hemigeno's Daytona restoration - a few more tweaks... again!

[hemigeno]

Here are some shots of the cowl/hood gap, plus one more of the hood/fender area

[hemigeno]

A couple of the cowl corners:

[hemigeno]

This shot is of particular importance to some of you guys.  Early on in this thread I was asked if the shop was going to address the leaded seams at the corners of the windshield and other areas.  Sure enough, they did indeed dig ALL of the lead out of the seams here, and welded the whole thing up solid.  I'll have more to say about how they handled the window plug later on, but it was a similar type deal. 

As was mentioned by others, this is an area very prone to cracking on B-bodies and is probably worth addressing on ANYBODY's project.

[hemigeno]

Here are some shots of the tailpanel area

[hemigeno]

One last shot of the tailpanel area, and then some shots of the decklid.  I took many shots of the lid itself, and decklid weatherstrip channel - so here ya go...

[hemigeno]

More decklid shots...  These are the original bolts, which look more like hardware store bolts than anything else.  You'll hear a couple of different versions about what is "correct" for decklid bolts, but they're apt to have used about anything.

[hemigeno]

Some shots of the decklid edges, showing the curvature.

[hemigeno]

Here are a few pics of the weatherstrip channel area:

[hemigeno]

That last picture is a good tie-in to the next couple of pictures, showing the trunk compartment light bracket still partially attached to the original trunk weatherstrip channel / dutchman panel.  The bracket was stamped as part of the whole piece, so it was not "attached" originally, although a reinforcement plate was added beneath the stamping for strength.

From what several of us have observed with these cars, Creative Industries apparently cut the bracket off of each Daytona with a sawzall or other cutoff tool.  The piece they removed was (from what we can tell) normally re-attached to the new weatherstrip channel which was part of the rear window plug.  The spot welds they used were pretty crude and poorly done, so you'll often find this piece missing.  I won't go so far as to say EVERY Daytona had it's bracket reattached, but a lot of cars I've looked at had the bracket - or evidence of the bracket's initial installation - whether or not the car was equipped with the A01 Light Group or not.  David Patik and others have seen cars that DID have the A01 light group that did NOT have a bracket, so there's no official / definitive answer on this subject.

For my car, you can very plainly see where the spot welds were on the weatherstrip channel, so my car did have a bracket attached even though it did not have the A01 light group.  Who removed it, and why, remains a mystery since the bracket was gone long before I got the car.  Could be it simply fell off from the poor welding job, or it could be that it was twisted off (with much cursing) after one of the owners removed a few inches of scalp while doing the limbo trying to get into or out of the trunk compartment.   

We will cut off a bracket piece from another car, and crudely spot weld it in the same location as you can see in the pictures, to return the car to as-delivered condition.

[hemigeno]

More trunk compartment pictures, including the corners.

[hemigeno]

The first picture is of the area where the jack stud will be located.  This time in the CORRECT location, which Creative Industries failed to do the first time around...   

The rest are more of the trunk compartment details, although the last one shows the area around the wheelwell where the seam of the quarterpanel patch used to be plainly visible.  Hard to see now, iddnit?? 

[hemigeno]

The next two pictures are of the rear window plug area from underneath.  The last two show the roof / window plug area that has been smoothed out.  As with the seams by the windshield, the guys took ALL of the lead out of this area.  The lead they used was prone to cracking, especially the lead that Creative Industries used since it had a lower melting point than the variety that Hamtramck's workers used.  That fact probably contributed to many repaints on Aero cars over the years. 

Anyway, Vance's guys removed all the lead and slowly/carefully welded the plug to the roof / sail panel solidly.  After grinding off the excess and using filler to smooth it all out, the area is noticeably smoother with very little chance of ever having a crack develop.  Much better than the original design, although I'm sure it was a time-consuming extra step.

[hemigeno]

The next pic is of the rear window channel, followed by a couple of pics of the A-Pillars

[hemigeno]

Several pictures of the roof here:

[hemigeno]

The first pic is of the underside of the roof, which still has a little surface rust on it.  The last three are of the rear passenger compartment area.

[hemigeno]

These pictures are of the firewall & floorboard area.  On the next visit I made (in October) I asked Vance's guys to go through and smooth out the floorboards.  The pitting that they had left (and might be visible in some of these pics) would have been hidden by the carpet for the most part, but it bugged me to be taking every other part of the car back to such a smooth state but letting this go. 

[hemigeno]

Here are a few pictures of the transmission.  Vance had already cleaned the case up, but the humidity in the air (even in Michigan) was already causing some light surface rust to re-appear on the case.  So, he painted up the outside of the case with DP40.  This will NOT be the base for the final coating of the case, but it serves a purpose by keeping further rust from appearing.

[hemigeno]

A few miscellaneous pics, including one of the Engine "under wraps" still, the NOS fuel tank that Dave H. sent with the car when I got it, and the cylinder heads which are about 1/2 done with their porting/assembly work.

[hemigeno]

I don't know if the date stamping will show up in these smaller pics, but I had found the date code from the vibration dampner (if I remember, it was either 150 9 or 160 9).  It constantly amazes me how Chrysler date-coded almost EVERYTHING.  Why did they bother with the vibration dampner??   

[hemigeno]

Well, that's pretty much all I have the sanity to post at the moment.  I'll wrap up this batch with a few pictures of the new room I've built here in the shop.  The guys at work have dubbed this the "Hemi House"...

[BigBlockSam]

poor little hemi charger sleeping all alone every night in that big room. 

[hemigeno]

                       

poor little hemi charger sleeping all alone every night in that big room. 

It'll hopefully have company sometime soon!

[pettybird]

Couple questions-

What hole in the driver inner fender are you talking about?  I don't think I recall knowing that...

Was the car not media/soda/walnut blasted, and why?  I ask because of the paint still hanging on under the quarter panel end caps.

Are the original Charger rear window molding clips now removed?  Weren't those installed after paint, therefore should be black and not red? 



Masterful restoration and my full respect--I'm nitpicking to further my knowledge.

[hemigeno]

Doug,

This is the hole we were kicking around.  So far, we have ONLY found this hole on Daytonas (not C500s), and beyond that, the only unrestored Daytona I've seen without the hole is the aforementioned 287970.

I haven't honestly looked at any Superbirds for this specific detail.  Have you noticed this hole on any 'Birds?

[hemigeno]

Was the car not media/soda/walnut blasted, and why?  I ask because of the paint still hanging on under the quarter panel end caps.

The car was media blasted, but for whatever reason they did not remove the end caps before sending it out for the blasting work.  When it came back from the media blaster, Vance's guys removed the caps and the original paint is still there.  They probably left it there just to tease me... 

Are the original Charger rear window molding clips now removed?  Weren't those installed after paint, therefore should be black and not red? 

The original Charger clips would indeed have been installed after paint, as were all the moulding clips like that.  Unfortunately, the car isn't ready for paint, so I won't bust Vance's chops for having the clips still in place just yet.  Not a bad observation to make though.  I don't recall what color the clips were originally - I think the windshield moulding clips were a greenish color.  Were the rear clips black?  I'd have to look around at some other reference material to see.

Masterful restoration and my full respect--I'm nitpicking to further my knowledge.

Thanks, and don't worry about nitpicking.  If you read the thread from earlier on, you'll see that another DC.com member noticed that we had the wrong rear crossmember fuel filler hole shape.  I'll gladly take any help I can get (and so will Vance, I'm sure).