Cars

A couple weeks ago, I decided to make it my goal to spend at least an hour every night after work, working on my Ghia. It’s been so darn cold though, that I skipped out all of last week, and a lot of the week before. So far this week though, I’ve put in at least 2 hours a night. Motivation? My dad’s been warming it up before I get out there.

Yesterday I got my driver’s door off. I’m sending the hinges that I bought back for a replacement. The hinge pin is supposed to remain stationary relative to the pillar side of the hinge, and pivot on the brass bushing, but the pin has been moving, which seems like it will wear the hinges much faster than they should.

Also yesterday, I finished welding up the passenger’s side door opening, and today, cut most of the pieces for the driver’s side. Hopefully by this weekend, I’ll be able to pull the body from the pan.

I’ve decided that my first big project will be restoring the pan. I’ll disassemble it completely. That includes the torsion bars in the front and rear, and removing the engine and transmission. All the bushings and rubber bits will be replaced, and everything will be painted with heavy duty rust proof paint before being reassembled. New pans will be welded in, and I will disassemble the transmission and make sure everything is within spec, and replace or rebuild everything that is not. I may also put my new engine on at this time, depending on if it’s done or not. That will then be stored somewhere, and work on the body will begin.

I got out to the shop for a couple hours tonight. I’m going to try to make it a nightly habit. I’m going to have to if I’m ever going to get this thing done.

My verdict, for now at least, is that my heater channels are good. I’ll have to replace the rocker of course, and probably the middle section, but I could just patch the couple inch section that’s rusted through. Even if it’s ugly, no one will ever see it.

I started cutting plates to bolt onto the hinge and striker mounts so I can weld up my door openings. I’m going to do this to stiffen the body while I take it off the pan. Before I do that though, I’m ordering some hinges and strikers, probably from House of Ghia, so that I can make sure my body is straight. I’m kind of concerned about the left side striker panel. It’s bent up a bit. If that door hangs straight, then I’m good for now, but if it doesn’t, then I have more work to do.

I’ll get more pictures of my progress hopefully tomorrow. It’s mostly just more butchery.

I haven’t had a chance to touch my Ghia is the last week. My 74 Super, which is my daily driver, had been developing a strange noise, and I decided that I’d better find out what it is. I listened it for a while, and eventually settled on it being my alternator. After calling around, I found a rebuilt one for $90, and put it in. Pretty easy once I figured it out. I could do it now in about an hour and a half. So I started it up and “GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”. Shit. Okay, so that’s not what it was… My old alt really was going bad though, so it’s not really money wasted.

The next day, I decided that I needed to take the alternator belt off and see if it still did it. Nope. Okay, the fan is hitting. It didn’t do anything when I spun it by hand, but that’s definitely what the sound was. So I tore it down again so I could get the fan off and stick another shim on it. Well, I figured out that I hadn’t put any shims between it and the alt, they were behind it. So I put it back together right, and everything worked.

Until I got home a realized that the only running light that was working was my left rear. I stuck a new fuse in, and it immediately started to burn. Shit, a short. I’d been mucking around in the back when I was trying to get to the front of the fan, so I figured that I’d pinched something. The next day I spent trying to figure out a wiring harness that I’d bought with no instructions. I figured out where all the wires went, and also that there was no way I was going to get it in my car with it all assembled. So I gave up on that idea, and started looking for the short. Figured out that it was the license plate light, so I just unplugged that, and it’s fine.

In the meantime however, I’d also removed the dash, and I don’t like what I see under there. All kinds of homebrew fixes. I don’t want to deal with it though, so I’m just going to cover it back up so I don’t have to look at it. I did manage to close off that annoying fresh air leak that makes me cold in the winter.

Or at least it was. Next step I believe is to weld braces across the door openings, and take the body off the pan. I’ll have to remove the entire area between the fenders and replace it all. I’ll cut apart the other side to see whats there so I can order the heater channels and rockers. That’s about $600 worth of stuff, about doubling my projected sheet metal price. I hope to keep my sheet metal budget below $1800, or three times my origional estimate. My current plan of attack is to work my way from the back to the front. All this is easy complared with what I’ll have to do in the front.

I’ve just preemptively spent most of my first pay check on my Ghia. I bought hopefully all the metal to repair the areas around the rear fenders. Total so far: $363.20. This is, by my calculations, just under half the money I’ll be spending on body parts. I’m also looking for some scrap metal to build a rotisserie that will get my body up in the air at a comfortable level to work on, and allow me to rotate it to get to different areas of the car easily. I think I’ll wait until I actually get my second pay check before I spend any more.