Don’t go getting your hopes up *too* high – even though this may be the second blog post in three days, it’s not going to become a habit. But I took care of a few little tidbits today and I wanted to share them.
First, I installed the “welt kit” to the top of the grille. The welt is a dual-beaded canvas strip that buffers the front edge of the hood and prevents metal-to-metal contact with the grille. In the mid-’70s this was replaced by individual rubber bumpers, but because I’m trying to retain as many period-correct clues as possible, I chose to pad the grille with the older-style welt. It’s only partly installed, though – it comes with 13 brass split rivets that are each a half-inch long, which is fine for the sheet metal of a totally stock grille. My grille, of course, is anything but totally stock. Therefore about half of the rivets are too short. I found a company, H. Gerstner & Sons, that sells 3/4-inch split rivets to repair some of their products; these will be just long enough to hold the welt to the grille. Here’s the not-quite-finished installation.
Next, I added the hood latches. The hood itself had the holes pre-drilled, but since the fenders are custom-made, I had to figure out where to drill for the latches. This is complicated by the fact that there is a three-inch-tall steel strip along the fender to fill in the gap originally created by a taller body and the original fender height. Well, after much measuring and marking, I finally drilled the two holes for each latch and installed them. The hood will now stay down without needing ratchet straps!
The photo also shows the results of the next task, which was to buy, and create locations for, the four side marker lights (two amber lights at the front; two red lights at the rear). Just because I’m trying to be period-correct in some areas doesn’t mean I’m going to sacrifice safety issues! This is a three-quarter-inch amber LED marker light; the red ones just like this will be in the lower rear quarter panels as shown in the next photo.
So things are slowly progressing. I work on whatever I can in the time I have available, which means both progress and blog posts are erratic. I’m hoping I’ll be ready to take the ‘Monster back to the fabricator by mid-October, but that’s a soft deadline. We’ll see how it goes.
From The Ground Up 