My goal for the black Sprint right now is to get a lot of the big delicate stuff mounted on it, like bumpers, grills, and trim etc so I don’t have to find places to store it. You probably saw the front bumper on the ground in front of the Sprint in the pictures of my new space -well, on the car seemed like the best place to store it, so I got to work mounting it. Of course, it wasn’t straight forward, I had to chase a lot of threads, straighten some parts and go on and off a bunch of times with it until I was happy with how it fit. It took several hours and went something like this.
Starting at the middle. These grills and bumper are original, warts and all, I just polished them by hand as well as I could with steel wool and Mothers mag polish. I’ll get some electricity involved and polish the heck out of them at some point. Note the spacing between the grills and bumper is fairly even -took a lot of bumper mount bending to make that happen. Grills will have to come back off to fit the lights but this was a good exercise.
These were in pretty bad shape when I started. The upper one had been tweaked a lot and required a half an hour of tapping and bending to get it to the pretty good state seen here. Both had a lot of over-spray -vestiges of which can still be seen. A quick wet sand with 1500 and some polish has them looking really good.Â
All mounted up. I don’t know what was originally used to mount them so I used stainless M5 x 16 Cheese-head screws. Nice reflections!
Next task was getting the bumper to align. These mounts take a lot of abuse and are not very rigid. Threads were in bad shape so I chased them with an M10 x 1.5 die. The orientation of the stud in relation to the flat part dictates the angle of the bumper to the car. I bent this a lot of times before I was happy with how the bumper fit. There are carriage bolts in the top of the bumper at about the right spacing for spot lights, so it may mount some. I just have to figure out how to get the rusty nuts off! Should I neutralize the rust and brush paint the inside of the bumper silver?
A little closer. Looks good no? I need a set of the bolt hiders for my red Sprint.
This picture is near the end of the process. The car came with two of the original 16 little clips that hold these trim strips on. What to do. I had this vision of capturing a screw in the hollow backside channel that I could send through the hole in the body put a nut on.Â
They sell strips of aluminum in bulk as OSH so I grabbed a 6 foot length, thinking I would chamfer the edges so they could be slid in the trim piece.
Once the piece fit I tapped a hole in it and sent this M5 through the hole.
Cheese head screws are not ideal for this application, but get the job done. I made these four quicker than the first one since I discovered if I angled the hacksaw at about 45 degrees for the cuts I wouldn’t have to file the chamfers in. I’d only have to dress them as needed a little bit.
Ready to mount. Does it matter that there’s overspray on the backside? I love this rubber topped 1960’s Steelcase table. Very sturdy. And someone else already ruined the top so I got it cheap and don’t have to feel bad about any stains or gouges I create.
It feels embarrassing, but it took about 3.5 hours to get this far. I had to come up with a method for making the little mounts, the trim pieces all needed a massage, and the holes in the body had to be drilled clear of filler. I should be able to get the rest of the pieces on the car pretty quick now that I have a system.
I’m curious to know what any of you have done to mount this trim. I imagine there are easier ways to do this, but I went with what I know and it seems to be solidly mounted and look good. If any of you could use a set of these little mounting pieces I suppose I could make you a set. Each car takes 16 so it would probably be about $50 for a set.