I always thought it was nice that the camera didnt show how bad the car really was but now i wish it could show up better since it looks real good now

Here is where I am starting with the fiberglass work, it is amazing how many cracks the trunk lid had. I also have it parked beside the old Eldorado so you can get a general idea how easy it is going to be to fit that drivetrain into it.

Body is finally back on the car and waiting for a hinge setup to be made on the rear and the engine to be put together and all my new chrome parts added to it.

In case anyone is wondering if I painted it blue this is the cadillac I got that has a 500 cubic inch engine and front wheel drive setup that would be real nice to put in the car right away but I wan’t the car running by this summer not 3 summers from now so first things first. This car has lots of practice sitting around getting rained on so sitting for another year or so wasn’t going to hurt it. at least it gives me a lot of scrap metal to use on other stuff. It is hard to belive that a car as rusted and in bad condition as this thing was that it ran so good. It just goes to show what a good engine that they put in these cars. I am not even going to have to rebuild it or work on it in any way to use it in my car.

I decided this engine needed some work to get it running. I tried to make some sense out of it. I managed to get the timing belts installed on it and some of the covers even looked like they could fit without much trouble. I started to look closely at the engine wiring and decided whoever took it out of the donor car was a complete idiot. all the wiring was cut and none of it matched anything. The manual I got with it was for a Subaru and the wiring diagram didn’t match what was on this engine in the slightest. Some of the wires color codes were right and some of it was not even close to correct looking. I gave up on this wiring and started to look for a way to fit a carb onto this engine. At least that way it could be used without much trouble. after checking around for a few days I realized there wasn’t a single subaru of any kind in a junkyard around here. So since nobody around would buy this engine and I wasn’t able to use it I just ripped it off the car and stuck it in a corner of my building and would figure out what to do with it later. All I had to do now was find a running VW engine to stick on it.

Once the gauges where all set where I thought they should be I needed to check and make sure they all were seen with the steering wheel in front of them so I stuck the body back on the car and tried it out. It all fit and worked out almost perfect. the signal indicators were hidden by the wheel so I needed to find somewhere else for them. I would worry about that later. I wired up the dash. it was fairly easy to get hooked up. I had to wire the steering column later. It was in bad shape and I didn’t think I wanted to use it anyway.

Once I got the holes cut I put the gauges back in the holes to see how well they lined up. You can see that I also moved the radio into a normal spot.

I didn’t like the layout of the dash, all the gauges were way to far apart and took up to much room. as well as no room for a cd player or any other junk I might want to add. I filled in all the old holes with fiberglass and will cut new ones when they dry. I also have some black vinyl I picked up from a craft shop to put back on the dash where the old stuff was cut out..All I had to do is wait for this to dry, cut out the new holes and wire it all back up.

Here is where the fun finally starts. I took the wire looms off the dash wiring. now you can see what a mess the wiring was. it always looks nicer inside wire looms I quickly gave up on keeping the wiring and decided to redo most of it, if it wasn’t an obvious wire and connected good I ripped it out. I made a quick diagram of what the plug that wired it to the lower part of the body and then ripped almost all of it out.

Here are some random pictures I took to try and show what all of the parts of the car looked like. I had it took apart enough to start rebuilding it and getting it running again so I figured this was a good time to take lots of pictures in case I needed before and after shots.

Here are some Pictures of right after I took the body off the frame I was hoping with the body off the wiring would make some sort of sense but it was almost completely insane from what I could tell. there were 4 switches on the dashboard side and 2 of them seemed to control the wipers. there was a radio turned sideways in there with them. It all looked like it was hooked to something but I wasn’t able to get anything to work so I figured instead of trying to figure out the old mess just rip it out and redo it all from scratch. I tested all the gauges and they worked except the temp. it is always reading right in the middle of the scale. I tried to take some pictures of each part of the car so I could have a reference in case I needed to go back and see what something looked like. The only thing that looked confusing was going to be getting that strange little engine running. I would give it a shot but not put much effort indo it before giving up and sticking a bug engine back on it.

Here is a mold I tried to make out of the broken drivers side window. It looked good and would have probably worked but I didn’t have any oven big enough to put the new window in. I gave up and just fixed a new window up the best way I could think of.

These are some pictures I took to try and get a general idea of what was going to be needed to get this thing in some sort of running condition. There was no interior to speak of and the person who wired it must have had stock in the crimp on connector company, there were more crimps in some places than wires one good thing was the car was fairly well built and there wasn’t anything major that was going to keep me from fixing it up by spring.

Here is what the car looked like when I got it off the truck it was shipped on. It looks pretty good and I was suprised how good it looked compared to what the description I got of it was. I thought I would have it made and have the car running in a month easy

I had no idea what I was getting into…..