1977 El Camino

The floodgates opened.

It's all coming out now.

#MensTherapy

Back home again after hibernating for the winter.

There's a couple of drainage tubes. These things rot out inside the smuggler's box (the part of the stock body that would have been the rear seat footwells if it was bodied as a Chevelle) if the drain pipes get blocked up.

One of my checklist tasks this morning was to check they were clear because there's been an awful lot of curse word and nuggets in the back of the truck these last five months and I didn't have the foresight to block the tops up beforehand. One was blocked, one wasn't. So I need to pull the lid on the smuggler's box and pull the pipe out to clear it. But I need something to reseal the smuggler's box with before I do that, so it came home with a bunged up drain. The camber of the road is making sure the rain falls to the working drain for now.

At the other end of the car/truck/cruck there are two drains to take away the windscreen waterfall. They are deeply embedded in a big old plastic chunk of stuff, and not straight, so I may have to do some dismantling to make sure they are clear. I suspect the driver's side is not.

It was SO DAMN NICE to drive the car home without the old busted hatch rear windscreen constantly squeaking like a rave chipmunk with a megaphone.

Fanks man!

I never did like the boat rails. I'm taking all the fixing rails out of the back bed as well. They're almost useless anyway and I'd rather have a completely clear rear bed.

The only thing I'll say at this point Elky is when I bought the car to your workshop it was huge. Having got home and parked it up between a Ford Focus and VW Golf, it doesn't seem very big at all anymore.

I don't know whether that's something to do with the environmental atmosphere in your workshop or whether you've done something to the car... but it's no longer a huge American car. It's about the size of a modern European family car.

So I'm going to need you to put that back how it should be please. I didn't ask for it to be shrunk and you never said shrinkage was a possibility when we shook hands on the arrangement.

I don't want to involve solicitors as that gets expensive for both of us. I'm hoping we can both be reasonable about this?

It's all in your mind dear chap. (It does look small though!)

Go give it a rub and see if it gets any bigger. It is cold out so maybe that's the problem, the workshop was cosy.

It does look very good in the street pic @thousandwords

Maybe a tad on the small side, but as said above it has been cold of late!

The rear screen makes it look a whole look cleaner, I think even if the boat rails had been left on just the rear glass makes it look better

And also, the Golf looks big because it is nearer to the camera and riding high... (thoughts of father Ted and Dougal in the caravan sketch now in my head!)

It's also an artefact of the tiny, wide angle lenses used on phones. The stuff in the centre is largely undistorted, but around the edges of the image everything gets warped outwards, so it looks much bigger.

Thanks for the kind words, it is starting to look a bit tidier now, even though it has rattle can paint down each side. Even that doesnt look too bad and with one more pass of the polisher will get much better.

Lots more to do on the car, but I'll be back to regular fiddling and tinkering now its home again. Got a list of things to tackle. Some cosmetic, some preservation, some tuning, some mechanical.

So hopefully more will be happening in terms of a progress thread via smaller changes.

Just wait until I've done the hoodscoop.