Rain Delay

The weather has not been very cooperative.  I finished sanding and preparing the body of the car and all I had left to do was to sand the hood and I could take the car to be primered, but the day I was going to work on the hood it decided to start to rain... for five days straight.  After the 40 days and nights of flooding I was finally able to start on the hood, but the temperature dropped back down into the 20s at night and the days were sometimes only up to the 40s.  I was, in a strange way, actually looking forward to working on the hood.  I knew it meant I was almost done with this leg of the job.  I would be able to sit it on saw horses so I could finally work on something in a decent position that didn't hurt my back.  I was wrong.  The paint on the hood was extremely difficult.  My best guess as to why, as my dad had said could possibly be a reason, is that perhaps the heat from the engine had baked the paint on over the years.  My sand blaster was completely ineffective.  It took two entire blaster-jugs full of sand to do an area about 12x12 inches.  I knew that would take days and cost a fortune in sand.  You could hold the blaster on the paint and for the first second it didn't do anything, and then it would finally remove one small spot.  I ended up having to sand the entire hood by hand or with the DA grinder.  When I came to a spot that had a pit and needed blasting I would take a piece of green tape and put on the hood to mark the spot I needed to come back to.  This took two full days.

It seems everyone around me has been sick.  It has been going around this area in a bad way.  Some entire counties have even closed schools due to the flu and strep throat.  I started to feel sick and I was very scared that I might be coming down with one of the two.  I started cramming as much vitamin C as I could.  Yesterday I headed over to dad's house as early as I could stand, feeling pretty miserable, and finished the hood and then dad helped me load the car up and I took it up to the body shop.  They had a somewhat narrow time frame to fit me in and the rain had already caused a delay so I didn't have time to take a sick day.  Despite feeling pretty run down I got it done.

Today I woke up feeling better than I have the last two days.  I headed up to the body shop first thing.  I took the vacuum to clean up a lot of the left over sand and plenty of other supplies to get the car ready for primer.  The sand blaster had damaged some of the tape and paper I had sealed the open spaces with so those areas had to be repaired.  I can handle cleaning a little bit of sand out of the carpet but I certainly don't want primer colored spots on the seats.

There is a hill leading up to the door to the paint booth.  I backed up to the door as far as I could before the back of the trailer would bottom out on the gravely hill side.  This left about a foot between the concrete floor entrance of the paint booth and where the door to the trailer opened to.  We had to push the car uphill to get it into the paint booth.  There were four of us pushing and it was literally all we could do to get it into the shop; The car is that heavy, even without the engine, glass, doors or front clip.  We would have to push the car a few feet and then chock the tire and take a breath.   

After having spent a total of almost a week on the rear driver side door I admitted defeat and let Gary work his magic with it.  If you don't account for body-filler dry time, it only took him about an hour.  I was glad and also disgusted at the same time.  That's why he's the professional.  This shop has built plenty of show cars, one of which sold to Jay Leno at one of the Barrett-Jackson Collector Car auctions.

While he was at it he fixed one more very small spot that I hadn't gotten to.  I snagged this picture of him in action.

Here's a picture of the hood.  All I have left is to take some sand paper and smooth the individual holes in the vented portion of the hood.  I didn't have enough sand to finish each vent hole individually so I'm going to have to finish that up by hand.  This is a very, very large hood.

Here she is all taped up and ready to go.  Almost...

There was one other spot I ended up addressing and that caused me to not finish up today so I'm going to head back up very early tomorrow and finish up, then I can wipe the car down with wax and grease remover and it should be ready to spray.  After that I'll come pick the car up and I will prep the rest of the parts since there isn't room to do the body and the other parts all at the same time.

The HEI distributor came in today.  I was pointed to the company I bought it from while searching the internet. Here is basically why I bought this distributor:  Name brand companies like Summit and Jegs have started selling items made in China by slapping their name on them and still selling them at mark-up prices.  Though these Chinese companies have high quality control they still are made cheaper than their domestic counterparts.  The company I used, Skip White Performance, uses the same quality products made in China, however they charge a fraction of the price.  I got this unit for $53 shipped.  The cost of the other products, which are of the same quality, is between $150 and $200.  I was scared by the low cost and did a lot of research on this product and the company.  I even viewed a dissection of one of these distributors and the machining and assembly is as good of quality as you can expect from a name brand. 

I previously ordered a kit that I had believed would allow me to use my original distributor shaft and just install new components to change it over to HEI.  I later learned that I was incorrect and what I ordered was only an update kit for older distributors that had originally come with the old style, factory HEI.  This kit alone cost 2/3 more than what I paid for this whole distributor and I still would have had to source my own HEI distributor shaft.  I'm going to be sending the kit back.