impala3

I had said for a long time, years maybe, that I was going to dedicate myself to driving to my Dad's house (about 30 minutes) as many times as it took to help him get this project back on track. Words are cheap, and because of time commitments with church and family, I never lived up to those words. In January of 2009, I talked to my loving wife, and we decided spending this kind of time helping my Dad was more important than staying home with the kids, or even getting back into church ministry.

So the first Saturday in January, I showed up and went to work.

It took us a bit to get organized, but one of the first things we did was to hand crank the motor to make sure nothing had frozen up during the layover. Everything seemed to be fine, as it had been lubricated good before it was put on the shelf.

First step was to paint the dash and the interior parts that are darker coral. In 1958, most of the dashes were painted, though a padded dash was an available option. Here are the pictures of what we during the first couple of months, getting our painting technique down through trial and error. The package shelf he had painted years ago, so it was ready to buff and polish.

We also started the roof in March. Over the Veriprime, he used the car with DuPont Velvaseal, and now it was time to start to spray Dupont Lucite over that. The supply was thin, but we thought we had enough. Here's some pictures of the roof during the process.

Looks nice doesn't it? Turns out that the time we spent painting, sanding, and compounding the roof got us nothing except an education. We were using too aggressive a sandpaper and compound, so we went right through the paint we put on, and primer started to show. We used up all of our Dupont Arctic White paint, and the touch up paint we had proved to not be close enough for a match. We were also concerned about the amount of Cay Coral we had available, so we made the decision to buy another gallon of Cay Coral that would be matched as close as possible to what we already had. Also we made the difficult decision to buy more Arctic White, and put a few more coats over what we just spent weeks polishing.