B.G. Willers

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!