Front turn signals

Nice day out today... back into the garage for a brief bit. This time, it's the front turn signals that are comin' out.

Driver's side turn signal mount.

Same mount, but shot from inside the wheelwell. The mount is held on by a pair of posts coming out of the mount, through the large rubber piece, seen here (which is one piece with the surrounding rubber on the outside of the mount).

Once the nuts are removed from those posts, the rubber part needs a bit of encouragement to release its fifty-two-year old grip on the fender.

Three wires snake down through the rubber mount from the main headlight area.

Said three wires are the set coming up from the left, into the plastic container in the center. I figure I'll end up replacing these type connectors with newer gear in the end.

After the sleeve holding the wires is pulled out from the headlight area, the entire piece comes free.

But of course, there's trouble. During the removal of the passenger side turn signal mount, trouble! The two posts that ran through the rubber mount, through the holes in the fender and were held down with hex nuts - both of them snapped clean off during removal - practically flush with the recepticles on the turn signal mount. I fear that I won't be getting the remnants out anytime soon, without ruining the piece as a whole. I'll be chatting Frank and Edward up on this - they have a tap set, and maybe a tap that is small enough to work here. Otherwise, I may be in the market for a replacement piece at some point. Grr.

Front bumper (part 2)

Now that the bumper is off the car, it's time to take it apart. The main bumper is three pieces, with the two bumper guards attached over the seams. First order of business is removing the guards. Easy enough - there is a single bolt that needs removing in order to free each guard.

Back side of the two guards. Note that the bracket on the bottom of the left guard has the nut attached - the right, no nut. Not sure why this is; but the bolt for each side was slightly different as well. May well have been a change made some time after the car was assembled. The rubber bits that fit between the guards and the bumper itself will need replacing.

Front side of the two guards. One's seen better days than the other. Both will need some work.

Next, it was a matter of disassembling the main bumper. The remaining attachment was a bolt on the top side of the bumper (the bolt holding the guards in place served as the connector on the bottom side as well). Fun bit with these bolts were, they were Phillips heads on the top, not a hex bolt. And there was simply no way for me to be able to both wield a socket wrench on the nut beneath, while holding a #3 head screwdriver from the side, and get sufficient leverage.

Fortunately, my ever helpful neighbor Edward was tinkering on his brother's Karmann Ghia, and I roped him into pitching in. With him holding the bolt steady with the screwdriver, I was able to get each nut loose and off quite quickly - surprisingly quick considering the nature of some of these bolts and nuts, how rusted and seized up they are.

The bumper itself is going to need some love as well - lots of little creases and such, plus one huge dent right in the middle, on the top side (visible here as the bottom, as the bumper in this photo is upside down).

Front bumper (part 1)

I've been looking at starting on removing the bumpers for a few weeks now. Lately, every now and again, I would hit the relevent bits with some penetrant and let it cook. Today, with the help of my neighbors Frank and Edward, the front bumper is off.

Driver's side bumper mount, shooting right-to-left. The curve in the bumper is where it wraps around the front of the fender. The mount is basically a curved slab of steel - two bolts holding it to the frame, and one bolt on the far end holding the bumper to the mount. All it takes to remove the bumper itself is the removal of these two bolts, plus one on each side (see below). Not terribly robust, I fear.

Same mount, shot from the opposite side. The nut pictured above is part of the frame piece; the rearward bolt uses a normal nut.

The mount on the left side of the fender, shot from the front looking back...

...and from behind, looking front. Another situation with a fixed nut, where only the bolt is removed.

A nicer shot of the main bumper/mount bolt.

The bolt that holds the bumper guard on. There's a rubber bit that wraps around both sides of the guard... that should be fun to replace. :/

There's also a bolt on the top side of the bumper, behind the guard, that helps hold the end pieces onto the main center piece.

Earlier, Frank and Edward came by - as usual, I was just asking their opinion on something, and they choose to escalate the situation and something gets pulled off. Gotta love those guys! As a result, we had gotten the two side-mounted bolts out, so all that was left to remove the bumper itself were the two bolts on the main mounts. Oddly enough, despite the difficulty the brothers had with getting the side bolts out, the front bolts came away quite easily...

...and the bumper is off! But, not without a casualty...

Pictured above is the curved bumper mount... but what's that extra bit?

That extra bit is part of the frame that the mount bolts onto. I noticed when I started working on the bumper again, after the side bolts had been removed, that the passenger side of the bumper was somewhat wobbly - far more than the driver's side. Now I know why - this piece had finally failed completely.

Considering where the nut is, and how that piece is bent down around it somewhat, I'm guessing that the bent area is a result of some sort of damage - and that this frame piece was a hair from failing completely as it was. Our working on the bumper simply pushed it over the edge. I hope that this piece can be bent back into shape somewhat, and welded back together - but I'm going to plan on trying to find a replacement piece that is in good shape instead.

Here's the driver's side mount, still attached. I've removed the forward bolt already - the rear bolt took a few minutes of wrestling (with a wrench holding the bolt on the right side while pulling upward mightily with a socket on the bolt from the left side. Phew! But it's off as well.

Tail light removal (part 1)

I've been neglecting the old gal's backside, it seems. So I decided to remove the tail lights today as well. It's tough to get good angles on these photos as the back bumper is pretty close to the back wall of my garage, and I'm no contortionist.

Driver's side tail light shell. Both are in pretty good shape - some cracks but no holes, and the color is still good on both. Probably one of those "replace sometime down the road if a good deal shows up" sort of things. Two screws (top and bottom) come out easily and the shell comes away. The shells have a small plate, separating the lower red area from the middle white - one of these plates popped off when removing the shell, but I don't think that's going to be a big worry.

The guts of the tail light, with the four lamps. Little did I know, until getting a look from the back, that these old bulbs pop out as easily as they do - push a bit, twist, pull. Sorta like child-proof caps on medicine containers.

Passenger side with the shell off - note the dent just below thte tail light area. Been there forever, I imagine. Just one more bit to get repaired once the body is ready to be hauled to the shop for stripping.

Driver's side area, with the guts pulled away, shot from above. Easy enough to take a small flathead and detach the half-dozen or so wires. I took several photos from various angles so I'd be sure which wires go back where.

The guts removed, sans bulbs, front...

...and back. Pretty good shape considering.

Driver's side area, sans guts. The rubber seal appears to wrap around the mount. I'll get back to this area at some point with a part-two post.

Door panel removal

One thing I thought would be a quick-and-easy bit was to remove the inside door panels. Oh, how silly of me... :)

Along with a bunch of clips around the sides of the doors, the panels are also attched with small screws. Here's one from the rear driver's side door.

Front passenger door, with the panel removed. Some of the clips tore free from the panel itself, and are easily pulled out later with a quarter turn. (Unfortunately I did demolish a couple of these clips before I puzzled onto the easy-twist trick.)

Front driver's side door.

Door lock (left) and pull rod (attached on door lever).

Door lever and window crank area.

Rubber bit called a "linkage guide" in the parts manual. Most of mine have deteriorated and detached from the hole they fit into. These will likely be fun finding replacements.

Same shots as driver's door above, for the rear driver's door.

This was a fun one. Early on, the first thing I started removing from the old gal were the armrests (or rather, the remnants thereof). The one I could not fully remove was the right rear door. As it turned out, one of the bolts holding the bottom half of the armrest screwed into a nut that was attached to the door frame with some sort of clip - and this clip had come loose, so the bolt and nut would spin freely. Said bolt passed through a hole in the door frame, so in order to remove the door panel, this bolt had to come out. It came down to taking a box cutter and cutting a hole through the lining and backing large enough where I could get an arm up inside with a pair of pliers, to hold that nut/clip steady while ratcheting the bolt off from the other side.

I had already planned to replace the lining on these panels anyhow - to match the upholstery when that is redone - but I was hoping to retain the backing material for re-use. This one, obviously, is now shot. :) It's a minor issue though, as a new piece can simply be cut using the old one as a pattern anyhow. And I may well just have all four panels redone this way as well, in the end.

Next fun bit will be carefully removing the trim pieces and preserving them for later use.

The other fun bit will be with the front door panels, specifically the pockets at the bottoms of the panels. 

Blinker (top of fender) removal

Oooh these bits were fun. I had to enlist my neighbor Frank and his brother Edward on this task.

The shells themselves are in fine shape - whew! And are easily detached by removing a single screw at the back.

A bit of a mess inside, however. Some rust and a material in the back of that area that has deteriorated. I figure it was some sort of padding.

A shot from the inside of the driver's side wheelwell. The curved area at the bottom is the headlight area. The shinier metal area is the bottom of the assembly coming in from above - the right side has the remnants of some sort of protective piece wrapped around this assembly. The cables for the blinker snake up through the part coming off the bottom of the assembly, going into the headlight area.

A closer shot from the top, with some of the deteriorated padding material on display. Yum.

The most difficult part of removing these bits are the front-most bolts. Here you see Frank with an impact driver, attempting to loosen the passenger-side bolt. This bolt eventually loosened, but also loosened the nut from below that was held on by a clip - so both were spinning together. It was impossible to get any sort of substantial grip on the nut inside the wheelwell, due to the tube for the electrical wires being in the way. Eventually a dremel was employed to cut the top of the bolt off from above.

On the passenger side, Frank and Edward have gotten out their tap set. In this pic, Edward is drilling a hole in the bolt head, in preparation for getting the tap in there, and working the bolt out.

A nicer photo of the inside of the wheelwell, this time from the passenger side. The shell around that one assembly is shot on this side as well - you can see a fragment of it poking around from the left. The square nut holding the front-end bolt is also visible, below/right. A mount attached to the trim piece is also visible, above/left - the nut has already been removed.

Success! The trim pieces have been removed, and without breakage.

One issue with the trim - one of these pieces has a bent bolt. It took a bit of wriggling to get this one out, as we were unaware of this situation at the time. I figure at some point, a large rock got bounced up into the wheelwell, struck this bolt and bent it a bit.

There's a vendor out there who makes custom-fit wheelwell covers for these old buggies - they're not terribly expensive, as best I could tell (around $150 each? I'll have to find their site again). I'm strongly leaning toward investing in a set of these at the appropriate time - to protect everything up inside that wheelwell once it's all cleaned up.

The other big issue will be finding replacements for the rubber seals, between the trim and the top of the fender. Very odd shape, and as best I can tell, the bits that were outside the sides of the trim itself were a bit thicker (i.e. the rubber wrapped around the edge of the trim slightly).

Headlight removal

Next, the headlights! Forgive the left-right-left-right of these photos... you get the idea. :)

(You'll see the "beehive" turn signal caps are gone - these simply twisted out. The caps themselves have tabs that fit into the visible slots. Sadly, one of the tabs on one cap broke off when it was removed - fortunately, I have a spare pair.)

First order of business is to get the chrome trim off. A single screw at the bottom of each comes off, and then the trim lifts off from the top - it's held on by a tab at the top.

There are three small bolts that hold the smaller trim piece (surrounding the bulb itself) to another large cup piece behind.

(Annoyingly, the on the passenger side, one of these bolts is frozen in tight. I managed to remove the whole assembly, but the inner trim, the bulb, and the mounting cup behind are still all attached. Separating these pieces is a job for another day.)

Inner trim piece removed.

Now the bulb is free, for the most part - just a matter of detaching the wires on the back, and the bulb can be set aside.

This inner mount is a bit trickier. There are two bolts (top and inside), and at the bottom right, you can see a slot - this is where a small spring is attached from within. It's this cup that is used to adjust the direction of the bulb - the spring is set, and the bolts (quite a bit longer than the smaller bolts earlier) are screwed in/out to position the bulb within this mount.

Poking a small flathead screwdriver in to detach the spring from the mounting cup.

Mounting cup removed!

A pic of the wiring.

A shot of the passenger side area. A fair bit of rust, and some bits have rusted out completely. I'm unsure at this point how these areas will fare when it comes to getting the body stripped. I fear the worst. Some replacement (either patching in pieces from a donor car, or replacement of the fenders entirely) may be in order. Grr.