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Finishing a car project is always tough. I don't mean tough like the Teutul's finishing a bike on time on "American Chopper". I mean that once the job is done, the car is all together and running well there's nothing left to do. There's no list of uncompleted items stuck to the wall with blue tape, no parts hanging from the garage door rail in fresh paint, no bolts and washers waiting by the drill press to be brushed back to life. The UPS guy doesn't come around anymore. Life is dull. To brighten things up you could always take the "project out and run the wheels off of it! And that's exactly what I did with 'ol' Blue'. As August was coming to a close the Carrera was coming to life. An exhibit at Lime Rock Park was on the schedule the first weekend of Sept. so that meant some seat time was needed to insure that AAA wouldn't be needed more that 100 miles from home. It was time to fire up the seven year project and go for a ride. This was the only 356 that I have ever owned that had a 12 volt electrical system. I was so used to the slow grind of a 6 volt starter that the first time the Carrera starter spun I went back to see if I forgotten to put the spark plugs back in place. When they were found to be properly installed I was convinced that the engine must have no compression. After all I was the one who built the engine, even with the Maestro's tapes to help, what were the chances that I had done everything correctly? No 356 ever spun that fast, it was almost like a real car. With plenty of fuel from the electric pump the engine fired on the second or third try. Well, fired might not be the right term, how about exploded? The timing was off by at least one plug (that would be 90 degrees) so the plug fired when the intake was open and the cylinder was full of a gas and air mixture. Sorta like what happens when you light a firecracker and throw it into a coffee can. It's the kind of noise that wakes the dog up out of a dead sleep. Fortunately the metal air cleaners were in place so the blast of flame didn't take the paint off the underside of the engine cover, but boy it sure lit up the garage. After some checking, some adjusting, some phone calls and a visit to George Nelson's garage it was purring like a kitten. I won't even tell you how far the timing was off before George put a timing light on it. So much for my ability to time these things by ear. That was probably a skill that I never had anyway and getting older hasn't helped. It actually runs really well and a little testing showed it to be even faster that the Speedster which is 300 lbs lighter. I know that I promised in last month's column that I would revel some restoration bloopers so I might as well fess up to some of the errors that were made on this long journey. Some were easy to fix just time consuming and some were tough to fix and time consuming. An easy fix was the recovered dash pad. At least it was easy the third time that I did it. These are tough because you come out with way too much material on the ends and they have to be trimmed down and tucked under the rubber door trim without leaving a bunch of lumps. The first time I did it the foam pad went on fine but I cut the vinyl material too short on one side and no amount of time with the heat gun was going to make it three inches longer. I called Auto Intl. on the left coast to get a replacement to discover that the vinyl piece was only $23, so not having a lot of confidence in my work I ordered two. It's a good thing that I did because it saved me the freight costs on the third piece that I wound up needing. I probably could have cut my total costs 20% if I just had free delivery. Tougher fixes were things that went bump in the night and had to be redone. Like a brake master cylinder that after all the new hard lines had been installed decided to leak and had to be replaced. I should've replaced it to start with but I just couldn't wait to stop work for a week so as to pay more freight charges and say hello to the UPS guy again. I had a vendor cut up a 356 C front trunk to get the brake fluid reservoir holder only to discover that the 356 B cars didn't have the reservoirs mounted in the trunk, they sat on top of the master cylinder. It was sorta like the guy at the junkyard who says, "if you buy a part that doesn't fit, now you have a spare.” I was about half way through the headlined installation when I saw a Discovery show with a Boyd Coddington interior guy say that the one tool that he couldn't live without was a heat gun. I wondered how the pros got all the wrinkles out of the material, after a few tries with my wife's hair dryer I knew the answer. And after the second try (the material was pretty cheap the second time, see dash pad above) it was amazing how good the job looked. Juan also said that a steamer was really helpful for forming carpet onto the floor of a '55 Chevy. Turns out that the wallpaper steamer at my local Ace hardware store does the same duty with no investment just a rental fee and I don't have to stumble over it for the next few years like the high powered pressure washer that I bought six years ago and used twice. I really learned about a lot of things that otherwise would not have occurred to me. Like how easily a razor blade cuts through headliner material when you're trying to open up a spot for the interior light. It seems that the further away you are from the correct opening the quicker it cuts into the wrong spot. Much easier that when trimming the same liner away from the door edge to allow the molding to lay flat. In that case the blade hangs up on the cotton batten under the headliner, drags it into a ball and pulls the liner away from the side rail. That's after it has left a cut in the paint that the rubber molding won't cover. Little lessons in humility. As in most of the things that went south on this project, I'm the only one that will ever know. The insulation inside the doors that I cut twice because I didn't like the way it bunched up at the window frame support. Nobody will ever see that. The sound deadener under the carpet that I painted to match the original that I took out, who's ever going to know I did that. I media blasted the rear window defroster tube and painted it semi gloss black after trying gloss black, only to discover that the rear panel under the window completely covers it from view. Oh well, I know that it's there and done correctly even of it did take me twice as long as it should've. KTF |
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