My rear-view mirror gave up the ghost yesterday and fell to the passenger side floor, leaving only a coffee ring of rusty residue on the windshield to mark its passing. I am taking this opportunity to clean off the rust before gluing it back on. So far I’m about halfway done, as evidenced in the picture below.
Having my armrests re-chromed proved to be a little tricky as they are plastic and not metal. As the electroplating/chroming process is more difficult on plastic, it is more expensive and harder to find someone willing to take on the work. I finally found a place that would do the job at a reasonable price and pictures of the results are below:
Before:
After:
I still need to give the vinyl pads a good cleaning and polish up the ashtrays, but I won’t be putting these back onto the car until I get the door panels back anyway.
Back in my last year of high school my dad was working on location in Minnesota. He gave me a call one night and said to go get his Ford book out of the garage and find a 1966 Galaxie. When I finally managed to find the picture he asked me what I thought. “It’s beautiful,” I told him. “Any reason I’m looking at this?” He explained that he had found one in front of a house while driving to work and if I liked it he would go offer the guy cash for it and see if he’d bite. It wasn’t even for sale.
A week or so later I woke up to tapping at my window to find my dad outside grinning. He had the Galaxie idling in the moonlit driveway with the top down. It was definitely love at first sight, even though the car was pretty rough around the edges. The original owner hadn’t wanted to sell it at first but when my dad offered him a grand in cash he changed his tune pretty quickly. After a little meatball surgery my dad got the car running and when his job in Minnesota was done he canceled his plane ticket and drove the Galaxie back to California himself.
Pictured is the car shortly after I got her, parked outside of the Aerojet ordnance facility (the local submarine race stands), in her original springtime yellow paint. Later on we would paint the car vintage burgundy in our own garage, but that spring/summer she was in her original paint.
I decided to swap out my battery tray, clamp down, and cables today, as they were getting pretty ragged looking. In what is sure to be the least exciting post I have made so far, here are a few before and afters:
I have no idea why the clamp was previously on upside down. I will make it a point to only work on the car sober in the future.
Next weekend I will give the engine bay a bit of detailing if I get the time, as it is still a little dusty in there. Other than that, I found a stock looking voltage regulator to replace my busted one, so my alternator light is no longer burning its angry red eye at me while I drive.
Quick comparison shot of my Sun RC-85 8500 RPM tach before and after the restoration. As pretty as it looks I still haven’t fixed it–for some reason it’s been on the bottom of my list. I eventually want to get some other aftermarket gauges but these days I’ve been driving the car a lot more than working on it (other than replacing a broken regulator and some chewed up battery components).
Here are some older pictures of the vinyl dash pad:
And here it is after sending it out to Just Dashes:
Feels great to finally have the dash looking good again. Tomorrow I will try to locate a steering wheel puller and get the steering wheel swapped. After that I will replace the rear quarter trim cardboard inserts and then try to detail the engine bay if I have time.
Parked next to my buddy’s ’65 Fairlane this morning at work. Looks like he’s going to have to get into his car through the passenger side when 6 o’clock rolls around.
