I finished one little project that I started several months ago. The front and rear bumper bars have a lot of peeling chrome and rust, and re-plating them will be expensive. So I had decided to try a “temporary” hack: I took the rear bumper bars, bead-blasted them, sprayed on several coats of rattle-can primer, wet sanded them, and sprayed them with “chrome in a can” paint. It took more time than I expected, but the cost was about 20x cheaper than actual chrome plating. I bolted them onto the car, along with some repro bumper clamps. It looks nice from a distance, but wouldn’t fool anyone close up.
Month: April 2012
One bit at a time
I got the floorboards finished and installed- it was just a matter of tacking on the weather stripping and painting and riveting on the mounting brackets. I also finally finished buffing the zinc door sills. Once that was done, it was easy to screw them in place.
Just one thing.
I’ve been busy, and on vacation. One thing I managed to do was to make a new set of front floorboards. I cut them out of a piece of 3/4″ plywood from Home Depot, which was a bit nicer than the original plywood. Fortunately I had a set of detailed plans to work from. After cutting them out and drilling a few holes, I painted them with a mixture of black wood stain and black paint, which looks a lot like the tarry glop that Ford originally used. I still need to attach some weatherstripping material and mounting brackets to them.