After the debacle with the front bumper on the car, I decided to divert my attention to the body trim pieces that I have scattered about the inside of the car. I still have to do the work I said I needed to do to the inner bumper and the four stud brackets before I can install the bumper so putting trim pieces on will pass the time as well as rid the inside of extra parts. The first thing I did was go for the grille and the associated trim pieces. I put the bordering trim piece in which is held in with cap nuts around the grille. The grille itself is held on with six screws that go through the grille itself and are anchored on clips that snap in tabs on the body panel where the grille mounts. Along with these two pieces I also installed the headlight trim pieces, which also screw in place with simple sheet metal screws. The next thing I put on was the mirrors. After digging the mirrors out, I found that the driver's side mirror is a cable operated mirror, which I definitely wanted to save. I had to put the mirror back together but after doing that I went ahead and mounted the piece in the door. I had to lower the window in order to route the cable in place through the door. The passenger side mirror was just a regular mirror so just two nuts held the piece in place in the door. That's two more pieces eliminated from the batch. The next trim piece or pieces that I added were the rocker panel/door jamb panels. These are the panels that accent the bottom of the door jamb and at times cover the trough where wires run along the door jamb to the back of the car. These were just a matter of screwing some sheet metal screws in place to hold them to the door jamb and ensure the doors shut properly, which they did, all was well. It really appears that the previous owners just disassembled the car with the intent on restoring it but never finished for whatever reason. For me its just a matter of reassembling the car and restoring those operations of the car that are not operating, basically getting the car mechanically operable. The next set of pieces to be installed on the car were the door frame/A pillar trim pieces. These moldings come in two pieces for each side, held in place with short sheet metal screws. Normally there would've been some weatherstripping under the moldings, to cushion the door windows when the doors are shut. Since this rubber is long gone, I will have to later on remove the moldings to install new weatherstripping. This is fine as I don't want the weatherstripping sitting around loose, it would be better for the pieces to just be on the car, out of the way. Lastly in this session, I installed the two rear side marker lights. These, just like most of the other pieces that were loose on the car, had nothing wrong with them other than having faded paint on them and being old. The plastic backing that holds the bulb sockets are both in good shape and the outer frame piece along with the red lenses are all in good shape. Both marker lights are held in with simple sheet metal screws, making the installation quick and easy. The fixtures even have raised letters identifying them by side and where the top of the fixture is so there is no mistakes or confusion in their installation. These went pretty fast. I was about to install the two front side marker lights except that they unlike the rear lights, are held in place with cap nuts. While I could've probably gotten these installed pretty fast, it was getting late in the day and I was tired so I concluded things here and planned on continuing things the next day. Little by little this car is coming back together, even if the pieces may need "restoring" as far as making them look better. At this point I just want the car put back together and running and drivable. When the time comes to do extensive body work I can slowly work on disassembling parts and doing the body prep and paint work as intended. Since we're not exactly building show cars here, I can probably get around doing a lot of the more extensive body disassembly work that would involve allowing me to paint every surface of metal where panels and trim pieces would've went.
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