Reassembling the interior
It was a pretty hectic summer in the Wiz’s garage. Almost every repair that I undertook on the Roadmaster became either more involved or just plain took longer than expected. I lost a lot of time due to the body shop having kept the car for two months to finish 8 hours worth of work. The car being away for so long gave me much more time to work on the seat frames and make more attempts at getting the carpet clean but it would have been nicer to get it all back together in time to drive it for a while before winter set in. In my neighbourhood I can only park a car on the street overnight during certain months of the year in order to allow for snow plowing. Since the garage has been full of everything that came out of the Roadmaster, the wagon has sat in the driveway and I’ve been parking the Pontiac out on the street. This isn’t an ideal situation but it was temporary and working well. Unfortunately as of November 1st, I can’t leave a car on the street overnight anymore. My plan was to have all of the Roadmaster’s interior parts reinstalled to free up garage space for a car again by that cutoff date. Needless to say, that didn’t work out so well.
I did manage to get my carpeting put back into place and the seats reinstalled. While none of this has come out perfect, I’m really quite pleased to look at how much nicer everything is after all of the work that was completed. Given how inexpensive replacement carpeting is for cars, I’m thinking that I’ll give up trying to get this carpet clean again. It’s probably 60% better than it was but new carpet will look so much better. That will be the first project tackled in the spring.
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
Here we have the inevitable lone french fry found underneath every seat, lending credence to the theory that much of McD’s food may once have been bred for sentience causing them to seek out dark places to hide.
AFTER
I snapped this photo before reinstalling the mounting bracket covers but it still looks one heck of a lot better.
BEFORE
AFTER
I’m especially proud of the seat frames. It was a significant amount of work to get the frames back to a semblance of normal but it was really rewarding and loads of fun.
This is where I ran out of time. I reinstalled the seats and had to pile the rest of the interior parts in the cargo area of the wagon in order to get it into the garage for the winter. There it will stay until this white crap is off the ground and I can work outside for long periods without risk of frostbite.
