Dec 2011

Sort of worked on the RR over Christmas break. I made a plywood box to store the glass in and chrome trim parts. As I boxed the stuff up, I wondered when I might be getting the parts out of box again? Oh well, the project is 10 years and counting now, no real rush. Good thing about this project was that I got the glass off of the couch in the shop and Dad get's his napping couch back.

Actually, I got a few other things in-progress too. We are reorganizing the shop and putting in a sand blasting room. What this amounts to is me making a tarp to seal off part of the room. The advantage is that I'll be able to work on the RR for a few hours at a time and not have to spend hours moving stuff outside and setting up the sandblasting equipment, (which is a royal pain). This should really get things moving along and with minimal cost. The tarp was sort of expensive, but I bought some fabric from Rochford Supply in their closeout 2nds. Super cheap for what it is.

Purchased in 2001, started restoration in 2010

I bought this Road Runner in 2001. Hard to beleive it's been nearly 10 years already! The car came out of Iowa but I bought it locally in Grand Island, NE. At the time I had just graduated from college and was living in Peoria, IL. My plan was to buy a house (with a garage) and haul the car out there to start working on it. Well I did buy a house, but that ended up being another whole chapter of my life as it was a fixer upper and took nearly 4 years to complete... To make a long sorty short the car was stored inside a building on the farm in NE and never moved until last October (2009) when I decided to move it outside so we could clean the building out and transform it into a working farm shop. The car sat outside last winter, and this spring I had to do something with it. Sell it? Restore it? or Do Nothing? were my basic options, well I wasn't going to leave it outside and let it rust away, and I just couldn't get rid of it, so that left one option, restore it! and no time like the present that to start now! I think I only have about 3 or 4 other hobbies this will cut into right now, so the timing is good...

The next problem is that event though we just cleaned out this farm shop, that wasn't the place to ideally work on this car in. Now it became obvious that I needed to clean out the "race shop" so there was room for this car to come in. After 2 weeks of late nights and feeling like I had been run over by a freight train, the car was finally ready to come in. The car was hauled into the shop on 18 April 2010, and the tearing down process began.