Day 142

Well some good news and some not so good new$ today.

I finished sanding and scuffing the entire body!  It is ready for a coat of primer filler when I am ready.  Took a few hours but all is well.  Here's a 360 walk around of the car.

Turned out pretty good!  Hopefully the block sanding won't be too arduous since I spent so much time trying to get the pieces straight before I even get to that step.

The not so good news is after some sanding on my steering wheel it is very apparent that the amount of time, effort, and even ability to make my steering wheel look good again is going to be prohibitive.  I knocked down the epoxy filler I used and although time consuming I thought it looked pretty good.  But then I started seeing more cracks, in harder areas to fill, and took the wheel over to the sand blast cabinet.  I took the outer layer of paint off most of the wheel and it became clear that I was in over my head!

To try and fill these in would be insane.  And you can see my attempt at remaking some of the "fingers" on the bottom left.

The entire rim is like this.

This is the easy part on the back.

So, I am going to send it off to these guys who don't fill the cracks...they recast the entire steering wheel!  They break off all the old plastic and leave just the metal frame inside.  They then recast it like the factory did.  The lines, ridges, valleys, and "fingers" will all look perfect instead of me using files and sand paper to guesstimate.  It is pricey ($300) but well worth the result.

I also sanded down all the parts that I'm going to paint "L29 Blue Gray" which is mainly the gas tank and things in the trunk.

I need to do a little paper mache action on my original glove box too.  Then I plan on painting the outside of it and "flocking" the inside of it like the original.

So moral of the story, I'll probably work my way through the small paint projects and then go from there.