Breathing new life into an old car
The engine bay is very grimy. Very, very grimy. I figured I’d spend a bit of time scrubbing what I could reach. It came out pretty nice for the amount of effort I put in, and only doing one pass at it. Degreasing is pretty slow going, but it looks awesome.
My car kinda looks like it’s wearing a bandit mask. 🙂
I’m prepping the front for some paint, but first I had to get all the gross built-up crud out from behind those headlights!
You know what sucks? Sanding Bondo. Well, actually it’s not difficult but it takes forever.
Work must be done on the front fascia, so the bezels and headlights needed to come out!
The one thing about the 1980s that is common on almost everything? Plastic. Lots and lots of it.
So there is a lot of rust that is going to be difficult to remove. As long as you don’t come closer than 10 feet, this car will look pretty good 🙂
Dominick and Eric seem to like sitting in the Reliant. I think Dominick is dreaming of driving it soon…
I have a cool idea for the front of the Reliant. It involves the removal of the grocery-getter grille and replacement with something a bit more masculine.
The Reliant is up on blocks so it’s easier for me to take a look at the condition of the underside. I went around the car and made note of some issues.
So I have a k-car up on blocks in my driveway… I’m officially a redneck. 🙂
So I was looking in the glove box of the reliant and I found the original manual (which I knew was there). But I also found the original warranty card, all filled out by the original owner circa 1987.
Well, because there was so much heavy-duty vacuuming to be done, I went out and got a small Shop-Vac to deal deal with it all. I got every piece of glass from down inside the door and under the seats. Also, I cleaned up the engine bay and any other place where there were accumulations of crud. Looking a bit better now, sorry no pics of the vacuuming 🙂
Well, I got a moment to work on the car today in the beautiful sunshine, since I had a nice day off. My plan was to take the front bumper completely off, since there is a bit of a warp to the plastic I’d like to fix. There were only 2 bolts left on the driver’s side holding it there at the moment, so it was pretty easy to get off, (especially since I broke one bolt, the same one as the opposite side of the car.)