Speaking of Rennline, I grabbed this really great front strut brace from them, but also have the really nice new carpet kit from Carbone for the front trunk. Thanks to McMaster, I ordered a hole punch the right size for the strut bar and voila! Measure thrice, punch once...brews (driven specially from Wisconsin, if you know you know!) with Kristen to celebrate!
Now...you know that thing that happens when all you want to do is replace a few things here and there and you end up accidentally tearing the entire car apart "while you're in there?" Well... I had zero intention of taking the windows and doors apart, but once the windshield was out we had a chat and a google image search about whether to keep the '77 black trim (which the previous owner had sandblasted and resprayed trim black) or to polish it for an earlier look. I bet you can figure out what we decided to do here...
Starting to go a bit nuts in the mask between the epoxy primer and trying to strip the paint off of the trim!! All part of the fun...
Now, here's where I owe Kristen a HUGE shoutout. She completely disassembled the majority of the door trim herself, with her phone on the Pelican forums in one hand for reference, and bagged and labeled ALL of the hardware and pieces. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of her organization, but she truly did a really nice job of keeping track of everything.
Originally, I had tried to polish these myself, but the previous sandblasting was too much to cut through by hand.
I called around to a few places (and quickly learned of Flat6 restoration in my back yard, but unfortunately have to wait for a bigger budget build to use them), and found a father-son duo in Wilmington, Mass. called MacLellan Co.
Another huge shoutout to Peter MacLellan for knocking this out of the park, and getting all of the smaller bits plated for me. These guys did an amazing job, and were super pleasant and fun to work with.
As bad as I wanted to jet to the shop and install them right when I picked them up, Kristen wouldn't let me touch them since it was her project on the car!!! Rightly so - she couldn't wait to reassemble the doors, and I can't blame her at all.
That's to come, and much more still! Thanks for following along, and Merry Happy Everything out there!