Since the grille was mocked up successfully, it was time to store it away. This is also a good time to consolidate some more parts. Before I start with that, I decided to polish the grille. A friend taught me a trick to working with this anodization. You can use wadding polish and it cleans the surface perfectly without scratching it. I went over the entire grille with polish. I was even able to remove some black overspray. I used a microfiber towel to final wipe everything. Unfortunately, I did find a few tiny blemishes here and there. I'll have to downgrade the grille to a 8.5/10, but that is crazy good for 35+ year old NOS.
Next up, was installing the inner grille. I bought an NOS inner grille many years ago, but I learned later that the one I bought was actually for a 1969. Apparently, when GM made service parts of the inners, they mass produced the 1969 version for 69/70. I was told it was next to impossible to find an actual 1970 inner. Well, board member
Mike Coefield came through for me. He finds all the good stuff!
I think the hardest part of putting this assembly together was attaching the inner to the outer. I had to tape together a stack of washers for the plastic clip to recess into as I used pliers to install the clips thru both grilles. A few of them were at a really bad angle for the pliers. In the end, it just took some patience. Once all the clips were in, I installed nickel plated screws hand tight with a 1/4" ratchet.
Last thing was the parking lights. This wasn't hard, just a pain. I found NOS parking light assemblies on EBAY years ago. I actually bought each side at different times. What I didn't realize was that one side was made of galvanized steel and the other side was not. When I realized that this past week, I tried to find something that matched one of my sides. Everything I could find looked just like this. It really isn't a big deal because the housings will be hidden. However, with the lenses on, one light appeared to be way darker than the other. So, I decided to spray the inside of the housings bright silver.
The next issue I had were the gaskets. The NOS assemblies come with a really nice rubber gasket that I would've preferred to use. However, age had started to turn them yellow. I was able to clean them up a bit but once the lens was on, you could see the color of the gasket around the edge of the lens, which just didn't look right to me. I found some black foam gaskets local. However they didn't quite fit and when I tried to stretch them, they tore right away. I did keep the felt plugs that came with them as the NOS plugs were not in good shape. I was able to find some grey foam gaskets from board member
QualityClassicParts (Seth Doulton). These gaskets are really nice and can be stretched to fit how you need them to. The color matches the housing perfect and looks great with the lens installed.
I could never find a hardware kit to install the parking light housings. So I sourced some #10 stainless sheetmetal screws and some #10 u-nuts. This finished everything off nicely. Now that the grille assembly is together, I think I'll upgrade this thing to a 9.5/10!
