During the winter and summer of 2006, I moved on to other things as I waited for the engine and transmission to be rebuilt a second time. I continued to work on my ’60 LeBaron. I still wanted to get it painted and continue taking it to car shows. I had the transmission overhauled and it was at the shop for 6 months. The shop owner then lost his shop space and what I got back was running very rough. Unbelievable as it may seem, I had to have this transmission overhauled a second time in this car as well. After that, the transmission ran fine, but the car still did not drive as well as I had hoped. I decided I was going to take it for a quickie paint job at Maaco and put it on eBay. A good friend of mine asked me “What makes me you think that I don’t want it?” I told him just why he did not want it, but that was not enough to deter him. They are very rare cars after all. I stored the LeBaron for its new owner until he could get a garage built. I stopped driving the car but continued to use it for reference while putting the Crown back together.

I finished installing the door frames and side glass, and with one exception, this went better than I had anticipated. There is really not much available in the way of adjustments so you get what you get to an extent. They were far from perfect when new. The sedans are notorious for having scratched side windows. There is a “U” shaped piece of sheet metal, a guide, that is lined with fuzzy strips secured by staples. Eventually the fuzzies rot and the staples scratch the glass. Even on low mileage original cars, the glass is almost always scratched. I had limited success trying to polish the glass as most scratches were deep. Over the course of four years, I was able to come up with enough glass that was good enough to use. Fortunately, my regulators were in very nice original condition and just required degreasing and new lubrication. Even though my window motors worked, my dad took the motors apart to clean and lubricate them.

I began installing door weather stripping, but it was a challenge as so little is available new. Gary Goer’s does a pretty good job. I used some of the 1959 sedan connectors and these I was able to adapt in most cases. I am still in the process of trying to replicate the wire retainers that were used at the bottom of each door. I also need to be able to move the car out of the garage to finish the left hand doors.

I put off having the pot metal roof spears and “louvers” replated as long as I could. After three years, I finally found a company that I could trust with the work. Everything came out crisp and sharp and smooth. Installing them was another stressful event. I used silicone on the top and front edges of the brushed stainless roof inserts, sealing them to the car. I left the bottom edge open to allow for breathing should water ever get under the panels. I cut small foam washers to seal the mounting pins as original, and used 3M rope caulk to seal the nuts on the underside. I then used ¼” Dynaliner to insulate the roof. The ¼” material works very well as the bows nearly touch the inside of the roof.

REAR WINDOW
More windshield drama: When I bought my first windshield the seller told me the reproduction was made using original molds. When it arrived, I immediately noticed that it did not have the original “bubble” profile. The seller told me the DOT would not allow production of the bubble and talked me into keeping the windshield. I soon found the correct reproduction. The first seller then reneged on his offer to buy it back at any time. So now I had two windshields, at a $1000 a pop, plus shipping.

This time I had the windshield professionally installed and it took all of 20 minutes and the guys did not even break a sweat. They said my seal was in such good shape that no sealants were required. I restored my original window seals by placing them in my glass beading cabinet and spending about an hour on each. I did have to use adhesive remover to get the original sealant off the rear seal. That took another three hours with rags and a screwdriver and 3-M Adhesive Remover. I spent the same amount of time cleaning off the adhesive I had used on the windshield seal in our failed attempt at installation.

The glass beading removes all dirt and rust from the rubber and leaves it looking fresh and new. It will take off hardened sealants as well. I have even glass beaded original soft rubber items on low pressure with great results. The new windshield looks amazing and the tinting is much more correct than what was on the first windshield I bought.

As things always seem to go around here, I brought down the rear glass and found that it was sandblasted. This was a used piece that came with the car, as a replacement for the broken original. It was unusable. So I was on the search again for yet another piece of glass. This time, I found that Bob Hoffmeister, in Nebraska, could provide the glass. Bob when to great lengths to find the best glass for me that he could.

THE MATRIX
I had decided early on that I wanted power door locks. I had bought a number of related NOS parts on eBay. The more I looked at my LeBaron, the more I realized just how complicated this was going to be. As it turned out, a good friend of mine in Palm Springs, was restoring a ’60 coupe. He had bought two parts cars out of Texas and he flew me out to help him part the cars out. One of the cars was a LeBaron with power locks. I was able to pull the entire wiring harness and only had to make two cuts to remove it. I spent two weekends dissecting the harness, pulling wires, splicing, and taping the wiring into my existing harness. This was a major project, just as I had thought, and I could not have done it without the factory wiring. I had to splice in new wiring at the door jambs and where the lock harness had to be cut. It was a challenge to find all the correct wires to make the splices with. I had saved the harness from my parts car so was able to salvage enough exact wiring for use at the splices. I used a typical crimp on connector and used heat shrink tubing to cover the connections. I had to be careful to stagger all of my cuts to avoid creating lumps in the taped harness. This was not as easy as it sounds, but the result is that you would be hard pressed to find the splices under the tape.

The first picture shows the power lock wiring after it had been extracted from the main harness of the donor car. The second shows splicing the wires at the door jambs where wires had broken over time. I taped the reconstructed lock harness directly to my original harness to recreate the original style configuration.

GONE WITH THE WINDLACE
I was able to buy reproduction windlace material from SMS. The original had a cardboard flange sewn into it that the reproduction does not. The new material does have two fabric flaps that I glued on flanking sides of matt board strips. I was then able to mount the strips to the car using the original clips which I had blasted and painted. I then installed my original tuck strips. These are strips of metal with teeth that retain the edges of the headliner. Having so many parts cars I was able to get enough of the butterfly clips to install the strips as original. The clips were never meant to be re-used and half broke when I squeezed them to spread. I had enough, but two broke later as I tucked in the fabric. I then had to drill pilot holes and use screws in those places. The moral of the story is that I should not be so fanatic about using every little original piece. In concept they worked great and pulled everything tight, but screws are much more dependable. In fact screws would have made a lot more sense in many cases had the cars not been produced on an assembly line.

UNDER THE BIG TOP
The headliner installation went really well. SMS provided a pre-sewn napped cotton headliner, a sedan specific item. Southampton hardtops came with vinyl headliners. I found a site on line (Auto Restorer On-Line) that described how to install headliners. They had some great tricks for locating screw holes under the fabric (i.e., holes for coat hooks, etc.) This was so much more helpful than the manual and proved invaluable.

It is important to cover as much of the car as possible in plastic, inside and out. That, or have lots of solvent handy to clean up misfired glue. The only mistake I made was spraying glue on too much of the front and rear headers. Glue is only required at the very outside edges. Use tape to mask off the majority of these bulkheads when spraying the glue. Otherwise, the bend in the metal will create a ridge in the fabric that will look like an additional headliner bow. I had to pull the fabric back, clean off the adhesive, and just glue the fabric at the outer edges. The ’60 Imperial has a built-in serrated strip at the top of the rear window. To access this requires removing the rear glass, according to the manual, and it probably is required. However, I think you could still glue in the headliner without removing the rear glass.

The first thing that I did was install the bows in the car and check for fit. I think these bows were made per car as swapping bows from the parts cars did not always work. This may take some hand bending to make them fit well. Keeping them in order should be obvious. They are color coated on the ends. I then removed the bows when I was happy with the fit. Next, I laid out the headliner fabric, face down, over a bed. I then slid in the bows, centered the fabric, and cut the listing (fabric pockets) as instructed. Next I hung the bows and fabric in the car, securing the back bow in two sheet metal hooks (attached to the car) and pulled it forward, gluing it to the windshield header. I then glued the fabric to the back window header and tucked in the sides. Finally tucking, trimming, and gluing, the fabric at the back pillars. I then collapsed from nerves.

A vinyl headliner can’t be nearly as intimidating as cotton. After all of this I then put a spring clip in my visor, not knowing one was already stuck in there, and fought with my visor for an hour. There are fun times too. After having spent a small fortune on having the windshield garnish re-chromed, I was able to install some trim. Shiny stuff! Only the holes were gone. My trim came from so many different cars that it was just bound to happen. Holes were not always drilled straight at the factory. Imagine that, and in “America’s most carefully built car”.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC
I finally decided it was looking as though I might actually finish this car one day. I e-mailed Electro-Tech and sent them my radio for FM conversion and ipod hook up. I also bought four speakers. I installed two small speakers, in place of the in-dash single unit, that I mounted in black painted plywood covered in black fabric. Since I added rear air there was no place to install rear speakers. There were two holes in the back panel that I enlarged to fit two additional speakers that will be covered in package shelf fabric and will not be visible. Also nice was the fact that you cannot see the speakers from the trunk because they are behind the trunk hinges. I covered the rest of the package shelf in a layer of Dynamat to replace the original insulation material. The pink fiberglass insulation, behind the seat, was used in cars with rear air for additional sound deadening. I really had to shop the Dyna brand insulation products. I bought three different products from three different online vendors and saved over $200. These products are really great and very easy to install.

At left, you can see the radio on the left has the new FM conversion. Compare this to the original, on the right, that has the old circuit board and transistors.

I finally was able to pick up the engine and transmission in September of 2006. I stripped off the transmission shop’s paint and re-sprayed the bell housing in black, the iron in a cast iron finish, and clear coated the aluminum. The transmissions were originally bare iron and aluminum with black overspray on the bell housing. Overspray from the black engine paint. I finished detailing the block and my Dad arrived in October to install the engine. Inside of a week, everything was nearly back together. Of course the day we were to install the engine we realized that the engine mounts were all cracked. The mounts are available new. I can’t even tell you how many times I asked mechanics at the restoration shop if I needed new ones and was told they were fine. That put us a day behind as we had to have new mounts over-nighted. I had to re-blast and paint much of my hardware as it was looking rough from all of this in and out business. Having had the extra time and access, things were actually looking much better the second time around. In the end we were short one washer, to the park brake, so we stopped there.

HOW THE WRENCH STOLE CHRISTMAS
My parents came for Christmas 2006 and my dad and I spent almost every waking moment in the garage. I have to thank my partner Tony for taking care of us and getting us to stop and eat. Also my Mom, who spent the whole week with us and saw me for probably less than 8 hours. We did stop to have dinner and open presents.

We finished up the exhaust system and installed the drive shaft, which my dad had rebuilt with new u-joints. We did not immediately start the engine. We wanted to make sure that the push button control cable housing was sealed to the transmission. This cover is below the transmission fluid so that when it cracks, as it always seems to do, Lake Torqueflight appears. The first day we used JB weld to re-connect the covering. The next day my Dad built up a supportive cone of marine epoxy. Finally the whole piece was sealed with silicone. My Dad wanted to make sure that we would never have to make this repair once transmission fluid had been introduced. Meanwhile, new plugs, new fluids, etc. were installed.

My dad is a retired Cessna Aircraft engineer and has an amazing knowledge of engines and electrical circuits. While we were waiting for the transmission sealant to dry we began working on the electrical systems. We pulled all of the fuses and installed the battery. After some testing we found there was no extraneous power flowing around the car. That is good, no shorts. We found that my power locks worked the first time. Yes! That was a big relief as there were only two miles of spliced wiring taped into harnesses involved. As the fuses went in, the car came back to life. The stereo worked great and I could begin to envision what it would be like cruising around in this fabulous car. The radio fade, and all four speakers, worked as well. The wipers came on but would not go off. We had the same thing happen with the rear air fans. My Dad took both switches apart and found that the internal lubricants had turned to gum. After cleaning, a dielectric grease was used, and now the switches work as new. I installed the air conditioning fuse and, as before, the blower fan came on and would not turn off. Turns out I had swapped about 5 wires when cleaning the push button module. We spent a lot of time with wiring diagrams. I brought down boxes of dash components from the attic. These were all out of my parts cars. One by one my dad figured how each component worked, and should be wired via the manual, and then tested with the meter for current and flow. Then we would go to the car and check that all of the correct wiring was in place and getting current. We found that the electroluminescent power pack was full of dirt and that was sent off for a rebuild. I had a few gauges that were inoperable so I sent those off to be tested. I had a quarts movement installed in the clock as well. This work was performed by J.C. auto restoration.

We tried to start the engine and realized that our neatral safety switch was still inoperable. Another overnight delivery and we were in business.

SAME TIME, NEXT YEAR
At 7:55 pm, on Dec. 27th, 2006, the engine was successfully started and run for less than a minute. We stopped for the evening. The next morning we jacked up the back end, started the car, put it in reverse, and finished filling the transmission. The left rear wheel began to turn as the transmission pumped up. The engine was now running with the only leaks being the two toggle valves my dad had replaced the original block drain plugs with. We drained the anti-freeze, replaced the pet cocks and there has not been a single leak! If only we had known the first time to just to do the drive train ourselves.

This also happened to be the very day that my ’60 LeBaron was picked up to be delivered to its new owner. I am sure there is some irony there but I am not sure what it is.

I have had a terrible time finding good bumper cores. The bumpers on this car are made of the most tortured sheet metal and therefore seem to be made of a thinner metal than most. The result is that more of these bumpers suffer damage easily. I have sandblasted the back sides and taken them in for plating. Once the bumpers are on, and I have a back window, I can start thinking about a first run under the car’s own power. That first run will be to the alignment shop, the exhaust shop, and then the body shop for rocker repair and paint touch ups. I just may get this car done for a mid-summer debut so stay tuned.