72 TA : New Project

**njsteve** · #1 04-29-2007, 12:15 AM

I was doing some more finagling around with the car today, cleaning up the headlight buckets. While I was waiting for them to dry off I unbolted the trunk latch. I took some photos for documentation purposes. As you can see the trunk latch was installed when the car went into the giant primer dunk tank back at the Norwood plant in December 1972. You can see the red primer covered with traces of the exterior white overspray as well as the black and turquoise trunk spatter paint over that. It's interesting to see that the undersides of the mounting bolts have the primer on them as well. That e-coating did its job: it got everywhere.

**njsteve** · #2 05-01-2007, 05:51 AM

I went to Carlisle a week or so ago and picked up a new gas tank for the car. I have been holding off on ordering one since I didnt feel like paying $50+ in shipping for a $150 part. I bought the tank there and carted it home. My original tank has two large screw holes in the top where someone in the past had drilled through the trunk floor to mount something and went right through the tank. Ouch! Yeah, I could have repaired it and kept it but when it comes to safety items like brakes, brake hoses, fuel lines and gas tanks, I dont play around with my life. Replace them, save the originals for posterity and don't ever worry again.

My original tank still had the factory silkscreened stencil barely visible on the bottom with the 12-20-71 date code on it. I have been scratching my head on how to reproduce it when I stumbled across the website www.inlinetube.com and found that they reproduce the stencil! (go to their website and look under "gas tanks" and you will find it). I had to do some modifications to get my exact date code but in the end it reproduced it exactly.

Here's the original tank with the ghost image of the factory US Steel Stamp still visible (barely):

**njsteve** · #3 05-01-2007, 05:54 AM

The stencil is more like a decal with cutouts in it. You clean the tank with lacquer thinner and carefully peel the front off of the decal and place it one the tank. Then use a squeegy and make sure it is firmly attached. You then carefully peel the backing off making sure all the centers of the letters stay on the tank.

**njsteve** · #4 05-01-2007, 06:01 AM

The stencil was close but it did not have the cutout for the day, only the month and year. (They accidentally sent me the wrong year "72" instead of "71"). I ended up taking a photo of a ruler next to the decal and printing out the correct scale photo on my printer. I then used an exacto knife and cut out the "20" and the "71" from the photo. I then cut out a spot for the month in the center of the stencil and applied both sets of numbers.

**njsteve** · #5 05-01-2007, 06:02 AM

Next, I masked off the tank and sprayed the stencil lightly with several coats of flat black.

The final result duplicated the original tank stencil perfectly.

**SS427** · #6 05-01-2007, 07:48 AM

Looks great Steve. Dedication and attention to detail pays off.

Rick

**njsteve** · #7 05-01-2007, 05:06 PM

Here's another bit of useless trivia for everybody. The date on the original gas tank is 12-20-1971. According to the cowl tag, the car was scheduled to be built the first week of December 1971 (12A). It was completed and shipped on 12-21-1971 to Reliable Pontiac in Roseville, California. How's that for "just-in-time" parts delivery at the plant?

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