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1970 1800E Driver Restoration

The extensiveness of your rust repair would send 99.9% of the people on this forum running! Do you have any clamps in reserve or are you showcasing your lifetime collection of them?

That was pretty much the whole shootin' match right there. Had to scrounge in the basement to come up with them all.

I too am questioning my own sanity every time I head to the garage to work on this thing (ergo the slow progress). Believe it or not there's a 73 ES waiting in the wings that is probably in worse shape than this one.....we'll see if that project ever gets off the ground. :)
 
Closer to getting it back on its own feet.

Quarter patch completed:

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Plugged up the hole where some PO mounted an antenna on the rear quarter:

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[/url]Untitled by didenpx, on Flickr[/IMG]

Been working on the rear axle. Replaced the pinion oil seal diff cover & gasket. Waiting for some wheel bearings and then it will be ready to paint and start putting back on the car:

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Patching the battery tray now and after that (fingers crossed) no more welding for me. The fun ended more than a year ago. Really looking forward to some honest mechanical work and reassembly.
 
Still making progress toward getting the shell out for media blasting. It probably doesn't look like much is happening (and probably that's accurate) but the psychological impact of actually reassembling some stuff (rear axle) is huge after many months of tedious and unrewarding rust remediation!

Pulled the remaining hard brake lines and the proportioning valves. No photos.

Dash wiring documented and dash pulled:

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Axle shafts are out for rebuild/new bearings. Started to reassemble the rear axle and suspension after work today:

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Got the axle shafts with the new bearings back from the shop today and was hoping to get the parking brakes put back together so that there's some way to stop the thing when it becomes a roller and heads out for blasting but I ran into an issue with the fit of the new brake rotors: http://forums.turbobricks.com/showthread.php?t=320364

At least I did get the axle shafts and backing plates back on the car and I threw two wheels on it just to feel like I'd accomplished something:

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I never get tired of looking at your head light/turn signal repair. This is inspiring me to get a welder.
 
Looking good! Kinda makes me wish I would have kept our rusty '66 1800S. I'd likely still be welding on it today, but would've gotten all of this valuable practice...
 
Thanks guys!

Duder - you wouldn't have had to do a small fraction of this welding on the Duckling. It ended up going to the greater Boston area, right? Or am I having a senior moment?

And some more photos for the appearance of substantial progress where there is none: I hunted through my barn and managed to find the hood and dropped it in place and took some happy snaps:

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Thanks guys!

Duder - you wouldn't have had to do a small fraction of this welding on the Duckling. It ended up going to the greater Boston area, right? Or am I having a senior moment?

Yep, it was sold to a guy near Boston. He had it shipped out after Hi Performance Auto here in So-Cal did some mechanical sorting. It was driving better than ever when I waved goodbye to it, but an 1800 coupe doesn't really work as a fun weekend cruiser when you have a kid in a carseat and a dog who want to come along...

Anyway the car had rust in the normal rocker & dogleg areas, in the rear quarters, and in the nose where someone had poorly overlapped and brazed another complete front clip (fenders and all) to repair accident damage I suppose. The car lived in foggy Marin county north of SF for most of its life, so while it didn't have hardcore east coast levels of rust, it was far worse than the typical CA native car.

And if I've learned anything from rust repair over the years it's that whatever's visible is only the tip of the iceberg and represents anywhere from 50% to 10% of the actual total rust lurking beneath.
 
And if I've learned anything from rust repair over the years it's that whatever's visible is only the tip of the iceberg and represents anywhere from 50% to 10% of the actual total rust lurking beneath.

Amen to that!

Anyway I'm still hoping to see the Duckling on the road someday here. 11 years of commuting ~90 miles a day in the greater Boston area and I've seen a grand total of 2 1800s in traffic (and one of them was on a trailer).
 
Amen to that!

Anyway I'm still hoping to see the Duckling on the road someday here. 11 years of commuting ~90 miles a day in the greater Boston area and I've seen a grand total of 2 1800s in traffic (and one of them was on a trailer).

I can give you the guy's contact info if you want, but I haven't heard from him in quite some time (he was supposed to send some pics of the car with New England fall color backgrounds :-P).

You car is looking really good. Going to paint it yourself?
 
You car is looking really good. Going to paint it yourself?

Thanks very much. I feel so much better about the project now that it's gotten to this stage. There were lots of times that I asked myself what the hell I'd gotten into and doubted it would ever be on rubber again.

Originally I was going to do the paint and body work myself but after all of the time I've put into it and the fact that it should be worth something when I'm done I'm going to have the body work and paint done professionally. I'll be taking lots of photos of blasting and body/paint and will post them hopefully beginning next month.

Starting to think about the next stages.
-Need to procure an M410 at some point.
-Need to rebuild the engine (probably paying to have someone do that too because I've never done anything like that). It was out of the car and disassembled when I bought it.
-Need to figure out what to do for fuel injection....stay with the D-Jet system that hasn't run since ~1983 and may be buggy or go crazy and spring for the stealth MS bolt-in option (http://stealthems.com).
-What wheels to go with? Stay stock and face the ridicule and shame of the TB community or spring for Minilight or ATS repros?
 
Thanks Duder; it does feel good. Probably going to celebrate by vacuuming up cobwebs and cleaning the garage stall.

Also thanks for the suggesting the American Racing option, which was news to me. Will definitely consider it when the time comes as it looks pretty awesome!

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