Ready to rumble … almost

The El Camino is back from Murphy Rod & Custom and Alamance Mufflers. Kelly and Josh Murphy installed all the mechanical systems in the car … the engine, transmission, air conditioning, etc. and Alamance Mufflers did the exhaust plumbing.

The first picture shows the engine installed in the car. It is wired and ready to go, lacking only a couple of power steering hoses, the cooling system and a battery to be complete.

The second photo shows the steering column and wheel in the car. I have seen steering wheels similar to that one, but that is the first time I have seen that wheel leather wrapped. I think it is a good look.

The third photo shows the Vintage Air installed under the dash. You are looking at the unit though the hole where the glove box is going to be. The owner isn’t going to need it now that winter has arrived, but he is going to like it just fine next summer.

The last three photos show the exhaust system. You can see why I send all my exhaust work, and recommend, Alamance Mufflers. They always do a neat and tidy job.

The exhaust is 2½-inch pipe all the way back with 22-inch Magnaflows to quite the LT1 small block under the hood. An “H” pipe is installed to smooth the exhaust pulse and the exhausts exit Chevelle style behind the rear wheels with turn-downs. Check out those bends over the axle in picture five.

If we just had the wiring harness in this baby would be ready to go. Well, the wiring harness and the interior … and doors, fenders, hood, tailgate, glass and cooling system.

But other than that, it is ready to go.

It’s déjà vu all over again

After removing the side mirrors and welding up the mounting holes, the door were ready to paint. Yesterday we got the doors primed and painted. You can see the doors fresh from painting, still in the booth, in the first two pictures.

After allowing the doors to dry over night, today we got cracking on wet sanding and polishing to return the shine to the point it was before we started hacking at the doors. You can see Chris polishing one of the door in the third picture.

The last two photos show the doors after they have been polished back to a brilliant shine. Now that the doors have had, in effect, two complete paint jobs, they are just about as protected from rust as any piece of metal can be.

The doors are going to look great with the new style windows in them. Moving the mirrors forward on the door is only going to help the look. Certainly worth every bit of the time and effort to move them.

Time for plan “B”

It was bound to happen … this build has been moving smoothly along with nary a problem. Until now. The owner delivered several boxes of parts removed from the car during the rust repair at Murphy Rod & Custom. Two of the parts that were to be reused were the vent window frames. The frames are made from unobtainium I guess because you simply cannot find replacement frames, new or used. Unfortunately for the owner one of the frames has some small rust spots in the chrome. That left him with three choices … use them as is, send them out for rechroming or don’t use them.

Option one isn’t really an option … this is too nice a car to put rusty parts on, even if the rust is minor. Option two is an option, but it’s expensive in both money and time … time that is beginning to be in short supply. That leaves option three, do without, the option the owner selected.

There is a kit available for the ’68-’72 El Camino that converts the door to use a single pane of glass as nearly all modern cars use. This option will cost about the same as the rechroming of the frames, but we can have the kit delivered and installed in just a couple of weeks.

Installing the kit isn’t hard … I have done them before, but it does require some modification to the door to remove bracing that was required by the vent window assembly. The owner also wanted to move the mirrors forward on the doors since the vent post is missing. The mirrors will look more “proper” for being moved forward … but it would have been nice to have known we were going to have to do this before we painted the doors.

The first photograph shows the bracing that is going to have to be removed. The next two photographs, numbers two and three, show Chris cutting the bracing out and grinding the edges smooth. This is really the extent of the modifications for the new door glass.

The next three pictures, numbers 4, 5 & 6, show how we filled the existing mirror holes. A small plug is cut to fit the holes as Chase demonstrates in the fourth picture. The paint is ground away to reveal bare metal so that the plug can be welded in as shown in pictures four and five.

After the holes are welded closed, the area is smoothed with body filler as shown in picture seven.

When the filler has hardened we sand it smooth, as seen in picture 8, and the primer applied to seal the repairs as shown in picture 9. Tomorrow we will sand the primer smooth before we paint the doors again. After the paint is thoroughly dry we will wet sand and buff the doors to put us right back were we started, but without mirror holes in the doors.

I think the owner is correct in his desire to move the mirrors forward on the door. When the car was built it made sense to have the mirrors mounted where they were to avoid having the vent window post in the way. But with the post gone the mirrors will look odd so far back on the door.

After the owner discovered the conversion kit he took a philosophical view of events by stating the single glass pane side windows sort of falls in line with the other modernization touches made to the car. Removing all the badges and marker lamps, shaving the rain-gutters … and removing the vent windows … they all give the car a retro-modern look that suites this car very well.

It’s too bad that we had to do this after the doors were painted … but a whole lot of life is how you handle plan “B.”

In that regard, I think this guy is going to be ok.

Like new again

Today we finished painting the sheet metal on the car. I think. We may turn up a few things here and there that need a new coat of paint, but I really think we are done painting Blackberry Pearl, the base color of the car.

The first photo is of the “smuggler box” cover painted to match the car. Considering how bad it looked when we started, it looks really, really, good now.

The second photo is the other end of the bed, the tailgate inside cover. The owner made a late evening run to the parts store to pick this piece up so we could complete the painting today. 

The next three photos, numbers three, four and five, are shots of various parts that came with the car cleaned up and painted. Picture three contains the head-lamp buckets and various braces. After looking at all the parts hanging there most of the day we started referring to this stand as the “body shop Christmas tree.”

The items in picture four are the tail-lamp mounting brackets. You won’t see these at all, they will be hidden inside the fenders, but they were so grungy that I couldn’t stand it so we cleaned an painted them too.

In picture five you can see the tailgate latch mechanisms. These are mounted to the edges of the tailgate and lock the tailgate in the upright position when they interlock with their mates on the edge of the bed. The only part you will see of these are the parts painted black. The rest of the mechanism will be hidden inside the tailgate.

In the sixth photograph I am hunched over the instrument panel wiring the gauges. It isn’t hard, but it is tedious cutting and fitting all the wiring to make everything work. I worked on it for a couple hours today but ran out of time before I finished, so you will probably see another shot of me looking much like this in a later entry.

Though the instrument panel isn’t fully wired, you can see what it will look like in picture seven. These are a new style of gauge recently introduced by Auto Meter called Black Diamond and they look fantastic, a perfect match for this car.

We have gone about as far as we can with the car until it comes back from Murphy Rod & Custom. About all we can do until then is wait for the paint to dry.

Staying busy

Work on the El Camino has kind of stalled while it is over at Murphy Rod & Custom having the mechanical bits installed. But we did put in a few hours working on a little of this and a little of that on it.

The first two pictures are of the hood latch assembly. It was a yucky nasty thing until Chris ran it through the sandblaster. After Chris finished with it looked brand new … all clean and shiny. Now it needs some paint, not only to protect it from rust but also to make it blend in and disappear in the inky shadows behind the grille.

Picture three shows the latch after the etching primer has been applied. Etching primer is used to bond to the bare metal and to provide a coating to promote the adhesion of the paint that is going to follow.

Finally, in picture four, you can see the latch painted in a nice flat black. As nice as it looks, it isn’t he most attractive thing on the car and painting it black will make it disappear behind the grille.

While the painting of the hood latch was going on, we completed the blocking on the bed panel that covers the “smuggler box,” what would be the rear seat foot well if this were a Chevelle instead of an El Camino. This was an original piece of the car and it was in rough shape, but it fit so well I decided it was worth the effort to save it instead of replacing it with an aftermarket piece and risk it not fitting as well.  There were a couple of times during the blocking of the panel that I wondered if I was making the proper choice, but now that it is done, I am very happy with the decision. You can see in picture five Chris blowing the dust off the panel after the blocking was complete.

Chris did most of the blocking on this panel, with a paint stick no less, because a regular block wouldn’t fit down into the grooves in the panel. You can see the blocked panel in picture six.

During the blocking process Chris uncovered a hole in the panel. It looks like it might be a place that something sharp, like maybe a heavy nail in some wood, was dropped on the panel punching a hole in it. What ever caused the hole, it couldn’t stay. You can see me welding up the hole in the seventh photograph, then grinding it smooth in picture eight. And in case you are wondering, yes, I was using the welding helmet of eye protection while grinding. I couldn’t find my safety glasses and welding helmet was handy.

After smoothing up the weld the panel was put in the booth and primed. The panel you see in picture nine looks a whole lot better than it did before we started work on it. This will be sanded again tomorrow to further smooth the surface and maybe, if everything goes according to plan, we will get the panel painted tomorrow too. If we are going to paint the top of the panel tomorrow, we needed to get the bottom of the panel painted today. After the primer dried enough to handle we hug it up for paint.

Chris has been hankering to try his hand with the paint gun. Since this is the bottom of the panel and will never be seen, short of removing it of course, I decided to let Chris have a go. After a little bit of coaching you can see Chris painting away in picture ten. I checked with the owner to make sure it was OK before I turned Chris loose but I needn’t have bothered. There wasn’t a single run in the entire panel. What is he trying to do, take my job?

Photograph eleven shows the panel painted in the same semi-gloss eggshell paint that we have used extensively on this car. The bottom of the panel can’t be seen so we didn’t send any time smoothing it up to make it look nice. We always go the extra distance to make our project cars look their best, but I don’t see any reason to spend a customers money making something that will never be seen, pretty. Like the owner said one day during a similar discussion, “If someone is going to comment on that, they better have a nicer one.” I think that is a good attitude.

The photographs beginning with picture 12 are a collection of photographs, all dealing with the lighting on this car.

The owner wanted to go with LED (Light Emitting Diode) lighting where possible. Picture 12 shows the six LED’s, two each in red, white and yellow that will be used to replace the turn signals, brake-lamps and backup-lamps.

LED’s work differently than old fashioned incandescent bulbs. With incandescent bulbs, the standard type of automotive lamp, you stick a clear bulb behind a colored lens and bada boom, bada bing, you have a brake-lamp, turn signal … whatever. But since LED’s emit light in a very tight spectrum you must match the color of the LED to the lens otherwise the perceived light will be much dimmer than it would be otherwise.

The replacement head-lamps, seen in picture 13, will accept the modern H1 and H4 head-lamps, the same bulbs used in modern cars. These high-quality head-lamp assemblies will throw considerably more light on the road than the old-fashioned sealed beams ever did. We are also putting in the highest wattage bulbs available for on road use. The bulbs look blue but when lit they produce a bright pure white light that makes this car much safer to drive at night.

Because this car will have modern wiring and lighting we don’t have to worry about the dim brake- and tail-lamps like this car had when new. Since safety won’t be compromised we added a light tint to the tail-lamp lenses to tone down the redness of the lenses. You can see the difference between the standard lens on the right and the tinted lens on the left in picture 14. The darkness of the tint is variable but this is about as light a tint as can be applied and still have the tint be seen.

Picture 15 shows the other lens tinted to match but before the clear coat is applied to bring the shine back up.

Picture 16 shows the completed lenses. As you can see the lenses are still red but the tint takes away some of the vibrancy of the red. This is about a 5% tint, which means the lens will pass about 5% less light than it would without the tint. But since these LED’s are just as bright, or brighter, and light up faster than incandescent bulb, nothing is lost in safety even as you add some style points.

Picture 17 shows the lenses assembled in their bezels. They are going to look great against this dark colored car.

The owner has purchased some rechomed OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) bumpers, which you can see in picture 18. They look great, better than new even, and the owner wasted no time putting his new lamps into the bumpers. You can see the parking-lamps/turn signals in front bumper in picture 19 and the backup lamps in the rear bumper in picture 20.

We’ve been staying busy on the El Camino, getting some of the little things done. This means that as soon as the car comes back from Murphy Rod & Custom we can begin the wiring and assembly process. We are sooo close to being finished I can almost see the finish line.

That’s better

Kelly Murphy, the fabricator, needed these brackets off the old steering column to install the new steering column. The brackets were a little … I think the term is yucky … so we cleaned them up and gave them a quick coat of paint so they looked like something.

The car has come too far to start taking shortcuts now.

Reflecting on a job well done

Because we have two polishers in the shop, Chase spent some time after he finished painting the doors polishing the header panel for the El Camino.

As soon as the car returns from having the motor dropped in we will be ready to start assembly.

Updating a classic

The wiring harness for the El Camino arrived today. The American Autowire Classic Update harness is the harness that I always recommend to my customers. I have wired numerous cars using the various American Autowire products and I have never had a problem. Well, not one you could blame on the harness anyway.

The second and third pictures show what comes in the box. It looks intimidating but American Autowire makes it easy to install. I’m no Thomas Edison and I can figure it out, so how hard can it be?

The owner of this car wanted all the bells and whistles when it comes to the electrical system. I will be installing, for the first time for me, some of the expansion modules that American Autowire offers. One module adds a slow dim feature to the interior lights. The other module bypasses the head-lamp switch so that the car can run high powered head-lamps. The head-lamp module also offers a “flash to pass” feature as found on modern cars.

Wiring a car is always a challenge because each car is different. Add the full LED lighting, the expansion modules and the high powered head-lamps … that is going to make this one even more fun.

See ya later, alligator

Today the El Camino left for Murphy Rod & Custom to have all the mechanical bits installed, things like the drive train, brakes, fuel system, steering and air conditioning. You can see it going on the truck in the first two pictures. What the pictures don’t show is that the truck hadn’t much more gotten out of the drive when the heavens opened up. Sigh … Well, that is why we apply the bed-liner inside, but Kelly is going to have fun sopping up all the water out of the thing.

Since Kelly is going to install the rest of the braking system, we had to get cracking on getting the brake booster and master cylinder painted. You can see the power brake booster in picture three and the master cylinder in picture four painted in the same semi-gloss black as the rest of the car. The owner is going to have to take care to not spill brake fluid on the parts, or if he does it will need to be wiped up promptly. It is worth the hassle and extra care because I think it looks a lot better painted.

The last picture, number 5, is of one of the hood hinges. Since we were painting, might as well paint everything, right?

The car will be gone for a couple of weeks or so before it comes back here for wiring and final assembly. But while it is gone we can make some progress on some of the other projects that have been languishing while we worked on the El Camino.

A little of this, a little of that

Normally the photographs on this blog are arranged chronologically to show the progress throughout the day. Today there were so many things going at once that the pictures, in the order taken, were very hard to follow. So for this post I arranged the pictures together in groups by task so that all the pictures that pertain to a task are together, then they are sorted chronologically within their task groups. This should make all the stuff we did today a little easier to follow. I hope.

In the first photo Chis prepares the new fuel tank for paint. The tank that came with the car would have had to be replumbed for the fuel injected engine, and who knows what kind of gunk may have been in it or if it leaked, so the owner just opted to buy a new tank, complete with new fuel pump, return lines and sender. It just seemed simpler and, probably, cheaper in the long run.

The second picture shows the tank scuffed, cleaned, and ready for paint.

The third photograph shows the tank painted in the same semi-gloss egg shell finish as all the other black parts of the car. Not only does it make the tank look better, it also protects it from rust.

In the fourth picture Chris is sanding the cover for the “smuggler’s box”, the foot well that isn’t used on an El Camino because it doesn’t have a rear seat. Someone was working on this panel all day because it was badly pitted and needed a lot of sanding before it would be presentable. Because the ridges are so close together a regular sanding block wouldn’t work so a paint stirrer stick was used instead. Thank goodness the owner had to replace the floor. If we had to do this to the entire bed floor I would have … done it I guess, but I wouldn’t have liked it one little bit, and neither would have Chris.

Picture five shows how the panel was left it at the end of the day, ⁹/₁₆‘s complete. You can see the “block” lying on the cover, along with all the sandpaper that was used today.

I got in my share of the sanding today also. Picture six shows me working to get the console sanded and ready to paint. The console is in the booth in picture seven, ready for it’s coat of paint.

Photograph number eight shows the console painted up in the same black we used on the console yesterday as well as the black parts of this El Camino. While this console doesn’t have quite the pop and sizzle that the console we painted yesterday day does, it isn’t a total plain Jane. A piece of brushed stainless steel goes on the top to give it a bit of zing.

While the owner isn’t trying to fool anyone into thinking this is an SS car, he does like some of the styling details that the SS cars had, so he is picking and choosing the bits he likes. Like the SS grille. In picture nine I am taping up the standard grille so that the mesh can be painted black, like an SS car. It is in the booth, along with the console, ready for paint in picture ten.

Pictures 11 and 12 show the grille after the paint has been applied. Once again this is the semi-gloss black paint we have been using on the rest of the car. When the owner showed me pictures of a SS Chevelle with the blacked out grille I had to agree, this nearly black car will look good with a black grille. Sinister, but good.

In picture 13 Chase, waiting while various parts were prepared for paint, is working on the primary project of the day … putting down the sound deadening. Every person in the shop got in on the work at one time or another today.

I have never used this brand of sound deadening before. It is called Rattle Trap and is a product of Fat Mat. The owner of the El Camino provided us with the product to use and it seemed to work about like the other products I have used, attenuating the metal so it no longer has the tinny ring to it.

While Chase painted, Jordan took over placing the sound deadener. Jordan thought he was going to have to sand the smuggler box cover so when he was told he could lay sound deadner if he wanted to he jumped at the chance. Picture 14 shows him all wadded up in a car, like only the young can do, as he presses a piece of the deadener down to make it stick.

It looked like Jordan was having so much fun I decided to get in on the act in picture 15. As you can see, I wasn’t quite as graceful, nor do I fold up into as compact a package, as Jordan.

Pictures 16-19 show the car covered in the sound deadening material. Unlike the car shows on television we didn’t just go nuts and cover everything, but then it doesn’t seem that you need to. The difference this made, even with the small gaps and holes, is just amazing. The running joke in the shop was who ever was in the car would pretend they couldn’t hear what you were saying, because of the sound deadener, even though the car has no doors or glass in it yet. Yeah, we have a good time at JMC AutoworX.

Picture 20 shows that after a week the header is finally shown some love. This is with just the base coat applied, but it still looks good, if a little on the dull side. The dullness is because the base coat dries to a near flat finish, but we are going to fix that.

The base coat might dry dull, but picture 21 shows the clear dries anything but dull. The clear deepens and enriches the colors and provide the luster that makes automotive finishes so beautiful.

The tailgate has a small el Camino logo painted on it, and we didn’t want the front of the car to be jealous, so you can see in picture 22 that we put one on the front as well. Now you can tell what this strange cross between a car and truck is, coming or going.

The last picture shows how the SS stripes from the hood continue onto the header panel. Those corners look great, but they are a real pain in the … well, let’s just say they are hard to get right.

We have positively hammered on this car all week and I am extremely pleased with the progress we made. In fact we have made so much progress, we are stuck until the drive train goes into the car … and that is supposed to happen next week. The car leaves Monday for the Murphy Rod & Custom shop for a heart transplant.

Kelly is going to install all the mechanical systems on the car … engine, transmission, breaks, steering etc. When the car comes back it will be … well … a car instead of a rolling metal sculpture.