31 Jan 2023

 Well since the grill panel is off the car and the radiator is out, additionally as I am well over sanding car panels, decide to clean up the engine bay a little bit, well the lower engine bay. It has long needed something done it to as the job was never finished when the chassis rails were replaced and it the lower engine bay has been basically primer and surface rust since then. 

On the plus side for not having done any work in the engine bay, when the bumper mounts needed replacing recently there was no need to worry about making a mess as it wasn't in a good tidy condition anyway. The downside though its that it looked very rough in there.

When the bumper was replaced the engine bay was still a mess to see.

More sanding and rust converter and priming and painting. Tidied the wiring up, by wrapping the loose wires and tied them to the main loom. It is no show winner and was never supposed to be such, but it sure is much neater in there.

8 Jan 2023

 Well, well there you go.

The bumper was straight for three weeks, how exciting is that! Unfortunately it s not straight any longer as one of the neighbours unfortunately reversed into the car at about 4am today and now the bar, front drivers side guard and grill panel are all stuffed. He didn't think he'd done much damage, didn't even realise that he'd hit it so hard it had pushed the car 1.5 metres back up the street!

Unfortunately that will have to wait though as first up is the reconditioning of the diff that is required. Have finally taken the diff out and will take it to someone who knows what they are doing to do the work, hopefully this week. I am hopeful that when I change the oil in future it won't be quite a shiny as the quite new oil I drained from the diff before removing the diff.

18 Dec 2022

Well, travelled to Canberra over the weekend where a very good friend did some surgery on the Count. The surgery consisted of replacing the bumper mounts on the front of the car so that for the first time since I have owner the car the bumper no sits straight on it! Grinding, welding and a lot of planning and calculations went into the work and everything went brilliantly. Really very happy and thankful for the efforts that went into the job, it's awesome!

You can see it hangs down and the over rider is leaning back, been that way for 30+ years

Problem was made worse when someone hit the car recently

Removing the bumper mounts

Angle grinding and patching the old, not too great welding

Both new brackets in

Final result is awesome

2 Dec 2022

Updating the saga of the damaged front bumper on the car, the one that was further damaged as per a few posts back.

Finally managed to get the front bumper off again and this time completely stripped apart, not a hard job, but one I put off because I am just too lazy. Anyway things are a lot worse that I had imagined with the spring bar that provides the rebound should the car be in an accident. Yes I know it certainly isn't a crumple zone design on this car. The bar is out of whack in just about every plane you could measure/test it by. Both ends are twisted in different directions and the symmetry of the bars design in completely out as one side had obviously had a fair hit at some time. I think it is well past saving and will need a replacement, which will hopefully twist the valance and the chrome dress bar back into shape, they both seem to be fairly much in the correct shape when it is all apart anyway.

A well skilled friend in Canberra is going to do some welding for me and hopefully we will replace either one or both of the bumper mount bars that hold the bar to the car. One of the ones on the car had lost its threaded section when I first got the car and a bolt was then welded to the stub that was left, which has worked well enough, though doesn't look too pretty. the other bar is now loose at the front and the threaded section now has a distinct bend upwards, which is a direct result of the parking speed "nudge". 

  Both halves of the bar should look like the right hand half in the pic

The bolt welded to the original stub, note the washers packing out the spacing 

The mount thread post the parking 'nudge", should be straight