Last night most everything behind the dash was hooked up. Only things not hooked up are gauge illumination and Check Engine Light. I think I'm going to hook the CEL up so that it comes on when the lights are on instead of when there is a diagnostic code thrown. I've already left the lights on a couple of times... Hopefully this will help.




Here is a shot of me holding the 'near complete' dash up.

B-Quiet!

Saturday was the official B-Quiet day for ol' Rosemary. (lol) B-Quiet is a sound dampening/vibration reducing material that you lay in between the aluminum and the carpet. Tom came over with his roller and heat gun to help get the process 'rolling'. Brandon and Justin pitched in and soon there was a well oiled process in place. Eventually we stopped working and partied down a little bit, but not before Justin cut several more panels to shape.

When I got home from work today, I put all those panels and then Brandon showed up to help wrap up the B-Quiet. We finished it quick enough that we had time to start the carpet installation.

You can see in this pic that we got carpet on the back wall, back corners, transmission tunnel and floors before we ran out of adhesive. We still have under the doors and the foot-boxes to do. Since you can't really finish up under the doors until the body is installed, were skipping that part for now. But we did get the e-brake boot , and the shifter boot installed.

Primer complete, Gauges complete!

Wow, a lot has happened in 2 days on ol' Shelbatoast (aka: Rosemary). Last night we finished up the body work and shot the primer. Sounds easy, but there is a LOT of worked packed into that one little sentence. I think we were in the garage for about 7 straight hours. So nice to see it all in one uniform color.



Over the past week, mom painted the new gauge faces and dad mounted them up to the dash. Another extremely packed sentence!! So I started to install the gauges and wrap the dash in leather tonight. Here they are with tape of the gauge faces in prep for the spray adhesive.




Here they are just after I sprayed the glue on the dash metal and the leather.






Here is a shot of the final product. I think they look really good - very happy with the end result!






Here is a close up of the five 2" gauges.








While I was reinstalling the ampere gauge, I broke the glass. So for now I took a rosemary bottle cap (yes, out of the spice cabinet) and cut it to fit over the gauge. Here is a shot of the cap over the gauge. It's pretty funny and works for now...

Primer

A lot more filling & sanding last night - then we cleaned up and shot primer on the underside of the hood, trunk, and doors. HazMat squad to the rescue!

Panel fitting

Though it's a lot of work, it doesn't really yield a lot of interesting pictures - 'hey look they added some more gook and sanded it back down.' But rest assured, I am not slumping on the job! Josh came out today and armed with grinders and sandpaper, we fitted all the panels and laid in a little more 'schmutz' in key areas to get the doors level.

Next things to do are:
Flatten out the trunk panel a little - the edges are still sharp. The driver side pipe is a little crooked and if I went with it as is, would have to cut a much larger side pipe hole in the body. I'm going to try to redo the rear mount to minimize the pressure pulling back on the pipe. Hopefully this will eliminate the need to cut too much fiberglass from that hole. After that, we pull the body, clean it and prime it. We're hoping for good weather on Thursday. We'll spend time Wed. getting cleaned up and ready for spraying thursday. Things look good!

Here is a picture of the mammoth engine peeking out of the engine bay. You have to look under a lot of the wiring to see the engine heads spanning the entire bay. When you do realize you are looking at engine...you kinda go "oh...OOOHHHHH."

Ghetto gauges - before

I just wanted to post a couple of pics of the crappy ghetto gauges.

Gauge kit finally arrived

Today the body was mounted back on the chassis for the first time since it was first delivered. Josh started trimming the panels for the final fit. The wheels don't look quite as bad as I thought they would. Maybe I wont have to rush to get the vintage replica wheels.

Meanwhile, my gauge conversion kit finally got in from Factory Five. I got 4 words for you about that. I am not impressed. The gauge faces are not big enough to fill in the gauge hole. I'll show you some close ups later - but I'm going to have to either come up with a new, larger gauge face - or I'm going to have to come up with some kind of border to put around the current gauge face to extend it outward. It's a lot of work for something that looks kinda crappy. Right now though, I just want to get it on the road!!