It must be very satisfying after all the work.....you got some fantastic power of endurance..... and skills

Looking forward for more pictures

 

Those bumpers can "hold water"......an old southern saying, ya'll…..meaning the bumpers pass the eyeball test/they fit great. And the tail light section looks factory. Got any small parts you can prepare for assembly during the winter...……




For example: One mechanism/one hour to start-to-finish (but you knew that!)

 

Im glad you got it to where you wanted. I was afraid you had given up. CHEERS. Hopefully next summer you'll have paint on her!!!

 

Thanks so much It certainly feels good to finally have it exactly where I want it. I'm a little surprised that during all that tedium and frustration I never got discouraged or felt like giving up which is a bit unlike me as I'm not the most driven person in the world.

 

Amazing what you did to that lock mechanism in only an hour!

I've got a variety of small pieces I can work on over the winter - assuming I can get motivated to do them. I haven't been to the garage in a couple weeks, though, this sitting around and watching TV and stuff instead of working eels so good!

 

Thanks

You know, month after month of trying to get done what I initially thought would take a couple of days I never really got discouraged which is a bit of a surprise to me as I have a long history of depression.

 

I am glad to see you haven't given up. You have done a great job so far, and I know that when the cold weather hits , things slow down. The nice thing about it is you get to think about the next steps and order of them.

Build up some energy over the winter and hit it again in the Spring.

 

Thanks righthanddrive

I've been pretty good about seeing my project cars through, except for that one time and it still bothers me that I never got it done. It was the car I sometimes wish I had instead of my Corvette, a 78 Lincoln Mark V. I started a frame off restoration on it:








I got the frame sandblasted and painted and the motor cleaned and painted. I was working on sandblasting and painting the undersides of the floorboards when I got hopelessly discouraged. My excuse for failing to finish is that every spring, just after almost all of the snow was gone, the quonset would get a couple of inches of water in it. After a couple of months the water receded to where I had mud for another couple of months and then as winter approached it would start to dry out. My workshop floor was dirt with 4X8 sheets of OSB on it. It was actually pretty nice for a floor for working in winter, at lot warmer to lay on than concrete.

So, anyway, I was sandblasting and painting the underside of the floorboards when I got a couple of inches of water in the shop and couldn't work. By the time the water receded my bare floorboards had started to rust again. I tried to repair about a 10" diameter hole in the driver's side floorboard in the meantime and the welding just was so crappy and not good enough. I couldn't figure out why the welder that had worked so well the previous year suddenly couldn't weld. Eventually I discovered the welding wire in the welder was covered in rust and that's why it wouldn't weld.

I moved to an area behind the rear seat with a small rust hole that happened to be where the seat belt mounting bolt went. The mounting hole was reinforced on the other side with a plate that was at least 1/16" thick and had multiple compound curves in it. I thought, how on earth am I going to form a new mounting plate from steel that thick? Its hard enough making compound curves in 20 gauge. I started thinking about how I needed to very accurately place the floorboard patch so the seat belt mounting bolt surface would be in the right place and I thought how in the hell am I going to line that up when I cut away the rust? Nearly in tears that I felt I stopped working there and never got back at it, it just was too overwhelming for me to overcome both the water in the work area and trying to repair the rear seatbelt mounting area in the floorboards. So, that was the one that got away.

 

If any of you following along are smokers, you might enjoy my off-topic thread on vintage lighters and "carve your own pipe" project:

https://www.corvetteforum.com/forums...e-lighter.html

 

My husband walked in the door tonight and handed me a couple of bags of groceries. He said "I've got to go back to the truck, I got your Cristmas present." He came back with this air supplied sandblasting helmet he bought at auction. It needs some loving but we'll fix it up



This is going to make sandlbasting a great deal less frustrating. It sure would have been nice to have when I was sanding those tons of fiberglass under the car in the gas tank area, lol.

 

Your husband is a Wasskely Wabbit!

 

Aye, that he is And so much more. He really is the greatest

 

I had a MARK IV when they were new it was. The best riding car I've ever seen. The mark V was just as good. Maybe you can revisit that one? Another fantastic car is the Mark VIII that was a very comfortable ride with a good bit of power. In any event keep up the great work!

 

priya your doing a great job cant wait for this to be done.

 

That must have been wonderful having a new Mark IV! Neither my husband nor I have ever owned a new car and from the looks of things, never will. Not that I never had the money to buy a new car, just that I could never save and I bought like 30 project cars back when I was living on the acreage which cost more than enough to buy a new car. I loved the luxury and ride of the Mark V, I actually had 3 of them. My favourite was a very dark grey with metallic in it. It had a black interior with black and brownish striped seats. If I had been able to complete the Mark V you see picutred I'd have taken the interior out of the dark grey Lincoln and put it in the white one and painted the white one that same very dark grey colour. Unfortunately I can't revisit that Lincoln because it and 30 ish other cars stayed with the acreage when I sold it and moved in with my husband. Hubby said I could only keep two cars when I moved in with him so I picked the Eagle SX/4 and an Aerostar van that was one of the best daily drivers I ever had. Sadly I expect all the great project cars I bought probably ended up at the crusher.

The one thing I intensely disliked about the Mark V was the continental trunk. My plan with the car was to cut out the protruding part of the continental trunk and make it just your typical boxy car trunk, make the upper trunk deck and tail light deck completely flat. Yep, that would have been one fantastic car....

 

Thanks jkippin! I hope you're not an impatient person, 'cause its going to be a while,lol!

 

Prya are you a CFL Roughriders fan? Last month my wife and I took a trip up to Niagra Falls and then up to Toronto. While there we decided to go to a football game between the Argonauts and Roughriders. It was a lot of fun. Being from the States we didn't really have a favorite team but we ended up setting next to a bunch of fans from Saskatchewan. They were a blast to be around. Even had my wife wearing a water mellon on her head! I guess wearing mellons is a big thing there.

 

My husband and I are big CFL Roughriders fans So cool you did the watermelon thing - very popular here! Every stadium around the country you see Roughrider fans that have made the trip. My husband tells me that he read that when it comes to sports teams sales of Jerseys, etc, the Montreal Canadiens sell the most closely followed by the Saskatchewan Roughriders, they're really "Canada's team". We're glad you took in one of our games.

 

So you say you want to graft a 70 Corvette rear end on your rubber bumper car? Well, here's what you should know before you take that on:

While the quarter panels and upper deck look like they'll match between a chrome bumper and rubber bumper car and that one can just join the two, its unfortunately not that simple. The quarter panels and upper deck are somewhat different shapes between the rubber and chrome bumper cars. The upper deck joining of the two is particularly troublesome.
Note in the picture below where the rubber bumper cover meets the upper deck of the fiberglass above the gas tank. Its a straight line across on a rubber bumper car. However, the upper deck on a chrome bumper car has a convex shape in the middle and two smaller concave curves at the outer corners of the deck - I've shown an exaggerated example of this with the blue line on the picture below. As you can see, if you try to join a chrome bumper partial rear clip to your rubber bumper car, the upper deck is going to be a problem area and that's going to pull things out of alignment as you force the chrome bumper upper deck donor piece to mate to the straight across rubber bumper car upper deck.




In order to get the upper deck from the chrome bumper partial rear clip to mate with the rubber bumper car's fiberglass I had to apply a lot of force to the donor's upper deck where it meets the quarter panels. The picture below shows how I forced two by fours against the donor's upper rear deck to push it level with the upper rear deck on my 79:




All this pushing surfaces together to mate that aren't quite the same shape puts stresses all over the donor partial rear clip and the quarters and upper deck of the rubber bumper car. Its not going to matter whether you use an aftermarket rear clip or a factory rear clip for a donor, you're going to have to force the two pieces to mate with clamps and that's going to put some uneven and undesirable bends in the rear body panels once the two pieces are laminated together. No matter what you do, you're not going to get a perfectly symmetrical and even join of the two pieces and you'll have to make the best of what you end up with as I did.

For example, to get things to line up better, I needed to make the bottom of the driver's side rear quarter panel about 3/4 of an inch longer than the passenger side. Note in the picture below the light blue line at point (A). This is where I measured the height of the tail light panel on both sides. Initially when I had the quarter panels the same length the measurement at point (A) on the driver's side was 5/8 of an inch lower than the same measurement on the passenger side. I had to pull the driver's side quarter panel rearwards (yellow arrow) until there was a 3/4 inch greater gap between the mating surfaces at the bottom of the driver's side rear quarter compared to the passenger side. This brought up the tail light panel at point (A) on the driver's side nearly even with the same point on the passenger side. This was the best compromise I could make when positioning the donor partial rear clip for lamination.




Following the lamination of the two pieces together I took a measurment at the exhaust opening on the exhaust filler panel forward to the frame crossmember, as I remember it the distance was 9/16 or 5/8th inches longer on the driver's side than the passenger side. Much, much later when I was working on the passenger side rear bumper I took those measurements again and they were the same on both sides(?). So, I don't know if I imagined there was 9/16" more length on the driver's side than the passenger, or if once everything was all laminated up the various stresses I induced forcing the dissimilar panels to mate gradually evened out and the difference in length from the exhaust opening on the exhaust filler panel to the forward frame cross member disappeared.

 

As I previously mentioned, I spent Oct. 2018 to Oct. 2019 trying to get the passenger side rear bumper better aligned. It wasn't that bad to begin with, but the passenger rear bumper was pointing upwards a bit along the quarter panel whereas the driver's side was pointing down a bit:




I was prepared to live with that but on the passenger side there was about a one millimetre gap between the corner bumper mounting surface on the body and the metal mounting pad on the bumper itself. I decided it would be an easy matter to add a millimetre of thickness to the outside of the fiberglass body there and take up the slack between the bumper and the body. That was my fateful mistake that saw me struggling for a year to get the passenger bumper back into alignment - I thought this whole process would be a couple of weeks maximum. The diagram in the following picture shows how the angle of the tail light panel to the quarter panel differed on the two sides of the car:




This view in the above picture is from the top of the car (I couldn't get high enough above the car to take a picture looking downwards including the full width of the rear deck). The black lines show an exaggerated line of the fiberglass body on each side where the tail light panel meets the quarter panel. The blue lines represent the shape of the bumpers where they meet the body. The pink arrow on the right side shows the gap between the body and the bumper mount I naively thought I could quickly fix. The pink arrow indicates the direction I needed to extend the fiberglass body to make the passenger side bumper mount flush to the body in the corner. The above diagram shows that on the driver's side the quarter panel bumper mounting surface has a gap between it and the bumper mounting pad. Here's a picture showing that:




I'll at some point add some mat and resin to that bumper mounting point to take up the gap shown above - I sure hope it doesn't take another year to do it!
Originally I tried to bring the passenger side bumper forward along the quarter panel by widening the front of the mounting hole on the quarter panel. That didn't close the gap on the corner bumper mount so in my confusion I widened the quarter panel mounting hole to the rear a bit and tried sliding the bumper back:




So, now my mounting hole on the passenger side quarter panel is a wide oval instead of a circle and I can't figure out why the corner bumper mount gap doesn't close - at different times I thought moving the quarter panel part of the bumper back and forward would close the gap and when it didn't I was baffled as to why. I spent an hour or so staring at the bumper and body and finally gave up for the day.

A few days later I drew a diagram of the passenger rear of the body and the bumper, sat down on the couch and tried to visualize why moving the bumper back and forth along the quarter panel wasn't closing the gap at the corner. Maybe you're better at spatial relations than I am, but it took two or three hours of trying to wrap my mind around how the bumper was moving in relation to the corner mounting surface I slowly realized I was only rotating the bumper around the corner mounting surface and moving the mounting place on the quarter panel forwards or backwards wasn't going to close the gap at the corner.

At that point I thought it would be a simple matter to add a layer of fiberglass on the corner bumper mounting surface and that would take up the gap. I decided I'd also fill in the now too wide mounting hole on the quarter panel as well and re-drill a smaller round hole.

So, I've got three locations on the passenger side body where the bumper mounts touch (or almost touch) the fiberglass. I've got two bumper mounting surfaces I want to change and one that's properly located (next to the license plate). I realized I should first modify and finish the corner bumper mounting surface before touching the second mounting surface on the quarter panel or I'd have two location variables to deal with instead of just one when aligning the bumper. The next day, marijuana being newly legal in Canada I couldn't resist having some before I headed out to the garage. I got so into the groove of sanding I forgot to do only one of the two mounting surfaces and sanded the gel coat off both the corner mounting surface and the side mounting surface on the quarter panel. Now I have two mounting surfaces to figure out the location for instead of one - so , yeah, that was a huge can of worms I opened up.

Prior to all this, I changed the angle of the two rearmost steel mounting pads on both rear bumpers to get better alignment. This would be the third or forth time I cut those apart, changed the angle and welded the mounting pads back together. In the two pictures below you can see how I cut the bumper mounting pad and leaned its angle outwards about 1/4 inch out from the factory location:







The driver's side bumper fit nicely with its pad leaned out from the factory position by about 1/4 inch. I initially did the same on the passenger side and it still wasn't quite right, the bumper was tilting upwards a bit. After multiple cuts and welds with different angles on the passenger side rear bumper I finally ended up with the corner mounting pad angle in exactly the original factory position. So, the driver's side needed an adjustment to the pads of 1/4 inch to fit best while the passenger side bumper pads needed no change to fit best. This shows again the asymmetries that result when you force a chrome bumper rear clip to mate to the rear of a rubber bumper car - there ends up being a lot between the two sides of the car you must account for in trying to make it look as much the same from side to side as possible.