oldsdroptop

Here's a car show here close by me in Laurens SC at the Squeal'in on the Square" festival...you should have heard the pig call'in...well...let me just say....it's not the way I would call my wife....lol... I took the twins out for some sun and fun...gotta hate a trailer queen....and when there's 2 along for the ride...well....hate just isn't strong enough....lol.....Oldsdroptop...

stevengerard

I need to check out my code I thought my code was #28 not #20 and I am pretty sure my interior code was 997 or 977, the color under the Azure was burnished gold or nugget gold I believe

stevengerard

Haven't posted in a while. The car has been sitting as the shop was almost done with the car in September and when they were test driving it the dash harness started to smoke this is what it has looked like over the last 5 months.

stevengerard

I ordered the harnesses in early September and had to wait 8-10 weeks, most are made from the same few companies and distributed by all the vendors we know. They are hand made as orders come in. Turns out I needed a dash harness (way more expensive than I thought ) AC harness, engine harness and at one time someone botched up theL alternator harness - isn't that connected to the engine? sure is but its part of the front light harness so I bought that as well.

wmachine

Hang in there!

stevengerard

this is what the interior looks like now

Scotty B

It struck me as funny that the owner commented on the "rare" shoulder belts...as if the $20,000 1970 W-30 motor wasn't rare enough...and in a 'vert to boot!

1969w3155

Yikes! you wouldn't want my color blind a** in there!

stevengerard

with the car sitting so long I have turned my attention to some of the not so tiny details such as the headrests. I purchased the headrest covers and though they came out ok I did not notice how bad they looked until I mounted them on the seats, the first picture is of the headrest covers. I then purchased a set of reproduction headrests and although they look great they only come in black which means I would have to dye them Pearl. Right before I started to prep them I realized maybe my old headrests were in really good condition and only needed to be re-dyed. I took the covers off and sure enough they were almost mint. I'll post pictures of those afshortly but here are some pics of the headrests recovered and the reproduction black ones.

Elephant_Engine_Ernie

Hopefully you'll have it ready for the summer! What shop in Chicago did your paint/stripes?

stevengerard

Loro autoworks

JSPajak

Looking great so far. I hope to get to my W30 restorations someday soon.

Cameo White

Great looking car. I wish I had a convertible again.
If no one ever answered about your belts, the lap belts do use smaller buckles than the shoulders with the deluxe set. That's what I have in my 69 H/O.

stevengerard

thanks, yes, I spoke to a guy who restores seat belts and he had the specs for them. That is the icing on the cake, never thought refurbished belts would make that much of a difference but I was at a large car show this fall and saw a bunch of beautiful cars with rusted out seat belts. I completely understand how difficult it is to restore everything but nice belts really finish off a new interior.

stevengerard

Just when it was getting close to being completed we had the wiring harness and with all this talk recently of burned cars I guess it was a good idea I replaced the harnesses! But now that the car has been in the shop so long and they are getting closer to finishing it the shop took a close look at the paint job and found some issues. To their credit they are fixing them and most of them I wouldn't even have noticed myself. But it means more sanding, blending the base coat again, another clear coat and even repainting the stripes on the deck lid.

stevengerard

grinding down to the lead seams on both sides of the car to make sure they were done correctly - there was a couple of very tiny pin holes forming in the paint.

stevengerard

eventually they found enough little issues that they sanded much of the rear of the car and took the trim and the deck lid off as well

stevengerard

here is the car in primer - again!!! and wet sanded right before it goes back into the booth.

W-30 Dan

It'll be well worth the extra time spent at the shop if it looks good and dosen't catch fire. I love that color.

stevengerard

repainted and clear coated too, car looks great. Spent a bunch of time polishing the chrome and the stainless while it was apart again - should have started that project a year ago. its time consuming but with some practice and patience one can really make the stainless trim look great!

stevengerard

so its been a month and very little progress but I thought it was going to start going quickly - well no luck, they tried to push the car on the 4 wheel coasters and it hit a rock, driver side went up and over and the coaster damaged the fender and even tore the red fender well where they bolt to the fender. UGH!!!

Elephant_Engine_Ernie

Unless you're getting a sweet deal I would give serious consideration to taking the car somewhere else to have it finished

stevengerard

its way past a sweet deal and matter of fact never was. I have been foolishly patient and have spent even foolishly more money but at this point the advice given to me is that them fixing it on their dime would be cheaper than me bringing it somewhere else.

stan 65 cutlass

git er dunn, and gitt er home. looks good. we had our cube van fixed at a shop and it fell off the hoist, they didnt even tell us, i noticed a dent in the roof the next day and they fessed up. at least that shop is doing very fine work. keep the pics coming

stevengerard

Its been over a month since my last post, the body shop gave in and had a mechanic work on the installation of the new wiring. As you can see the interior has been gutted (again) and the mechanic rewired the car. Almost everything is working again. Ironically the needle fell of the tachometer and the owner of the shop insisted one of his guys wouldn't handle it rough enough for it to fall off and claimed it was never in the tach in the first place. When I insisted I look for it he was the one who found it on the ground outside the drivers door. I can understand how it may have fallen off but the way these guys deny things when their employees make mistakes drives me nuts.

stevengerard

by the way it took 25.5 hours to install a front light harness, engine harness, AC harness, power top harness, cruise control harness and the main harness. Does that sound about right. I have heard guys say if you know what you are doing you can rewire one of these old cars in a day - others say 3 days is about right. Any thoughts on that.

svnt442

I did the engine harness and front light harness in about an hour and a half. The in car stuff would take longer due to the stuff that needs to be removed to get to them. So 25.5 hours to do the entire car doesn't seem too out of line to me.

stevengerard

Everything was already removed, the body shop charged me who knows what to get that far, they removed the dash and laid the new harness out next to the old one. I should have been clearer, the interior was already guted and the new harnesses were already in place just not hooked up - seems to me I probably paid a minimum of 40 - 50 hours to gut the interior and rewire the car - maybe that is still an ok time frame but it was also over two months, clearly they only work on this car when normal repair work is slow.

svnt442

Yikes. That's a bit different then. I don't know how long it would take with all of the interior out. Removing the dash would make things a lot easier for sure, but I don't know how necessary it is.

clean cut creations

stevengerard- So What happened? Did The car get finished? Did you finally flip out from the stress of re-doing parts on the car? I HAVE to know! I ran accross this post today and I can't help wanting to know the outcome.

We are currently building a mostly original paint red a '70 455 SX Coupe for a customer. The SX is being restored because of damage from massive hail storm we had recently.

stevengerard

In their mind they "finished" it. In my mind they "were" finished . I took the car and to this day are still fixing little issues - all big ones done. From 20 feet away the car looks great but clearly they did not use any of the documentation I gave them (assembly manual etc.) nor common sense. I took the dash a part and the tachometer wasn't even hooked up - only one wire and to the incorrect terminal.

I can list dozens and dozens of things they did wrong. I have repaired most but have a few more to go. Simple but insane items such as these:

Torx head screws for the headlight bezels so long they drove right through the plastic surrounds. DUMB - how can you put Torx screws on a 42 year old car - unbelievable.

Instead of the stainless screws with built in washers to hold the bottom of the interior door panels on they used black screws. Out of 5 screws 4 of them were different.

Did not secure the instrument bezel surround to the dashboard. I was driving on the expressway and it popped right off.

Light for headlight switch was disconnected, every time I hit a bump it would swing and hit metal and short out the interior lights, took me a while to figure that out.

loose connection in the convertible top switch - all of us with convertibles know how much heat that generates, they blamed it on bad switches, charged me for three switches and labor to replace, turns out the connector on the new harness was too loose. That took me two seconds to figure out, but not them.

I can go on but lesson learned - next car if I do, if I do one, I will be on the shop like a pimp

joesw31

I have read your thread and have enjoyed it. We all have had problems with shops; with some being small and some large. Recently I toke my XT wheels to have the tires changed, and they scraped 3 out of 4 wheels. They have to be repainted. The shop said "Its regular yellow paint"... We live and learn.

Dave Siltman

I feel your pain. Nobody (IMHO) does the same quality work as the owner, at least when it comes to the small stuff. I had a good friend ( and believe me, he is still a good friend and I only paid about half of what he usually gets to do what he did for me) do a car and I'm STILL finding thngs I have to do over. It seems like small stuff to him when I tell him, but to me it should have and would have been easier to do it right the first time. Here is my take on the whole thing::::::: The majority of the restoration shops are there to make money, restoring cars is how they do it. We, as owners, are more interested in restoring the cars---NOT to make money doing it.

joesw31

Dave, I hear you.

On another occassion, I toke my 71 Supreme in for a wheel alignment, and they jacked the car up from the front of the oil pan. Of course they said nothing until I found the ground covered with oil. Now, I do my own alignment.

stevengerard

I agree with both of you but here is my beef.

We both agreed on a dollar amount it would be, I knew it wold go up from there but even the owner of the shop said what he liked most about me was that my car was a driver not a railer queen. We agreed it made no sense to do a frame off since my goal was to enjoy the driving experience not take it to shows.

As the price tag went up the service went down, yet he tried to convince me he was doing everything right. In the end I clearly knew more about the car than he or his employees ever will.

My final realization was that all his employees were Mexican and Polish and barely spoke English let alone could read English. That is fine with me but then it was his responsibility as the owner to translate the assembly manual to them. If you asked me to work from a Spanish text book I'd be lost too.

I received two shoe boxes of fasteners back from him that I have been slowly putting back on the car - you would think he would have been smart enough to just dump them instead of proving how poorly he kept track of my parts. I also received a few boxes of parts his manager said I never bought and along with those extra parts were Toyota parts. Matter of fact the mechanic who took over the dash wiring said he received a few Honda parts mixed in with the dashboard parts.

I'll post pictures of the completed job and some of the issues

Dave Siltman

Here is another twist on the wiring----I ordered a new engine harness for my green '72 that was (is) the frame-off car I referred to in my last post. Well, I hook everything back together and the horn would blow. I changed steering wheels as the original was bad and I figured it was grounding or something of the like. Still wouldn't stop blowing. I then figured the original relay was bad. Changed that, too. This was really starting to get to me. Finally, after reading every manual, wiring diagram, and anything related to the wiring I could find (the harness and related pieces were all hooked up correctly) I pulled out the original harness. I then compared the old to new: to make a long story short---the new harness was MADE INCORRECTLY!!!!!!!! The manufacturer reversed two black wires and the pigtail was feeding the horn constantly! I had to remove the new harness, take the pigtail connection apart, reverse the problem and re-install. What a PITA!!!!!!!!!!!!!

joesw31

I have seen problems with repro harneses as well (wrong color wires). As they say if you want something done right you need to do it your self.

Just double check every thing they did as don't want to be on a trip and have problems. There may be things that you may want to take apart again just to double check.

stevengerard

for those who haven't seen it here it is with 15x7 SSIIs

clean cut creations

Steven, I feel your pain (on a daily basis I might add)...We have been through about 30 employees in 8 years since we have been in our new building. Nearly all have been let go because of poor quality work. We finally have a great crew that I trust to work on cars the way I do. From my experience, when you take a restoration job to a shop that regularly does insurance collision repairs, you get uneducated/poor quality work and constantly get pushed to the back of the production line. For that reason, our shop does not have a frame bench and we don't do insurance collision work. We pride ourselves in concentrating solely on quality, well thought out, well researched, well documented vintage auto restoration work. I constantly go over "correctness" (what fasteners go where) with my crew. We "bag and tag" all original fasteners and parts to the point that it is crazy how many seperate labeled bags we end up with through the course of a restoration. We go so far as to mark screws as to exactly where they came from on certian panels. ( don't want too log of screws poking through the sheetmetal when installing a freshly painted hood on the hinges) This is opposed to the " strip and whip" shoebox and coffee can bolt bin filling shop you experienced. I have heard other stories just like yours too many times already...I don't want our customers to have that same issues with us.

I'm glad you got your car back and are able to enjoy it as you shake down the problems you have had. If you are wanting to get another car restored and you want a totally different experience, give us a call, you will be pleasantly suprised. You can PM me for the shop #

John@ CCC

69'442

Steven, That is one beautiful looking car. Just keep picking away at the issues. It is worth it. Most of all enjoy it.