I pick up a nice Pioneer stereo and a kit to mount it into the dash. First I have to get the old stereo out though. Little did I know what lied ahead of me. I knew I was going to have to take off the drivers side dash trim. I was prepared for that. Or so I though. I got all the screws out and the panel loose, but the darn thing was wedged between the upper edge of the dash and the steering column. After about 45 minutes I started thinking the only way for me to get it off was to remove the whole feakin’ steering column. (I deeply despise the people who design cars.) For some strange reason I got the idea to put the gear level and reverse. Wouldn’t you know that did the trick.
So now I can clearly see the bracket and the screws that hold the radio in. There they are just smiling at me, an all too easy reward after all the hastle I went through to get the trim off. I remove the screws and tug to pull the radio out…and it doesn’t budge. Ugh! So I start feeling around what I can, and for the life of me I can’t feel anything.
So now I have to remove the ashtry and ashtry bracket that is below the stereo to see if there’s anything underneath. Upon doing that, I get a little bit of a chuckle. This truly is a luxury car. Inside the ashtray there are two little vacuum lines to pull cigarette smoke out of the car. Sheesh.
After I get the ashtray out I am able to feel a bit more around the radio and finally find what’s keeping it in. There’s one last bolt left on the passenger side of the radio, right by the air vent. And the only way to get to it is…to remove the glove box. UGH! Luckily I’m a pro at this part since I’d taken it out and put it back in several times when I was fixing the heater door. Andrea gives me a hand getting that out, and I can FINALLY reach the last bolt holding the old radio in, take it loose and pull the unit out. Praise the Lord! Nevermind I’ve all but completely disassembled the dashboard now.
Here’s a shot of how it looks now:
One would think that this is the last of my headaches. Oh what else could go wrong? Just wire the new stereo to the old speaker leads and mount that bad boy in there! Well that’s just what I did. And lo and behold, the unit powers on, but it’s eerily quiet for a stereo that’s supposedly on. Nay, it’s silent! What have I done!
Well I start reading around on the net to try to figure out what the heck I did wrong. Come to find out, this Bose sound system that is in my car doesn’t rely on the stereo to power the speakers. OH NO! Each speaker has to have it’s own built in amplifier. And the outputs of my shiny new Pioneer stereo just aren’t compatable with ANY OF THE SPEAKERS IN MY CAR! Well isn’t that plesant.
So I picked up two Pioneer speakers and got them mounted in the front today. And I ordered two more Pioneer speakers off eBay for the rear, because of course they have to be an odd size. 4″x10″. So what started out as a $150 head unit swap is pretty much turning into a $300 complete redo of my car stereo. But damn it when I’m done it’s going to sound goood!
01.13.06Trickin’ out the RC
ok here you go heres my newest hobby next i just need to figure out how im going to paint it. this first two pics are before i added any upgrades or “carbon fiber” componets the second two are after the upgrades including the body. edit: pics removed
05.14.05AM Radio rocks!
Would you believe that I’m listening to my formerly not working radio right now? Yep. loud and clear, all thanks to these little blue guys.
Sounds great if you ask me. But you be the judge. Hear me tune across the dial and tune in to Platinum Broadcasting’s very own 1420 Country KJCK!
Now all that’s left is to finish restoring the record changer. Check Bieb’s site for the latest updates!
News and progress
updated
Why Brasso Rules.
You ever up late at night. And see an infomercial for some miracle product that will take utter garbage and make it sparkly new again? Yeah, I always write those off as a crock of crap, which they probably are. Though I have found one product that I am utterly astounded by it’s effectiveness! (Good greif, now I sound like an infomercial).
I’d picked up some Brasso Metal Polish by reccomendation of a radio restoration website for restoring the bakelite (early plastic material) on my radio. And boy did it clear it up and make it shine like new. That alone was enough to make me swear by this stuff. But really unless you’d seen the radio before, you’d never know it did any good. But I now present to you the proof:
Before:
After:
Amazing! No? Sure it takes a little elbow grease, but this stuff is genius! Other than the fact I’ve probably fried a few brain cells from the fumes, this stuff is like a dream come true for my restoration project!
If there’s a metal you need cleaned (besides silver), GO BRASSO!
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I was paid absolutly nothing, I swear!