Tuesday 29 September 2020

FHC resto nr. 110; More small jobs

Or should I say that I entered the end-of-my-holidays-frenzy! At least I managed to complete a few more small jobs on the car.


To start with the interior light armature. I sourced that from the shed over 4 years ago, with the idea to clean it and fit it to the car in the then near future. Sadly life intervened in a negative way. Fast forward and last Sunday I was going through the small parts littering my study. As the F1 Grand Prix of Russia had finished, and the weather was rather wet, I thought it a good idea to clean the armature. As I had found a few extra spares in the past years, I decided on a little cleaning experiment.


To get rid of the oxidation I dropped the armature for 15 minutes in a lukewarm solution of cleaning vinegar, rock salt and water. Turned out to work quite well as the picture below illustrates


Another job that had been haunting me was the boot light switch. The very early original item (606239) got lost during the move of all my parts from René’s place to the shed. At first I didn’t think much about it as I had enough of the later switches. And that is when I found out that the later switches wouldn’t fit. Also the early left hand boot hinge I had prepared turned out to be missing its welded on tab to activate the switch. Time for a rethink!
So one of the items that were picked up after powder coating was the part of the boot lid hinge from a later car that bolts to the bottled. And I found out that I had a freshly galvanised tab between the coated parts! So these were fitted together.


After which it was time to remove the left hand hinge from the boot lid and replace it without damaging the paint work. It took me almost an hour but I succeeded. Also managed to fit a later type switch. Although it works I am not very impressed with the fit. Luckily it is mostly hidden from view! Though I will probably have a go at adapting it to get a slightly better fit …


And the final job for a day well spent in the shed was fitting the door strikers. The driver’s side went rather smoothly.


Though I have some doubts about the right hand (passenger side) latch. With the latch fully engaged there is a fair amount of free movement. Which isn’t there on the driver’s side. Looks like I’ll have to fit some door seals first, to see if that changes the matter. I hope so! Otherwise I’ll have to prepare another latch.

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