MORE AND MORE MISCELLANEOUS FIXITS (7 of 8)
Steering Wheel
The wheel that was on the truck when I got it was in pretty sad shape with the typical humongous cracks. I installed the wheel from my 67 Vette for a while and I really liked the way it looked. However, I estimated it would run me around $500 to buy all new parts to do the same thing, so I looked for other options.
’69 C20 with Rare '67 Corvette Option
A wheel came up on the Parts Board that looked nice, but it was light brown, not saddle. It was in very good condition, a couple of minor cracks at the spokes and none on the rim. I bought it and installed it. It had a nice look in the truck; the brown against the saddle (no pics, sorry).
A while later, another one popped up on the Parts Board that was saddle color. However, this one had four cracks in the rim. The price was decent, so I bought it and figured I’d give it a go on repairing the cracks.
I used PC7 epoxy to fill the gaps. I masked right up to the edge of the area to be filled so as not to get goop on the adjacent original surface. Once cured, the epoxy was fairly easy to shape. I used narrow strips of sandpaper, working my way little-by-little down from 100 grit to 1500. I had to use my Dremel with small diamond shaping bits in a few places to reproduce the rim contour, particularly for the groove and offset in the top half of the wheel. Then I played around with Testors light brown, green, and white paint until I got the color pretty close and then painted over the dark gray epoxy.
After all this I ended up with three stock steering wheels, each one a different color. All had the same part number but with a different suffix. The numbers are on the back of one of the wheel spokes.
Shown top to bottom in the photo below:
9749753 5 - Saddle (I bought from Parts Board)
9749753 1 - Greenish (on the truck when I bought it)
9749753 2 - Light brown (I bought from Parts Board)
Maybe the greenish one was what came from the factory, not saddle. I really don’t know. Anyone have any more info on this ?