Sprucing Up The Place

Some of my favorite videos on YouTube are quite polished with nice music, fancy editing effects, and appealing graphics. As I’ve promoted before, I’ve been posting videos of my LeMans restoration for quite a while. My productions have the music (and I’ll try to mix it up) and some basic editing, but poor graphics. I decided to step up my game with a nicer image and font for the intro and ending.

I’ve always loved the formal look of the LeMans script, so I wanted to use that. Unfortunately, I could not find any font in my PC’s library that matched exactly. Instead I decided to just use a photo of the script in place. I don’t have any good pictures of my car with the script in place, but, after some hunting on the web, I managed to find a decent photo of a dark blue 1965 LeMans. The resolution was high enough that I could zoom in on the rear of the quarter-panel and get something usable. I cropped the photo and did some playing in Photoshop. The image at the top of the blog is what I came up with.

On to other accomplishments. I got the engine running and the transmission turning the rear wheels in my Episode 14 video. The front of the car is now without bodywork and hood and fender removal process is covered in Episode 15. Episode 16 shows how I repaired the front wiring harness where a thoughtless rodent dined upon insulation and conductors. In my last blog post, I wrote about rearranging the garage, and Episode 17 gives before and after views. Finally, yesterday I uploaded Episode 18 where I’m working on applying filler to a door and working on the front fenders.



The fender work included removing all the clips, and rubber bumpers, wire brushing the inside surface of the passenger fender, bumping out a couple dings in the same fender followed by cleaning and then brushing on a coat of Rustoleum Rusty Metal Primer.





I’m whittling away at these projects, but getting all the bodywork refinished is going to take me years at this rate, hence the new tagline to my blog, “Lessons in patience …”

In the color race, Go Mango is currently in the lead.

More Room

I thought that getting the LeMans running would solve my workspace issue. I would just start up the car, drive it out into the driveway, throw a tarp over it, and have the entire space (minus all the garage stuff - workbenches, tool chest, spare engine, etc.) to strip paint, hammer dents, prime panels, and work on one of the family's daily-drivers when required. I've changed my mind. I don't want the LeMans outside, and I think I can make it work.

Through the magic of AutoCAD, I can show the current floorplan versus the proposed one.



The LeMans will be on wheel dollies, so when I need the welder, I can move the car around and get to it. But since the car is so rust-free, the only welder usage I think I have ahead of me is pulling out a few dents. My hope is to implement this rearrangement Friday evening.

Speaking of bodywork, it's looks like this coming Saturday will be warm enough for me to open up the doors and get out the paint stripper. Sunday will be cold again, but I'm hoping that the heaters will get the garage up to temp so I can lay down some epoxy primer over the bare metal (after extinguishing the kerosene flames first).

Last weekend I went hunting for LeMans documentation I knew I had from back in the day. My hunt was successful, so part of episode 16 of my YouTube video series includes sharing the stuff I got from Pontiac Historic Services. Links to PDF files of the different literature follow:

• PHS Cover Letter 
• Build Card and Decoding 
• AMA Tempest Specs 
• The Tempest Line Story 
• The Tempest Engineering Story 
• Storage Suggestions

By the way, the arrow is currently pointing at Atomic Orange Candy for the LeMans exterior.

How'd I Do?

It's VERY sad that it took me so very long to get to all the items on my to-do list dated nearly two months old, but here's how it went (original list in italics slightly reodered for clarity). Much of the following activities are available for your viewing pleasure on Youtube.

Episode 11 of 1965 LeMans Restoration
Episode 12 of 1965 LeMans Restoration
Episode 13 of 1965 LeMans Restoration

Interior:

• Bolt down the driver's seat. Done without drama.
  
• Bolt the column support to the underside of the dash. I couldn't find the support, so I just tightened the rope holding the column in place - very sketchy, but it's not permanent.

Brakes:

• Check the  fluid level in the master cylinder. A little low, so I topped it off with Synthetic DOT 3.
  
• Inspect the lines. As I slid around the underside of the car, I noticed some of the metal lines looked new-ish, while others were probably original. All the rubber hoses were changed out when I was working on the car back in 2003. At some point, I'll replace the original ones with new, but for now they aren't leaking so they'll do.
  
• Do a hard, harder, HARDER test on the brake pedal. To check for a weak spot in the system, I jammed the pedal and, happily, it did not yield.
  
• Check the parking brake. Liberal amounts of WD-40 loosened up all the e-brake bits, and it now works smoothly and effectively.
  

Fuel:

• Come up with a temporary, gravity-feed gas tank so I can bypass the existing fuel lines and tank. Instead of going with something temporary, I attacked the stock fuel system. I replaced most of the rubber hoses adding a third fuel filter between the tank and the pump, blew out the supply and return metal lines, checked the state of the fuel tank (just a bit of old gas), dumped in about three gallons of 93 octane, and called it good.
  
• Install the rebuilt carburetor. The original Carter with it's compliment of new soft parts was bolted to the intake manifold and the fuel, vacuum, and hot air (for the choke) lines were all mated.

Spark:

• Find the ignition key. For those that don't know, I've had twelve Corvairs pass through my life. About half were parted out since they were rusty beyond saving. Needless to say, I've accumulated quite a few Briggs & Stratton ignition and trunk keys.It only took about five minutes to find a key that worked, so I was good-to-go.
  
  
• Clean the points and re-set. Carefully, so as not to lose them, I removed the two screws holding the points in place. After which I noticed I could've just loosened them and the points would have been removable. A quick rub of the contact surfaces with some fine sandpaper, and they were put back into their distributor home. The gap, rather the dwell, was set using the dwell-meter while cranking the engine with the plugs removed. This required me to finally break down and spend the twenty dollars on a used battery from my favorite pick-a-part.
  
• Clean the spark plugs and check gap. All the plugs were dirty, but not bad, so a quick trip to the wire wheel followed by a gapping at the manual's 0.035 inch and they were ready for re-installation, but I left them out initially so I could spin the engine without compression. This would, hopefully, get the oil pumped onto all the lube-loving surfaces. The plugs were eventually screwed into place and the leads were popped into place.
  
• Check the plug leads for damage. They all looked fine, so were reused.
  
• Clean and install the rotor and cap. They both looked brand new, so I just reinstalled.  Here's where I hit a little hiccup. I thought I had the cap properly seated when I twisted the hold-downs, but I was wrong - it ever so slightly askew. The following fifteen minutes of frustration finally ended with me discovering that this had been the cause of the intermittent spark. Once the the cap was seated properly, lo and behold the engine started right up.
  

So the engine runs without any scary noises or smoky emissions and the brakes brake without drama, and, with the car up on four jackstands, I was able to confirm the transmission goes into gear and will spin the rear wheels both frontwards and back. The car is now mobile.

Back to the smoky emissions, I will admit a faux pas. The non-functioning, disconnected A/C compressor hangs off the passenger front of the engine blocking easy access to the number two spark plug hole. While I was struggling to reinstall said plug, I decided to remove the compressor. Only three (or four) bolts, so it was easy to get it out of the way. In my haste to get the last plug in so I could try to fire up the engine, I didn't realize that two of the bolts were head bolts (DUH!), so the initial running of the engine wasn't without a little exhaust gas puffing from the front. Once I discovered my foolishness, I reinstalled just the bracket and torqued the two big bolts to 95 foot-pounds. I didn't re-start the engine after that, but I'm confident (actually hopeful) that I didn't cause a head gasket failure.

I have been out to the garage one time since that eventful weekend of engine startup. I returned to bodywork mixing up a few batches of Bondo and applying them to the passenger door that I

This weekend the lovely Loriann will be away with her church youth on a winter retreat, so I'll be stocking up on kerosene and Bondo to finish the bodywork on the passenger door and starting on the next body panel (a fender perhaps, or I might go big and do the hood).

Setting Priorities

With high temps for the next week or so predicted to only be in the 40s and 50s, I need to make sure I can use the garage as a paint booth. That means I need to get the LeMans drivable, even if it's just in and out of the garage. Since I recently completed the carburetor rebuild, "all" that's left to get a running, stopping car is the following:

Fuel:

• Come up with a temporary, gravity-feed gas tank so I can bypass the existing fuel lines and tank
• Install the rebuilt carburetor

Spark:

• Clean the points and re-set
• Clean the spark plugs and check gap
• Check the plug leads for damage
• Clean and install the rotor and cap
• Find the ignition key

Interior:

• Bolt down the driver's seat
• Bolt the column support to the underside of the dash

Brakes:

• Check the  fluid level in the master cylinder
• Inspect the lines
• Do a hard, harder, HARDER test on the brake pedal
• Check the parking brake

Once all that is done, the car should fire up and idle so I can adjust the carburetor. I'll then say a prayer and put the transmission in gear. To check the ATF level the transmission should be warm and in Park.

I bought a tube of Bondo hardener to replace the failed one (see my video). Now I can finish off the Bondo in the can and smooth out the passenger door. Next , I'll need to shoot some coats of hi-build primer before I can lay down any paint. Speaking of paint, I've narrowed the color choice down to  Wild Pomegranate Metallic and Go Mango (or some orange close to this like Kirker's Atomic Orange Candy).



A hard decision I've recently made is to stick with front bucket seats like the car came from the factory with. The deciding factors for this were 1) I really like the stock, '65, parchment, vinyl interior, and 2) I'd really like to put a manual transmission in this car someday. I am having SO much driving my stick-shift Mustang, I'd love to have the same experience when I'm finally behind the wheel of the LeMans. There's a pedal conversion kit available, but I'd still need to source things like the transmission, bellhousing, clutch, and shifter. That project is for another day, but now I can accommodate it.

Slowly, but Surely

Last Sunday I was able to work on the LeMans. I continued working on the doors, this time pounding and prying the dents around the side view mirror on the driver's door. Click here to watch the YouTube video I posted. At the end of the video, I've finished applying the Bondo, but that wasn't the end of my car work for the day. After setting aside the driver's door, I moved on to the passenger door with it's nasty crease. Not shown in that video, but in a video that's in the works, is my whining about how hard it would be to deal with the significant crease in the lower part of the passenger door. The following images are screen captures from the raw video and compare the bad (creased) to the good (factory-made).


After spending some frustrating moments trying to pound the crease out from the inside of the door, I gave up and decided there had to be way, using my MIG welder, pull out the dent. I needed to do it on the cheap, so that's what I searched for a day later. Not surprisingly someone had made a video of their cheap and effective means of pulling dents out of car panels. I will make the lever shown and use washers I've got lying around. It looks like the only thing I'll need to buy is the s-hook.

Then, for something completely different, I proceeded to remove the carburetor and disassemble it. I'm going to give it a soak in carburetor cleaner before putting all back together with the new thermostat coil and rebuild kit that I picked up at the Hershey Swap Meet.

Bench or Buckets

Way, way back in the day, I had high hopes that the LeMans would be on the road before my daughters grew up. I thought, back then, that seating for six was an imperative, so I bought a bench seat and a steering column out of a mid-60s GM A-body (I think it was a '66 Buick Special - my memory is hazy on 20-year-old events). Well, time has flown by and the daughters have flown the coop, so it's just the lovely Loriann and me. Now that I’ve finally gotten serious about getting this car back on the road, I needed to do some online shopping for upholstery. Since it was my intention to still use the bench seat (so I could have the lovely Loriann snuggled up next to me during our rides together), I went shopping for a parchment (white) vinyl bench seat cover that matched the pattern my car came with.



Exhaustive searching ended up being more frustrating than fruitful. All I could find were the following images online without explanation as to whether it was original or reproduction. I had some hope that, since Pontiac made a front bench seat in vinyl, some vendor would reproduce it.



During my search I did unearth the following image from Pontiac’s Color and Interiors Brochure where they presented the offerings for ’65 A-bodies. This showed that only the LeMans and GTO got the top-of-the-line vinyl (Morrokide):




So, currently, the only ’65 front seat upholstery available being reproduced is for bucket seats. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since I imagine most, if not all, LeMans and GTOs were sold with the sporty buckets, so the demand for a replacement bench seat cover is probably pretty small.

From everything I've read and seen, at least '64 thru '66 used the same seat frames, so I  expanded my search and came up with another option. YearOne and Ames Performance sell '66 Tempest seat covers in black, red, metallic red, and gold vinyl that will fit my front bench and rear convertible seats. I'm thinking the following combination may work.

Does the pattern in the seat complement the pattern in the door panels? That is the deciding factor. I just sent a technical request to YearOne to confirm the same gold viny is used in both their '65 and '66 upholstery. We'll see.

In the end, is the best choice to stick with bucket seats?

I Hate Making Decisions

It seems like every video I've recently posted on YouTube contains some mention of my struggles to settle on the right paint scheme for the LeMans. It's been a monthly, if not more frequent, activity scanning the web for different colors. Currently, at the top of my list is Sunfire Red, offered by GM in 1964 on Pontiacs.



It was code WA3240, which also appeared on Buicks as Coral Mist.

Last spring I went to the Charlotte Autofair with my buddy, Bill. My shopping list included paint, so, with the above two images residing on my phone, I wandered the rows of vendors at looking for an affordable source for this color auto paint. Early in the afternoon I came upon a table stacked high with mixed cans of auto paint. Each can had a color name, but nothing else to indicate what shade lay within. The booth's salesman wandered over, and I showed him the GTO photo on my phone and asked if he knew if there was a match on his table. After a bit of searching, he unburied a quart can of Wild Pomegranate Red Metallic. He then produced a paint chart that convinced me to spend the $35 for the paint plus catalyst. Discount Autobody Supply carries Kirker paints, as does a number of other online sources.

The more I stare at it, the more I like it better than Sunfire Red. It's got some orange and gold to it.



These are the other colors under consideration.

Iris Mist

Go-Mango

Spicy Orange


Next I need to lay out the interior decisions that have to be made. Arghh!