I've got one hell of an update for the followers on this thread! I've made a lot of progress and tracked it, I've just been too busy to update.
About a year ago (a little over), I rattle-bombed my car. It's been holding up surprisingly well! Very little fading on the roof, and minor imperfections here and there, but overall it's been good. That being said, I took a lot of shortcuts. I masked everything off, rather than removing most of it. Also, I did the entire top half in red, the lower half in white.
I finally took apart the door panels and whatnot, and prepped the window sills for paint. I color matched the window sills red, and then painted the door panel trim gold. Because the motor is gold, the steering wheel is gold and the shift knob on its way to me is gold... I think minor trim pieces look good matched!
Before:
After:
I've seen a few pictures of wagons that black out their window pillars. Because of the huge chrome trim piece and the massive black weatherstripping around the rear cargo windows, it looks pretty decent! I started today by masking, sanding/prepping and spraying the rear passenger door pillars black. And that's when UPS came. A box straight from Canadia! I did the right thing and found a Bluebird grill! It was in good shape, it was all there, and the price was low enough for me to afford! Yippee!! These are the pictures he took before sending them to me.
I cracked open the box, and got to cleaning, leaving the rest of my pillars unpainted! I started to sand, clean and prep for refinishing.
Before:
During:
Bezel Painted (before trim):
Bezel Painted (after trim):
Grill Painted (before trim):
Grill Painted (after trim):
I ran over to Phil's house and we mounted it up!
It's CRAZY aggressive! The top part sticks out further than the bottom part of the grill, so all I need now is a badge or two to slap on it and call it a day! It's 100 times better looking than the old grill, in my opinion, but I'm going to hang on to the old one, obviously.
The motor got moved to my brother's house, so I can finally get rid of the old gasket materials and start putting things together. I need a new head before I can make too much progress, but when I get one, I'll be sending it to get ported/polished