72 TA : New Project

[yellowjudge]

Great pics, & very informative

[njsteve]

I spent a few hours chemically stripping the paint off of the driveshaft and then polishing it with the coarse wirebrush disc on my bench grinder. It worked very well. The finish matched the shiny areas under the stripes exactly. I then restriped it with one shot striping enamel and a brush. I let the paint dry overnight and then installed the U-joints and sprayed the whole assembly with the wax based Nyalac metal preservative. It works pretty well at keeping natural metal from rusting.

[DarrenX33]

Steve this is incredible work. I am blown away. Geez where the hell have I been?

[MosportGreen66]

Steve... I can have my cars at your door step... ahh... tonight if you want 'em? (all of them...)

[njsteve]

Thanks for the moral support. It's amazing what you can do when you don't have the cubic $$$ to pay someone else to do it for you. I am running out of things to do now. Hopefully ENOCH can take the car soon to do the body and paint. I spent today under the car installing the driveshaft and then cleaning the rest of the underside with lacquer thinner and rags. Looks great from the floor looking up! (I don't have a lift, so it's all cold concrete here in Jersey). Thanks again y'all.

[njsteve]

The one interesting thing I have noticed after the hours spent under this car, is that it appears that the factory undercoated the cars PRIOR to painting them. If you look at the wheelwell shots you can see the areas where the undercoating has chipped away: you see red primer and not white body color. (See the photo of the rear frame rail with the big red section where a large piece of stray undercoating fell off during the cleaning process)

So I guess if you are correctly restoring one of these 2nd generation F-body cars, the wheel wells should have body color overspray on top of the black undercoating (rather ugly in my opinion).

[Jacsey 70Z]

Steve, Not sure I agree 100% with your statement about the undercoat before the color. Here is a picture of my 70Z it's unrestored and original paint (hugger orange) norwood car. All I did was clean and new exhaust, but you can see all the undercoat patterns.
I've enjoyed following this post, you've done a Great job and I love all the detail. Keep up the good work and continue to post the pictures.

[njsteve]

Maybe they changed the procedure by 1972 but from the photos there is no other logical explanation if you go layer by layer. Top layer is white, middle layer is undercoat and bottom layer is red oxide. If you chip off a piece of the oversprayed undercoating right next to a white section of metal, you only see red oxide. Here's a shot of the untouched front lower cowl area. You can see where the original paint has flaked away from the black undercoat/sealer from overzealous pressure washing (-my fault) On the rear frame rail the large red spot is where a large glob of undercoating fell off during the cleaning process, leaving only red oxide. If the car was painted white before undercoating, there should be white overspray under the undercoating and not over. (Now I'm sounding like a scene in the Movie Airplane: "Roger Over, Over Under, Under out") Do we have any former Norwood employees out there who can chime in???

[njsteve]

Got disgusted watching all the Barrett-Jackson stuff so I went out in the garage to play with the T/A this afternoon. Hooked the battery up just for fun to see what works. All the gauges actually still worked! I had worried there for a while after the initial engine run in without the right ground straps. I thought I had burned out the temp and volt gauges from the voltage feedback but they all seemed to work properly when the key was turned on today. Even the factory radio worked when I hooked some speakers up. That leads me to this question: Do you have to run 10 ohm rated speakers with the factory radio? I have the original 10 ohm dash speaker hooked up but the rear speakers were 4 ohm rated. Will this hurt the radio?

[tom406]

How are they wired? If they're wired in series (non stereo) for an 8 ohm load, they'd be just fine if there's a second set of outputs. Basically, its my understanding that whenever you drop the resistance (ohms) by half, the current the amplifier tries to deliver is doubled, and these high currents are what get you in trouble. I'm not familiar with what the factory did when you got the optional rear speaker on some of these setups. I would look at the factory wiring diagram, and just try to keep the ohm loads withing at least 60 or 70% of what the original setups were, and then avoid cranking it up excessively.