The Webmaster Zone

The weekend after my last installment I went down and tried the screws around the headlamp bowls but they were still stuck after soaking in penetrant, so I got out the impact driver. Gave it a few good whacks with my big lead hammer, felt something give way; I looked down to see that the end of the driver had gone right through the bowl and the fender! I tore off the rest of the rusted out bowl with my hands and had a look; the fender behind the bowl was about 1/3 completely rusted away. I wasn't sure how to continue, but I knew the bowl on the other side wasn't as rusty as the passenger side so I would use this one to figure out how to proceed. My first thought was to fabricate a ring out of sheet metal and place it behind the fender so there would be good metal to screw into when mounting the headlamp bowls. That would sandwich the remaining metal between two surfaces and be quite solid. I set out and picked up tin snips and then headed out OMG to pick up new headlamp bowls, the one was rusted way beyond the point of return and rather than risk a second trip I decided to replace the other one as well. While at OMG I found out that the metal behind the bowl is actually two pieces, the fender and a metal ring behind it, and it was the metal ring that was primarily affected by the rust, so I purchased two of the rings as well, so I scrapped my sheet metal idea but now I had to go and buy a cold chisel to remove the old ring as it was tack welded into place. I'm certainly collecting tools at a fast pace! All this is spread over several days, I couldn't drive anywhere because the car had no headlights so I have to take the bus all over the place to pick up tools and parts. Anyway, I got everything together and transferred the old wires and adjusters from the old bowls to the new ones, then set at it with the chisel trying to undo the spot welds. Well after about 15 minutes with not a lot of progress, I called it quits as I didn't want another noise complaint quite so soon. I then thought I'd give drilling the old bolts out a try. After breaking 4 bits and lots of cursing I learned a lot about how to drill out screws. First, use good quality bits. Second, start with a very small size bit and go up in small increments. Third, be gentle, if you have to push really hard for it to bite you are probably using a bit that is too big to start. I also put a bit of motor oil on the bit before drilling each time to try and keep the bit as cool as possible, which seemed to work. At first I was having no luck drilling out the screws so I thought I would drill new holes since the new bowl screws were large metal screws instead of the small bolts that were used before. However, there are cutouts in the fender to allow clearance for the headlamp adjusting screws and I didn't want to cut more holes in the fender so I went back to drilling out the center of the small bolts. I found that the new screws would actually screw nicely inside the old bolts once a large enough hole was drilled so I did that for the remaining 7 bolts. Then I mounted the new bowls and put everything back together. Its so nice to have a car with eyes again! Cleaned the headlamp wire contacts with an eraser and smeared with dialectric grease. Adjusted the beam aim and after some fiddling got the trim rings back on. All that work and you can't even tell anything has been done from just looking at it! I did find a generic replacement spring for the one wiper arm at CT, since OMG doesn't sell the springs separate from the arms and the wiper arms are quite expensive. Put a new screw into the existing hole on the passenger's side arm, and used some blue loctite on the driver's side arm as the splines were slipping. Let it set for a few days and since then I have been driving in the rain a lot with no problems, so I can mark those two jobs complete, although I'll be looking at swap meets next year for some used wheelboxes and arms in decent condition. This week I will be greasing the heater motor so it spins properly and seeing if I can get a bit more power out of it. Its getting chilly!