Back to work
Well, after a long stint of being busy with things other than the car, today we finally got to do some work on her. First thing that we did was to get out all the boxes that we had packed for the move and to evaluate where we were up to.
The main things that I want to do is to get her to a point that I can drive her more frequently. There are two standout things that stop me from doing that: The door windows are not sealed properly as the rubber seal on the chrome trim has not been put in place and the seat belts are the old school fixed length ones.
First up, we had already glued the new rubber seals on the chrome trim, but we need to work out a way to re-secure the metal strip to help keep things together. As you would expect, the metal strip was very rusty, so the first thing to do was to clean it up a bit and put some paint onto it. Once the strip was painted, this task was put on hold (16hrs for the paint to dry).
Before we jumped onto getting the new retractable seat belts in, we cleaned up the chrome trim that fits onto the rain channel. Once we had given it a quick going over with the dry steel wool, we snapped it back into place.
We moved onto the seat belts and gave them a quick try using the anchor points that are standard in the car. They didn’t work as the reel would have to go in on an angle. The type of reel requires that it be positioned straight otherwise the locking mechanism would permanently engage. Based on that, we moved to positioning the reel in the same locations as others before me have, on the wheel arch. We made a couple of reinforcing plates and welded the nuts on them. The belts went in quite easily and a quick test run and they fit perfectly. When on, the belts go over the shoulder and across the lap as the installation guide stipulated. Thanks Hemco!