This weekend I got a bunch of little things done. I also realized I'm not the best at taking pictures beforehand, making the after pictures seem obsolete. Saturday I focused on trying to get the inside of the truck cleaned up a bit so it didn't look like a barn floor. I picked up all the loose bolts and screws from the interior and put them into a container, and sorted out the parts that are still left to put on the truck. The parts that could fit, went behind the seat, and the rest are in a small box in the front.
One of the cool things that I like about this truck are the floor mats it came with. I'm not really sure if these are rare or if they still sell them by the hundreds, but I dig them. I sprayed them down, washed them up and they look nice (they actually look nicer dry_).
Then today my wife and I went down to Harbor Freight and picked up a nice media blasting cabinet for $100 (on sale from $160 down to $120 and add a 20% off coupon). I love it already. I had a coil air hose laying around and some extra fittings, so I was able to hook up a permanent in-cabinet coil hose to my blasting gun to make it more maneuverable. It works like a charm.
Then, after sandblasting one of our kitchen cupboard doors for my wife to see, I dug into a few electrical issues I wanted to address. First one was to see if the two ancient 4" speakers in the dashboard actually work. Shockingly, the actually did work. Since they did, I figured I would see if the Sears and Robuk stereo that came with the truck worked or not. No surprise, it made noise, but not well. So I scrapped it.
After that I moved on to hooking up the electric choke on the Edelbrock. I live in Southern California so I don't really need it, but I'm Type A and wanted it hooked up. I ran the electrical wire across the firewall through the conduit and through to the fuse block using yellow 16 ga wire. I attached it to fused accessory power and it worked great. I just have to adjust the choke later.
And finally, my last order of business was trying to get the ammeter to work. I picked up a voltmeter at the junk yard last week, but I really wanted the original gauge in there. Mine was facing straight down and never moved so I thought it was toast. After figuring out that the voltmeter gauge would have been a ton more work to get it work correctly, I figured I would give the ammeter one more shot. I spun it back up to 12 o'clock and turned the key on. Voila!! It worked! I love easy fixes.
With all the extra time, I pulled the gauge cover plastic off and decided to try a headlight restoration kit on the scratches and fogging. I think it turned out pretty well. The fogging isn't completely gone, but all the scratches are gone and the fogging has been significantly reduced. Check it out...
Right side of the lens is cleaned, left is uncleaned.
And a couple of pictures installed...
