Temporary Ventilation

This past Saturday dad helped me remove the remaining windows from the car.  He borrowed this tool to help with the job and it came in very handy.  You push the wire behind the windshield and then attach it to one of the handles and then each person pulls back and forth in a sawing motion to cut through the seals and sealer.  It had a wire on it when we got it but it was in pretty bad shape and lasted halfway through the windshield, which we tackled first.  After that I started using old guitar strings I got from a friend.  This is definitely a two person job.  As I mentioned before the previous owners had crammed as much filler behind the mouldings as possible to try to stop a leak.  It would have been much better and cheaper in the long run if they had just had the windshield removed and fixed correctly, but they didn't and it left me with a big mess to deal with.  I thought the windshield would be the hardest but it turned out to be the easiest and in fact in the areas where there wasn't any extra filler it was almost downright easy. 

After the windshield was handled we moved on to the side windows.  I thought these would be easier but they turned out to be much harder.  The corners were very hard to get to along with the rust on the bottom and also the extra filler that people had added to try to stop leaks made these very difficult.  The rear curve really gave up fits until dad came up with the idea to run the strings behind the top of the glass and back out the bottom to be able to get around the rear corners.

Guitar strings definitely weren't made for this type of work and when we encountered rust or filler they didn't last long at all.  I had relatively new strings on my guitar but fortunately I had this extra guitar at home that already had one broken string on it so we cannibalized it for our purpose.  We ended up using 7 strings total, counting the ones I was given.  The problem with the top 4 strings is that they were wrapped in copper which made them more coarse and better at cutting however the copper wrapping would come loose and then cause problems.  

The passenger side was actually really easy compared to the time we had with the driver side.  There was much less filler, less rust, a few spots that didn't even seem to have sealer and also I used a razor to pre-cut the sealer.  All this made for a much easier removal.  We used a couple feed bags for protection and stored them in the loft.

Here it is sans windows.  It's really beginning to look nothing like a car, which is pretty scary and more frustrating as I realize just how much further I've gotten into this project than I ever planned or wanted to.  I hate to say it but had I foreseen this we wouldn't have bought the old clam but we're already this far in.  I just hope I'm able to keep costs down so I don't have to sell it to get our money back.

It only took around 2 1/2 to 3 hours to get all the windows out.  If we had the right string and there wasn't any filler I think this would be a very quick and easy job.  After we finished we went to see the new James Bond movie, Skyfall.  We have seen every Bond movie in the theater since 1995 and I also have every ticket stub to every single movie I've seen since that same film in 1995.  After 17 years, it's getting to be quite a stack.