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Restoration Tip From Forum Members

Do not throw ANYTHING away during disassembly! Even if you think it’s trash. Sometimes old genuine parts are better than reproduction.

As my friend found out with restoring his Mustang, and hes perfectionist when it comes to body and paint work. This is a repop bumper and look how it fits. The right side fits pretty much perfect but the left, not so great. I don’t know what he did with old bumper or even if the car came with one.

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He tried to make it fit better for 2 more hours after he sent the pictures above! He swapped some brackets and did a little shimmying, heres the end result. A little better, but not much. He said hes done, and hes not messing with it anymore.
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As my friend found out with restoring his Mustang, and hes perfectionist when it comes to body and paint work. This is a repop bumper and look how it fits. The right side fits pretty much perfect but the left, not so great. I don’t know what he did with old bumper or even if the car came with one.

View attachment 1766539

View attachment 1766540



He tried to make it fit better for 2 more hours after he sent the pictures above! He swapped some brackets and did a little shimmying, heres the end result. A little better, but not much. He said hes done, and hes not messing with it anymore.
View attachment 1766541
Though there’s no excuse for poor fitting repro bumpers (along with the fact I’ve found some to be thinner and lighter than OEM), I’ve seen and heard of many issues over the years about rechromed OEM bumpers.
It was bad enough years ago when there were chrome shops in a lot of cities and you could drive there to complain when you found your bumper they’d done for you didn’t fit right because they hadn’t straightened it well, or you found flaws in the chrome, for them to redo. Now there are only a few of these shops left and you need to spend a bunch of money to send a flawed job on your bumper back to them!
 
AMD rear bumper for Challengers is no great shakes either. Common problem, so yeah fit everything before final body and paint, it's best not to fit this chineseum on a car with fresh paint and expect it to fit perfect. The original parts didn't fit like a Rolls Royce back in the day either.

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I think everyone pretty much covered it, but may I add that taking pictures before disassembly and “bagging and tagging” everything are biggies and the most important so you know where and how it goes back together.
 
Yes every single screw is important, you can buy 2 or 3 different screw kits, and have to mix and match to get them all close to original
 
When I restored my T/A I bought an interior screw kit for my car, and the most value I got from the kit was the fact each bag of screws in the kit was numbered and an included instruction sheet told which number corresponded to what the screws were for.
My fasteners were in disarray due to my not being diligent enough in organizing when I removed them, and ink on tags I’d put in my baggies getting unreadable due to oil etc.
Many of the screws in the restoration kit were such bad quality I couldn’t use them. The metal was so soft the heads would deform when I tried to install! But I could use them to ID the screws I’d removed from my car to put my interior back together using mostly my original screws, so the poor quality kit was actually invaluable to me for that job!
 
For labelling parts, I have a few boxes of differently sized zip locks bags near my bench. I'm pretty fond of 3 by 5 cards for labels. They're cheap, and tolerate getting oily and still holding their content. They fit well inside boxes, outside boxes (taped), and inside zip locks. I have several examples where the (sharpie) writing on the outside of a zip lock rubs/scratches off the plastic pretty easily. A plus is one can retask a zip lock without the need to clean off (isopropyl alcohol) the older sharpie labeling.
 
Stop blowing apart a decent car on a weekend and thinking you have started the restoration process. Take an assembly off, restore it and store it for reassembly. Then take another assembly off and repeat. By the time you get the car torn down you have it 1/3 of the way and you're still excited to start the next process.
Most guys that tear a car totally apart will not complete it and then the process of selling it to a number of same minded newbies will happen, it will be apart for years, parts will get lost and the project will never get put back together let alone correctly.
Oh, and don't look for the cheapest body and paint guy and tell him to put it on the backburner as you aren't in a hurry. Give him a timeline, keep up your end on the money and hold him to the timeline, you know like your employer does with you or you get fired. Same principle.

Runcharger and I are of the same mind regarding restoration methodology.
 
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