Late-October - December: Body Work

This aspect of the car was challenging in the sense that it was easy to make progress in reshaping the cars previous dents and scratches, but it required a level of patience I do not ordinarily possess!

Probably the best example of this experience is the nose:

It took hours and hours of work to strip off the slap-dash bondo job and several layers of paint to get a really good idea of what it was going to take to give this nose some shape

Initially we used some fiber-glass body filler to help fill in the serious dents...































But ultimately what I recommend is friends and family with more patience than you to help you not rush things too quickly...

Mid-October: Rebuilding

After some amazing work from Cram-McCall Machine shop, we were ready to put the engine back and in get the car mechanically sound!

I was blown away by how clean the lower block looked, not to mention that the paint we used for the inside of the engine compartment was a nice match to what was already part of the engine!

Dad got a little "inspired" by our progress and blessed the engine with a new distributor, coil, and carburetor (the other one was leaking air through the throttle arm)!

Early-October: Ch Ch Ch Ch Changes!

So you might be noticing that the blog took a vacation for a few months... a big part of that was the discovery that the engine that I installed with Oakland John threw a rod and was on the verge of seizing up after less than 50 miles!

The project was more than I could handle on my own, I reached out to my Dad and he warmly agreed to help me tow the Ghia down to the Mojave Desert and have the engine rebuilt.

This provided me the opportunity that I always regretted missing when we swapped engines out back in the Spring, a chance to clean up all that fire damage in the engine compartment!


Scrapping & Sanding...


Priming...


Paint!

June 2010

June was the month of attempting to fix small things with small solutions and then ultimately breaking down and replacing or rebuilding the item from scratch...

The Fuel Pump:


















The Carburetor:

The Generator Pulley: