My 1964 Impala Restoration - Page 9

June 27th 2011 - The body finally rolls from the body shop into the spray painting side, bringing Martin's job on the body work and block sanding to a close. Gabriel starts prepping for the sealer coat that is going to go on the inside of the passenger compartment.

June 28th 2011 - Sealer coat is done. Better than it was new, as the factory only made a casual effort to get any paint in there back in '64.

July 1st 2011 - Paint Day !!!!

Carlos doing his thing. Not much fun to be stuck in a box wearing that outfit on a 94 degree day.

Now I just have to wait till it dries so I can see it out of the booth.

July 5th 2011 - Out of the booth and drying in the nice hot weather we are having.

Meanwhile, back in my garage, I am installing the final bits of dressing on the engine. If all goes according to plan, I will install the engine sometime the week, while the fenders are still off the car. This should make it easier and no stress about scratching the paint.

July 7th 2011 - Taking advantage of the curing time of the paint, I arranged with All Quality Collision and Restoration to let me use a day to put the engine in. This is much easier than doing it later with the fenders in place. Plus I got some help from the guys in the shop for those steps that take more than one person (like wrestling and engine into position). Naturally the weather was hot and humid and was a bit of exercise, which made me sweat like crazy, being used to my comfy desk job.

July 9th 2011 - Dash has been painted, and looks great.

July 15th 2011 - The color sanding and buffing is underway.

After the first pass, it is looking good.

Meanwhile, I worked on the shift linkage, trying to reconcile the stock likage with the non-stock 700R4 transmission.

I also installed the radiator, fan and fan shroud. Taking care of what things I can do now in parallel with the paint and body work will save me lots of time later. Also, getting the heavy stuff out of the way now while it is easy to get at things, will mean fewer opportunities to mess up the paint.

July 25th 2011 - I installed the firewall pad, then heater box on the inside and the A/C-Heater fan and duct on the engine side. Carlos got a start on installing the Dynamat. They Dynamat is not stock, but I like to make it quiet as practical.

I also installed the instrument cluster.

July 26th 2011 - Installed the steering column.

The door frames get a bit of the lighter "Aqua" interior color.

July 30th 2011 - Installed most of the wiring harness under the dash.

With the wiring in place, it was time to plug stuff in. Now the dash is starting to look like a dash again. With so much of the wiring in place, I hooked up the battery and gave the engine a quick crank to see if it was all hooked up correctly.

The mileage has rolled over twice, so that really makes it 212,819.9 miles.

Parking brake pedal back in and the wire and circuit breaker for the power seats.

Agust 3rd 2011 - Side molding installed on the fenders in preparation of mounting them to the car. Nice to get all those clips bolted down while it is easy to get at the back side. My old 283 car is now sporting it's new 327 emblems. The 283 has just the V emblem on the fender, the 327 adds the flags on the sides of the V.

I also had the engine stamped using date that preceeds the date of the body assembly date.

Agust 5th 2011 - Another quick trip to the spray booth for the rear bumper support area to get some needed black paint.

The grill gets installed. Things are moving pretty fast now. I have been keeping busy running down the odd part needed and finishing up the dash area.

Agust 8th 2011 - I have just about finished a small project to hide the TV cable for the transmission. Since the transmission is a 700r4, not the stock Powerglide, a TV cable needs to be attached to the throttle some how. The standard way it to use a bracket on the intake and link the cable to the carburetor. Since I want things to look stock, I installed the stock Powerglide kick down linkage rod and then had that work the TV cable out of side under the car.

Old position of the TV cable. It can be seen running from the black plastic adjuster near the ignition coil to the carburetor, with some excess cable hanging out front.

Same cable, now hidden under the car and being operated by Powerglide kick down rod.

The kick down rod is the lower rod.

Agust 16th 2011 - The trunk is getting painted. Finding paint like the original proved difficult. Some gray and white splatter paint was found from OPG that is pretty darn close to the original. I could only ask for bigger white blobs in the mix, but I am sure that varied a lot on these cars.

First the trunk was sprayed with a sealer coat (light gray) then the splatter coat. They claimed one pint would do the trunk, but it only managed to cover the back. So a rush to the supplier got some more to finish.

Carlos having fun getting at the hard to get at spots.

The original wiring harness has splatter paint overspray on it in some areas. It was decided to do them seperatley for better coverage in the trunk.

Agust 17th 2011 - The completed trunk looks great.