The New Project: Part Deux!

[njsteve]

In today's "Give A Mouse A Cookie" update, it all started this morning with me taking the rear seat out to fix some of the wrinkles in the seat cover. I pulled the back seat and set it in the 80 degree sun for an hour to soften up. Since I wasn't just going to sit around for the hour, I pulled the other seats out...and then the carpet...etc.

Anyway, I had a bag of hog rings so I adjusted and pulled and remounted all the new seat covers till 90% of the wrinkles were gone. They must have been installed in the Canadian winter and ended up being too loose on the seat foams. It worked out very well in the end.



The upright cushions are done, the ones lieing flat are warming up.

[njsteve]

And while all the seats were warming up I pulled the carpet out to see what the floors looked like. All the original tar paper insulation was in place and actually very pliable and sticky (a real mess actually). Sitting in the sun the stuff was just as tacky as the day it was installed 40 years ago.



I wanted to examine the floorboards so I started carefully pealing with a plastic putty knife and got all of the tar paper insulation up. The car was originally rust proofed when it was new and it looks like they lifted the carpet and slathered the tar paper with extra cosmoline or some other goop and it pretty much saved the floors but it left a black tar mess in places. Here is what it looked like after a few hours of peeling:

[njsteve]

And look what arrived yesterday:

I ordered a reproduction of the original owner's license plate from these guys: http://www.licenseplates.tv/

It turns out that the CWT-160 plate number that was listed on all of the car's dealership repair orders was in a unique 3-letter/3-number sequence that started in 1973 in Ontario. So it looks like that is as close as the original day-one plate as I am going to get.