It’s a Process

As I announced in my 3-3-18 post, I’ve decided to bump up the priority of Mikhaila’s Corvair (named Scarlett) so that she can have it to drive sooner (within a few months) rather than later (within a few years). I should state here that, for the first time, one of my children has more cars than I do. In addition to the aforementioned Corvair convertible, Mikhaila also has her daily-driver MX-3 and the Golf GTI we’re working to put on the road. Speaking of the latter, this past weekend she and I got the new clutch installed, the transmission put back into place, and everything reinstalled and hooked back up. Yay team. We did all this in very close confines (see above layout). Once I confirm the clutch take-up is where it should be, I’ll drop it off the jackstands and drive it out of the garage. That’ll allow us to move to the next task, replacing the heater core. For that, though, I’ll drive the LeMans out of the garage and put the GTI in its place. There’s no way I can strip out the interior and dash in its current confines – it’ll take the entire garage.



During the, hopefully, short time the LeMans is outside, it’ll be under a tarp with most of the loose parts pieces piled in a corner of the garage.

Once the GTI has its heat restored, it’ll leave the garage and Scarlett will take its place. When Mikhaila’s not available, I’ll be working on finishing LeMans’ body and interior parts. Could be a busy Spring – I sure hope so.

Interior Color Scheme

To while away the hours until the GTI clutch job is done and I can get back to work on the LeMans (and write some blogs and post some videos), I’m trying to come up with things to write about.

To preface this post, I'll state that the body paint color current leading the race is Wild Pomegranate Metallic. Now on to the post.

Serendipitously, while on YouTube this morning, one of the recommended videos was of a beautiful ’65 LeMans convertible – red with a black top and white interior (is that black over red over white?). As I watched the show, I was struck by how nice the interior looked with the red body paint extended into the interior onto the doors and the bottom half of the dash. As I reminder, here’s what the factory intended for a white interior like mine has (photo taken off the web - not mine). Comparing this to the interior of the YouTube car, I like the bling.

versus

Some Here’s some more '65 interiors to feast your eyes upon. Nice stuff, eh?



Something else else that popped up on YouTube was a set of short videos of a low-mileage (68,000) '65 4-door with the original cloth interior. One thing I'd never noticed before was the Grand Prix style concave rear window that came on the 4-doors. So much of this car is so very cool.

Here's the link to the tour of the car's exterior.

Here's the link to the tour of the car's interior.

Here's the link to more of the car's interior, as well as driving.

Grandma’s Car

The second of the big-body Pontiacs that I’ve owned was a ’66 Catalina four-door hardtop. While living in Lynchburg, VA back in 1998, I was driving by an auto repair shop and, parked in their side lot, was a big, beige Pontiac with exactly the same front and rear ends as my Catalina convertible. There I was, thinking about replacing the rusty ‘vert with another big-body Pontiac. Here was a replacement basically in my backyard. I knocked on the door of the shop, and the proprietor answered. I got right to the point and asked him if the car was for sale. He replied that it was, and that he needed to get $750 for it. Coincidentally, that was exactly what I’d bought the convertible for, and was now what I was selling it for. The seller went on to tell me he’d been this car's mechanic for many years, as the previous owner was a local widow. He added that, once her husband had died, she rarely drove the car, hence the 85,000 original miles. I took the car out for a test drive and everything worked, although the engine was a little sluggish. A thorough body and frame inspection (I wasn't going to buy another flexible, rust-bucket) showed the body and chassis to be very solid. Figuring the stars had aligned, I told him I’d be back with cash the next afternoon.

At this time, I owned way too many vehicles. In addition to the Catalina and LeMans convertibles, I also had a daily-driver Mazda with a couple hundred thousand miles on it. With cars stacked up at the end of the driveway, there was a moratorium on adding any more vehicles to the stable. Being the optimist I was (and still am), I figured I'd be able to quickly sell either the Mazda or the rusty 'vert, so I went against better judgement and parked (read: hid) my new purchase at a friend’s house. Unfortunately, about a week later my friend needed the yard space for a new project of his own, so, tail between my legs, I fessed up to my lovely wife who was not happy about the situation. I told her that I was selling two cars since the 4-door would become my year-round daily-driver, but that didn’t really cool her down. I did sell both cars within a couple months, but Loriann was never a fan of the 4-door.


After registering the car, the next thing I did was buy a carburetor rebuild kit and deal with the 2-barrel Rochester. With the car running better, but still not good enough, I spent some of the money I got from selling the Mazda on a full tune-up kit. Then the engine was idling smoothly and pulling strongly.

About a year after getting the car, I was driving home from somewhere close by (fortunately) and pulling up to a stop sign, when the front end jerked accompanied with a bang. I got out of the car and discovered the right front wheel was now angled in severely at the top. I limped the car home where further investigation showed a broken (missing) upper control arm bushing. Kanter supplied the parts for the front-end rebuild which my buddy, Bill, and I did on the street in front of my house. Thank goodness I didn’t live in a neighborhood with a homeowner’s association.

I also fixed the clock. This was my first experience with an old car clock. I carefully disassembled it, figuring out how it all worked. Then I cleaned and oiled the pertinent parts, and put it all back together. Lo and behold, after grounding the housing and putting twelve volts to the lead, the electromagnet did its thing winding the spring, and the second hand started its rotation.

The car came with the fender skirts in the trunk – one of them rather mangled from some incident. After some beating and banging, I was able to get it to go on and stay on. To me that really completed the long, low look Pontiac designers intended for the car.

Some other features of this car I really liked included its size, the engine torque, the delicate shifter and blinker lever, and the color. I wouldn't have thought I'd like a boring light brown car, but when Pontiac's Mission Beige was cleaned and polished, I was a fan of tan.

A couple years after getting the car, I accepted a transfer to Long Island, NY. The company was paying to move our household goods, but I couldn’t get them to foot the bill for moving the convertibles. By that time, we’d traded our MPV for a Suburban, so I rented a trailer from U-Haul. The big Cat’ was such a wide-body, that when I tried to drive it up onto the trailer, its wheels overhung on each side. I ended up driving it the nearly five hundred miles to our new home. No issues, thankfully. Sadly, my commute to work from our home in Port Jefferson was much longer than it had been in Lynchburg, so I made the hard decision to trade it for something far more frugal – a ’63 Chevy Corvair (a story for another blog).

The Catalina Convertible

Since work on the LeMans is at a standstill until the GTI clutch is replaced (kit arrives Wednesday), I thought I’d share the story of the Catalina convertible I owned back in the nineties.

At some point in early ‘97, as I looked out my kitchen window and gazed upon a Pontiac convertible (the LeMans) under a blue tarp and parked at the end of my driveway, I got it in my head that I needed another Pontiac convertible; a running, driving one that I could enjoy immediately, rather than one that was still many, many hours of effort from being roadworthy.

Twenty-one years have passed since I made the decision to bring a second Pontiac into the stable, so the details of how I discovered that someone in Arlington, VA was selling a 1966 Catalina droptop are blurry. I don’t believe it was Craigslist, even though the internet says CL was around then. How I was able to peruse the classifieds of the Washington Post is unknown, but I think that’s where I found it. I had a nice phone call with the seller, where he swore the car ran well and the power top worked, but there were some rust issues. After a conversation with the lovely, and supportive, Loriann and another phone call to the seller, and we were set for a mid-day Saturday meet-up.

After I loaded a jack, jackstand, and some cardboard to facilitate the upcoming inspection, we made the three hour drive up from Lynchburg, where we found the car parked on a residential street. The seller came out and I pored over the car inside and out. Yes, there was definitely some Bondo behind the maroon paint, but it seemed to be holding. The floors were intact, albeit with crude patches. The frame did have some rust through, however, but I quickly convinced myself it wasn’t terminal. The seller joined me on the test-drive where he shared how he didn’t have a place to keep the car, and, while he loved driving it, he wanted to move it on to someone who could take better care of it. During the drive the car ran fine - decent acceleration, smooth idling, and everything important worked as he’d promised. One event occurred during the drive that should’ve have warned me off the purchase – while driving over some railroad tracks I felt some flexing in the body. Not enough to cause a door to pop open, but certainly significantly more than normal. Since the test drive was made with the top down, spring was right around the corner, and the price was only $750, I was sold and bought the car.


The drive back home went off without a hitch, and, after transferring the title and getting antique tags, I had myself a wonderful daily-driver. My commute was less than six miles a day, so the ten miles to the gallon the car was giving me wasn’t a big deal. Sliding behind the wheel on the big bench seat, turning the key to fire up the 389 V8, and pressing a switch to drop the top is a wonderful way to start one’s daily drive.

There were many features of that car I loved beyond the droptop including the bench seat (room for our family of six), the slim, delicate shifter, the torquey engine, and the color scheme. I still remember family outings to the local ice cream parlor and being thankful for the easy-cleaning Morrokide upholstery.

A few weeks after I got the car, I visited a local body shop to get an estimate on patching the frame. The guy took a quick look at the underside, and told he wouldn’t touch the job. In fact he recommended I not drive the car. Something about, “one good bump and it’s going to break in two.” Well, I’d already put the car over far more than one good bump, so I didn’t heed his warning and kept driving the car. I did, however, make plans for replacing the frame. I’d found a wrecking yard down in North Carolina that specialized in older cars, and a phone call confirmed they had a ’66 Catalina convertible chassis he’d sell me for a couple hundred dollars. I rented a tow dolly, and my car-buddy, Bill, and I spent a Saturday fetching it. That adventure will be a blog post in itself someday.

The next step in re-framing the car was to look at what it would take to pull the body off the current, swiss-cheesed frame. I put the car up on jackstands and went looking for the body bolts. What I found instead was a whole lot of fiberglass. The forward portion of the trunk wasn’t metal anymore – it was now fiberglass. Much of the metal under the back seat was gone – it was now fiberglass. I was now afraid the body wouldn’t hold together if I tried taking it off what was left of the chassis. The whole “breaking in two” thing was a real risk.

So, what was I to do now? Keep driving the car every day of course. I enjoyed it for a second driving season before another ’66 Catalina – a low-mileage, only-drove-it-on-Sundays, our-door hardtop – joined the stable (a story for another blog post). At that point, I had to get rid of some cars, and, sadly, the flexible car as well as my previous daily-driver, an ’84 Mazd with well over two hundred thousand miles, had to go. If memory serves me I put the convertible up for sale on “Smoke Signals” (the Pontiac-Oakland Club’s monthly magazine). I listed it for $750 and threw in the replacement chassis for free. A couple months later, I got a phone call from a guy in Nashville, TN. I was very up front with him regarding the condition of the car, but all he seemed to care about was whether it would make the five hundred mile drive back to his home. I told him that, mechanically, the car was very reliable. That convinced him to buy a one-way plane ticket, and make plans for the next weekend when I picked him at the local airport, drove him to my house, accepted his pile of fifties, gave him the keys and the signed title, and watched as he drove the car heading east. I never heard from him again, so I guess everything worked out.

He did not want the chassis, so I changed my Smoke Signals’ ad to sell just the chassis for $100. No takers. After a couple months, I called the wrecking yard where I’d purchased it, and asked if he’d take it back and give me some credit towards other parts. He told me he wasn’t in the business of taking back parts, but he understood my situation and grudgingly agreed to give me one hundred dollars credit.

The following Saturday was cloudy and cold, but Bill and loaded the front of the chassis on a tow-dolly, Hitched it up to the family mini-van and drug it back to North Carolina. Once we arrive and unloaded the chassis, we went hunting for LeMans parts – specifically a bench seat and a steering column with the shifter. We found the former in a ’64 Tempest and the latter in a ’67 Skylark. Those and couple other little items were loaded into the MPV, and Bill and I drove back to Lynchburg.

Now I’m trying to get rid of the bench seat and steering column since I’ve made the decision to keep the LeMans as it came from the factory (bucket seats and console shift) rather than turn it into a six-passenger vehicle.

In my next post I’ll share the story of the aforementioned 4-door.

I Have a Plan

After Wednesday’s disheartening post, I’m much more upbeat. My change of attitude came, mostly, because of a phone call with my car-buddy Bill the next day. We went back-and-forth about what made the most sense for me at this time in my life; how I’d feel if, after 30 years, I get rid of the LeMans; is Mikhaila really going to find the time to help me get her Corvair on the road; are there any ways I can carve out more time in the garage. With his help, I came up with the following plan which really wasn’t any of my presented options.

1. Don’t sell the LeMans.
2. Finish the GTI’s clutch job ASAP and get it out of the garage.
3. Roll the LeMans, minus its doors, fenders, wheelwells, hood, and trunklid, out into the driveway and cover it with a tarp.
4. Put the GTI back in the garage and replace the leaky heater core and get it on the road.
5. Clean the MX-3 and sell it ASAP.
6. Move Mikhaila’s Corvair into the garage.
7. Put the LeMans back in the stall behind the garage.
8. Use my car-time to work on Mikhaila’s Corvair when she’s available and the LeMans body pieces when she’s not.

Yeah, I hear you. Adding a car project right after complaining that I don’t time for the LeMans – that is dumb. Here’s the reasoning behind the new plan. As I’ve whined about countless times, the LeMans is taking much longer than I’d expected. As Mikhaila gets older, her car-time availability is shrinking. I‘d better snag it while I can. Also, since I’m focused on the LeMans’ body panels I don’t need the rest of the car in the garage while I’m stripping, priming, straightening, and painting the removed panels. The Corvair is significantly smaller than the LeMans, so I can better work on the panels than I currently can.

Does this mean I’ll be maintaining two blogs at once – Tom’s LeMans and Corvair Fleet Maintenance? Definitely. Will I also be shooting Corvair video and posting it on YouTube alongside the LeMans Restoration video? Probably. Only time will tell.

Am I at a Crossroads?

As I started drafting this missive, one word kept coming to mind – disheartened. It’s been one year since I posted the first video in my LeMans restoration series - the one where I extracted the car from its stall behind my garage and rolled it into the sunlight for the first time in nearly ten years. What have I accomplished in that year? Two doors and a fender have primer on them. That’s about it. At this rate, I will be in my eighties when this car is finally roadworthy. There’s just too much going on in my life so I can't devote enough time to this project to complete it in a reasonable amount of time. The original plan to have it painted, upholstered, and running by this spring was a folly I quickly replaced by hopes for its rollout in the Spring of 2019. At my current crawl, however, that, too, is a joke.

Then there’s the Corvair that sitting behind the garage with a bashed in front end. Repairing that is supposed to be a father-daughter project – one I promised myself wouldn’t occur until the LeMans is on the road. Will my youngest daughter, Mikhaila, still be willing to work on it with me in two years (or more)?

Now I’ve got another project crammed into the garage next to the LeMans. I recently bought a ’96 VW Golf GTI for Mikhaila. Her current daily-driver has over two-hundred thousand miles and, while it’s been reliable lately, it is showing signs of possible issues that will sideline it. I got a good deal on the GTI since it needed a water pump, a clutch, and a heater core. The water pump’s been replaced, and the car is currently on jack-stands in the midst of the clutch replacement. It’s going to take another couple of weeks just to finish that project, and then the heater core job will be an additional eight hours of removing front seats, console, and dash just to get to the leaky piece before putting it all back together. Once it’s done, I’ll trade her for her Mazda MX-3.

So what’s a very frustrated car-guy to do? What’s a new, near-term plan that’ll remove “disheartened” from my vocabulary? Is racing part of the solution?

Fortunately, my current daily-driver Mustang is not part of the equation since it’s: 1) a blast to drive, so my credo (“Life is short, drive what you like”) is met; 2) reliable, so I never have to spend time fixing things; 3) rust-resistant, so I can happily drive it year-round; and 4) practical, so I can haul bikes, pull a trailer, fill it with camping gear, etc.

What else can’t change? Getting the GTI on the road must take priority. With all that being said, here are what the options I came up with.

Option 1 is to just come to grips with the current state of things and consider myself very lucky that I have a nice, newer Mustang as my daily-driver and a desirable car in the works, albeit a long time in the works. The MX-3 will be sold; the LeMans will take as long as it will take; and Mikhaila’s Corvair will get attention. At this point, I’m not considering putting the Mustang on a road course, so my racing would be limited to autocrossing and drag racing.

Option 2 is to swap Mikhaila’s Corvair for the LeMans, so she and I can get that car back on the road before her time is harder to garner. Once that work is done, I’ll be at a crossroads again, but at least I’ll feel good about getting a car on the road and I’ll free up space behind the garage to provide more options. The cost of this option is some paint to re-spray the front clip (sheetmetal in front of the windshield) once all the welding is done.

Option 3 answers my desire to have a track car – one that I’m willing to risk on a roadcourse. Think “Zoom-Zoom.” I’d keep the MX-3, squeeze it into the garage, strip out the interior, lower it, install a GUP (Good Used Part) seat and harness, GNP (Good New Part) shifter bushings, decent tires, and hit the track. Yeah, yeah, I know it has a lot of miles on it, but a replacement engine from a junkyard is a small investment. An upgrade to the V6 with it’s commensurate 20% increase in power is feasible or maybe a turbo. Stock these cars are lightweight (around 2400 pounds) and handle like a go-kart (Zoom-Zoom).

Option 4 is the dramatic one. Assuming I’ll never get the personal satisfaction equal to all the hours and dollars the LeMans will suck up, I’ll sell it. What could I get for a running, driving (after I bolt on the fenders and doors), rust-free 1965 A-body convertible? Hagerty says ten grand in fair condition. Even though it’s not restored, the rust-free-ness of it should cause it to hold its value, but let’s say I get $8500 for it. What would I do with that much cash? There are many, many fun vehicles that would be on my track-car list. It’d have to be a smaller car to better fit in the garage, so no Camaro or Mustang. The candidates would include the aforementioned V6 MX-3, the first-gen Tempest I've written about, a V6 MX-6, a Miata, a Corvair, a Triumph GT6, a Triumph Spitfire, an MG-B, and maybe even a last-year Fiero.

Hmmm. Quite the crossroads.

Metal and Weather Get In The Way of Painting Progress

For a while now I’ve been talking about my struggles with paint color and how I believed that shooting a door or other body panel in each of the top candidates would make it apparent which color I should go with. I wanted to have done it sooner rather than, what it’s turning into, later. What’s been hampering my progress? Well, it IS winter and I don’t have a heated paint booth. Even if I did, though, I’m still struggling to carve out enough time to properly prep both doors for primer. I’m also working on the front fenders hammering out dings and patching a rusty area. All these efforts are documented in my YouTube videos which now number 21 episodes. The latest ones are: 19-Sanding Bondo, 20-Fenders, Doors, and Gauges, and 21-More Sanding Plus Making a Patch.

With my progress drawn out, I’ve had the opportunity to fall in love with another color. Recently, I read a Facebook post from Rusted Iron Customs showing their beautiful 1963 Tempest convertible. The paint job was flat black over House of Kolor’s Tangerine Kandy. I asked their painter, Matt, what color primer this was shot over and he replied PPG K36 (gray). I’ve done some more research on the paint, and it’s recommended that the transparent paint be shot over a silver or gold basecoat. From the photos, though, it sure looks gorgeous over the gray. I’m toying with the idea of getting a pint of the paint off eBay for $30. I’d also need a can of reducer ($25) and one of catalyst ($50). That’s $105 I could easily spend elsewhere, so this color may be off the table just due to the cost of painting a sample panel.

I’ll be getting some time in the garage tomorrow evening, so I plan on finishing the patch job on passenger fender by cutting out the bad metal to match the patch I’ve made, welding it into place, and grinding back the weld flush. The five day forecast has daytime temps in the high-forties and low-fifties this weekend, so I might strip the outside surfaces of the fenders, finish sanding the doors, and shoot all four pieces with epoxy primer. When motivated, I can work in an un-heated, well-ventilated garage in that kind of weather.