Putting It All Back Together

Dateline - 08/20 and 08/21, 2016 - Spent the weekend putting things back on the car.  I wanted to concentrate on one area at a time so I started to work on the trunk early in the day before it got too hot.  I was able to put on most of the chrome and license plate before it got too hot (with the garage door open I'm in the direct sun.  It took longer then expected because, well just because.

Once it got too hot to work on the trunk, I closed the door and moved to the front of the car,  I installed the side markers and front blinker/driving lights.  This was a pretty straight forward if fiddly job.  Having all the gaskets I needed helped a lot.

I also fiddled a bit with the doors and the headlights but didn't really finish anything.  Here's a picture of the front of the car with side markers and front blinkers.

Front with side makers and turn signals installed

By about 2:00 pm it was too hot in the garage to work comfortably so I went into the house and relaxed for a few hours.  In the evening, I pulled out all the chrome and found some of the pieces I had not finished polishing and went to work cleaning them up.  I also cleaned and reassembled the front quarter lights.  I had purchased new gaskets for them so had to get everything fitting correctly.  I also put new seals into the outside window scrapers.  This was also fiddly work that took more time then one would expect.

Sunday, I was able to spend more time on the car because it was a lot cooler.  I was able to put time into finishing the truck which included mounting latch mechanism and the knob.  I had bought a good used lock from a guy parting out a series 1 and swapped out the the good handle for the badly pitted one that was on my car.  I then mounted everything so that the trunk now closes!

I also worked on the backup lights and the license plate lights.  The left backup light worked fine, but the right one had a bad connection that required that I pull the light off the car and reset a connection.  After fixing that, I ran all the wires into the trunk lid to the hing and wired everything up.  Both the backup lights work now as well as the little LED license plate lights I'm using.  These are small lights that make up the top two license plate bolts.  These should work pretty well.

I have put some Jaguar lettering and a Jaguar V8 symbol on order to fill in the blank spaces on the trunk.  Here is a picture with what I completed this weekend:

Trunk mostly completed

For the rest of the day, I started installing some of the chrome pieces, starting at the rain gutters and the passenger and drive side door.  I also placed but did not install the quarter lights.  There is a lot of chrome on this car!

That was it for the weekend.