I have it under a large flat, straight piece with some weight on it now and I plan to have it laminated. I'm not sure but it seems that the car may have been ordered as a company car, which would explain why it was optioned up and then sold used when it was 6 months old to the lady who owned it almost until I bought it.
And here's some pictures of the pieces, and the Clam, now a bit less aerodynamic, if that's possible.
I got all the window moldings off today. What a huge pain. The main problem was that apparently the windshield had a leak in it at one time and they decided to fix it by taking all the gunk and silicone they could afford to buy in a weekend and put it all under the windshield moldings, and a few spots in the rear for good measure. This made getting the clips off impossible. It seems they pushed the moldings on when it was all wet and let it harden that way. I cracked the windshield, but I'm not sure if it was in a way that will spread. I got all the other pieces off except for the two vertical pieces on each side of the rear sliding window because they have a screw in the bottom and I can't get to them until I have the tailgate down, which is difficult with no battery so I'm saving that until I get inside and take the motor out.
The only trim I still have on is the trim around the roll down windows on each side. I'm not sure how it comes off, but it seems to just pop off, which of course isn't that easy. I also got the rear bumper and taillight housings off. There were two studs for the woodgrain trim moldings in the rear that had been bent 90 degrees. I got one straightened out and the other broke. Fortunately there's easy access to the backside of them and I can easily tack weld them back on.
Other good news is that the large, non-creased dent in the driver rear all but completely popped out. One small area that might need some attention. That only leaves one other spot for dent repair, and then of course above the windshield. Above the windshield isn't actually as bad as I thought. It's mostly surface rust that built up because the water had no where to go with all that putty up there. I was expecting to find big rusted holes I would have to repair.
I borrowed a DA sander and got some pads today so if it's not raining tomorrow the plan is to weld up the molding studs and sand everything that will need to be sanded down to metal. That way when I move it to the storage building that has no power I can finish everything else up by hand, like the body filler and block sanding, getting it ready to paint.
I was racing the dark to get the moldings off, so I don't have many pictures.
I found this inside the car. I can imagine some kid playing with it in the 70s.
After letting the build sheet press flat under some weight for a day and a half I took it out tonight and tried to tape it back together from the backside. There is a laminate machine where my wife works so I'm going to have it laminated there. Here's a better picture of it. There are a couple of options here that I don't know what they mean, but most are self explanatory. My dad, who owned a GM dealerships for 33 years, said from his experience it looked possible from the build sheet this could have been a Pontiac company rep. car.
A spot opened up in dad's barn so yesterday he helped me tow it
over to his house. He it by a chain with his truck while I steered. We had to move quite a bit of stuff over to an open
area in another barn but eventually got all of it moved except for the
one small car that was in the way. It rained us out and I only got
halfway done and had to leave The Clam sitting in the field in front of
the barn. Today I got The Clam tucked into the barn and managed to do a
little sanding on it. I got a couple spots down to bare metal.
Tonight I went over to Gary's and we got the pistons in the block. It didn't go smoothly because the ring compressor didn't want to compress the rings for a while until he bent it a bit and got it working properly. Unfortunately, the cam wouldn't go in for some reason. It seemed as though it was too big. Gary's going to get a mic from work and see what's going on. I really hope this can be fixed easily. If so, we plan to meet Friday night and finish up the engine. Here are some pictures from tonight. They are big into drag racing and have several dragsters. The car next to the engine is a '68 Charger they've had for a long time that's in the process of being brought back to life as a drag car. 
Here my Pontiac 455 block next to Gary's '68 Charger.
   Here's Gary working on the big 455.  |
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Back at the barn, I marked
every bolt for the front fenders, numbered them and made a diagram with notes to remember
what they held, how they went in and how many shims they had. For the
driver side, since both fenders use the same location of bolts, I just
used the same diagram and wrote on the driver side ziplock back what
variations there were.       Gary did manage to get the cam in the next day. The cam bearings from the kit were undersized, though only by a very small amount, so he had to enlarge them. |
| After getting some more sanding and panels off the car I began cleaning
all the parts so I could sand them. It took a very, very long time with
soap, water and a sponge to get the backs of all the pieces clean. The
back of the headlight buckets was a real pain, but I finally got them
cleaned up. Then I began sanding the piece with 180. I put guide coat
on and started with 400, but it wasn't getting the scratches out. I
made some inquiries and found out it would work best if I water sanded
it. I had never water sanded and I now prefer it much more to dry
sanding, even though it's a bit messier. I found out that because I've sanded the body down to the metal in places that I'm going to have to primer the car. I though that Maaco would do this, but apparently they will use a sealer instead of a primer. I may be able to get them to primer the car but then I would have to go pick it back up and block it, so I'm going to have the restoration shop I used to work for to shoot the primer. Then I'm going to block it and have Maaco put Oldsmobile Emerald Green on it. Pontiac has the same color, it starts with a V, but I can't remember the name of it at the moment. It will look like this (this, of course, is an Oldsmobile).  If it doesn't rain, I hope to get the hood and perhaps at least one fender finished tomorrow. Gary and I finally finished building the engine. I say Gary and I, but he did 95% of it while I watched and tried to learn. He known Pontiac engines very well. When I went to pick it up it was quite a chore to get it on my trailer. Gary wasn't home so his son, Daniel, who is a friend of mine helped me load it up. Their racing trailer was in the way, as well as a non running Ram Charger and the Charger dragster. We had to take the front fiberglass clip off of the Charger, use the 4-wheeler to pull the ram charger out of the way and then use the 4 wheeler to back my trailer into place to load up the engine. I wish I had the camera with me to have pictures of the puzzle we had to solve to get it loaded up, but we finally did. I painted the engine today because I had to get some protection against rust. It may rain tomorrow so I had to make sure I got it done today. I had to change how I sat the engine on the tire because we filled the engine with oil to prime the engine. The oil filter was being bent and crushed by the tire so I had to only use it on the front.  Here she is. She is one heavy, heavy beast. After taping up all the holes.  And here she is all primered up.   I started out by painting the exhaust manifolds with cast gray paint.  Then I taped off the manifolds, which took forever.  Because of the concrete lip on the garage getting the engine into the garage is not a one person job. My dad came over right as I was finishing up the final coat of Pontiac Blue, so I forgot to take pictures of the finished product while the engine was outside. I have to put a very large bar for leverage and lift up on one of the front wheels while another person pushes to get it back into the garage.  I've tried to find some more moldings for the exterior around the woodgrain but haven't yet come up with any. I hope to find some before everything is finished. |
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| I'm back after a hiatus. I had to house-sit for my cousin
and keep his dog. I was going back and forth across town but then
Tuesday I started getting sick. By Wednesday I had a 102.6 fever so
that has pretty much put me out of action. In the meantime, I have been
doing some research and realized the only truly permanent fix for small
pitted rust is to sandblast it, so I've ordered a small, hand held sand
blaster. It came in today. I really hope I'm feeling well enough to
start back to work on the car Monday. I want to finish this car before I
start a new job so April will have a reliable daily driver. Back to Tuesday. Here's what happened. One of the tabs that holds the woodgrain moldings had broken off when I bent it back into shape. These are the small metal tabs that are part of the body work. I forgot to weld this small tab back on before I moved the car and I have to weld it on because welding it after would destroy any body filler I might use in the area. Since there is no 220 outlet at my dad's barn I had it setup to borrow a 110 welder from a friend. I was about to head out to borrow the welding and was holding the tab in a pair of pliers when it shot out of the pliers and bounced against the wall in my garage and then vanished. At the time, my garage was a complete mess of multiple projects going on at the same time. Fortunately April helped and we emptied out the entire side of the garage looking for this piece. Dad also came over and helped. It took all day and by the end we had moved the entire bench and searched on our hands and knees almost every inch of that side of the garage, twice. Here's the tab:  And here's the bag we put it in to make sure it never gets lost again...EVER....  Because this tab broke from the spot on the car, only this tab will fit back exactly as it should to line up correctly. After a preliminary search, we began moving everything outside, one by one.    I like everything to be organized, but unfortunately because of the many projects going at once and having way too many things to cram into one garage, the place had gotten a bit out of hand, so at the very least this was a good excuse to clean up.   The end result. After April, Dad and I un-nailed the desk from the wall and moved it, vacuumed under it and searched everywhere with magnets and intense scrutiny, April ended up finding the small piece out in the driveway amount all the junk out there. At least now it's a bit more organized.  During all this, I was beginning to get sick and by the end of the day felt very, very bad, so I haven't been able to do anything at all since this day. I think needless to say, this was frustrating beyond any previously created scales to measure frustration. |
