21 Feb 2023

 Apart from a flasher can for the new lights that I have installed the car is basically good to go for now, though it does need some areas touched up paint wise in the near future.

The new lights are a pair of front parking / indicator light that were briefly fitted to some of the early 60's cars, between the old single use parking light from the Series 2 and the parking / indicator jobbies that i had on the car previously from the later series 1000's. It's a much better look and closer to how the car is supposed to look, so that is a good thing. The reason for not installing the earlier Series 2 lights is that they are singular parking lights only and it is much tidier to have the new ones as they are parking/indicator in one unit and they can fit an LED "bulb" so that is even better. 

Installing the "new" guard and the new LED powered side lights

Everything went back together fairly well and only required a light degree of swearing and cursing to come together properly. The "new" guard is a much better fit, being and original part, that the other guard which is a pattern part like the one that got crunched. Everything just lines up better with it and seems to sit much more "properly". Thankfully the bumper is not too out of square, so all the previous work done wasn't totally a waste.

Everything lines up better and the new lights look much more in keeping.

New sidelights look so much better than these old ones

The concerns over the colour match with the new paint seem to have been unfounded, as even though the colour in the tin looks much darker that the old colour, once on the car it is so much closer than was expected. Only real problem is that it really shows up the rims that are still in the old eye matched colour that was way too green.

The rims are now very obviously the wrong colour

10 Feb 2022

 Slowly, slowly is the process of getting the car back onto the road after the neighbour collided with it recently. Naturally as I am doing the work myself it has become a bit of a snowball situation and as per the last post, I have added a few extra jobs to the mix that has taken a lot longer than it would have if I had just replaced the guard and grill panel alone as per the brief.

Having already cleaned up the lower engine bay and wiring, as per the last post, I have managed to get the grill panel, grill and radiator support panel back into the correct shade of green (Valley Green, 1955-1957 only and only in Australia. Good luck finding someone that has the original colour mix directions anywhere!).

Now all that is required is to put it all back together and reinstall it in the car. That said the tidying up of the bonnet catch mechanism and the pivot pins has been added to the list and I have just realised that there is supposed to be an additional spring between the bonnet catch and the radiator support panel which hasn't been on my car since I have owned it. The whole system has been relying on the anti-rattle spring on the release handle to make it all work. So now I have to wait until that spring turns up from the parts supplier before it can all go back together.

Further to the additional jobs that I have added, there is the worrying line of rust bubbles along the bottom of the drivers door that have been expanding for a while now. I have started working in them and discovered that there is a frame inside the door that basically makes reaching the bottom of the outer panel almost impossible to reach. I managed to duct tape a piece of garden hose to the vacuum cleaner hose and get that into the cavity to clean out old pieces of broken window glass and dirt that I managed to scrape up with a really long screwdriver and a steel ruler. It cleaned a lot of rubbish out of the cavity and I then filled the space with a rust converter/preventative spray through the open door and every drain hole and rust hole in the panel. Hopefully that will hold the rust at bay for a while until I can get some sort of paint into the space.

So now it is on to repairing and sanding the outer panel and getting it back into a reasonable state, which includes the paint bubble/blister damage in the middle of the panel from some years back.

 

Would like to be a Panda car when it grows up perhaps.

Onward we go...