Front End Mock Up

The first thing I wanted to do on this car was repair the upper grill shown in red below and the lower grill inserts.  All 3 had been damaged in a small fender bender that kinked the bumper up a little and cracked all the plastic and composite.


If I couldn't repair those things then I would have to make a GTO clone out of this car, which I didn't want to do.  1970 was the only year with the beautiful chrome bumper that goes all the way to the top of the grill.  All the other years had grill inserts that are slightly different in size and connections as well, because of that bumper.  Also, the upper grill (because of that bumper design) is different than any other year.  So, I needed to know up front (no pun intended) if the front end was reparable.  It was.


I found that the passenger side clearance light had been weathered and broken.  I couldn't find one as easy as I could repair the old one so I took an old ohm meter connection, stripped the copper insert out of it, cut it, bent it and made a little bulb clamp.  I drilled a hole in the back of the connection, ran a wire through it and soldered on the new clamp.

Then it was just a matter of pulling the wire back through the housing and seating the little clamp.  Here you can see the finished product and the type of bulb that it uses.

The difficult part of the front end installation was making the fitment adjustments of the bumper supports.  There are about 10 variables to work with and a place to adjust all of them.  The bumper and grill on this year of Pontiac is kind of complex in the way it all has to go together and of course, I did it the hard way.  As I was nearing the end I could see that original assemblers had put the entire front end together and then bolted it onto the frame instead of putting it together a piece at a time.  When I pull it all off to paint, that's the way I'll do it.

Upper Grill

Bumper with Lower Grill Inserts

Mock Up Installation

The red paint is just some rattle can stuff I put on there to protect the fiberglass and composite from weathering.  When I'm ready to paint, it will have to be stripped, sanded, primed, etc.  But for now, it's nice to look at and imagine just how cool this year of Lemans really is.

Steering Column

I've been going out starting the car on Saturday mornings to keep the battery charged and to keep the engine easy to start.  A couple of months ago, I went out to start it and the key mechanism broke loose.  It wasn't the tumbler, but I was going to change the key switch and door locks anyway.  I also knew I had to replace the turn signal switch because it was broken.  So, off came the steering wheel and this is what I found.

The rest came out in a handful of broken pieces.  Most of the nuts and screws hand long since fallen out.  For those interested, to the right of the sun glare (sorry about that) there's a screw hole.  Attached to that there's a ridge of metal that goes down and to the right.  The slot inside that ridge is where you release the key tumbler mechanism.

Here's a picture showing the junk that came out.

The broken piece was the sector gear that turns to move the race and pull the ignition switch.  One tiny little plastic tooth broke and shut down the whole project.  The hard part was finding a replacement.  There are plenty of replacements for non-tilt steering wheels.  Those only have 5 teeth.  The tilt wheel sector gear has 6.  Here you can see the old broken gear and the new black one that came from a Corvette restoration shop.  All GM cars with tilt from 69-76 use this gear.  You would think they would be more easy to find.

Here's the hole it goes in.  A rod goes through that hole and into the key tumbler.  That's why these cars were so easy to steal.  A thief could pull the key tumbler out with a slide hammer and turn that rod with a pair of pliers and be gone almost as fast as someone with a key.

And here's the column with the gear in place as well as the spring that moves the steering wheel lock post.

After that it was easy to put in the new turn signal switch,

Then the steering wheel lock plate,

and all done.  While I had it out, I stripped off the old green and painted it gloss black and the gear indicator red.  I've decided to go with a black interior with red accents and red exterior with black stripes.

Exhaust....ing. Installing headers and exhaust system.

I wasn't ready and it's not time, but my son Jason and I had access to a shop with a lift and a pipe bender for the week-end so, we took advantage of it and installed an exhaust system.

Unbelievably difficult because of all the unforeseen problems.  We started Friday morning and thought we would have been finished by late afternoon at the latest.  Wrong!  We ended up putting in 2, 10 hour days or so.

Here's what we started with...

Pay no attention to all the oil, tranny fluid, anti-freeze, power steering fluid, etc.  My plan was to have all the old dried out seals and gaskets replaced before I ever started this phase, but couldn't pass up the opportunity.

So, the first of the problems.  On the left side.  Sorry for the fuzzy picture it was hard to focus on everything.  On this side, after removing the old exhaust we couldn't get the new header past the starter and the brake lines.  I ended up removing the starter and  detaching the brake line bracket.  That gave us enough room to wiggle in.  I will have to reroute the brake lines before the car hits the road.  Right now, they are wedged against the header.  We also had to reroute the wires to the starter.  The old lines ran down a pipe along side the exhaust manifold.  There's no way they could have withstood the heat of running through the header pipes so we added wire and ran then down the firewall and back up over the top of the starter.  The old wires were nearly burned through anyway.

There was no wiggling in on the right hand side.  We first tried to get in by removing the oil filter.  It wasn't even close so we had to remove the oil filter adapter.  We were closer, but no dice.  We ended up detaching the motor mounts and raising the motor as far as we could.

The only way we could get the motor jacked up far enough was to tie the front of the car down to the lift with wire, then jack the motor off the mounts.

After raising the motor off the mounts about 3 inches, we were able to get the header in.  That's when I found we had to reroute the transmission cooling lines.  After installing the header and lowering the motor we found that the header would be resting on the cross member.  So, back up went the engine and we shimmed the right motor mount about 1/2 inch.

Left Side

 

Right Side

With the headers installed and the motor back on the mounts, even with the shims you can see that the right hand side of the motor is lower.  Anyway,  there they are, Flow-Tech ceramic headers from Summit Racing in all their glory.

Then came the pipe and Magna-Flow mufflers.  We had to do some jockeying around trying to get the pipe as high as possible.

 

The lowest part of the system is still the headers.  They might raise a little when I pull the engine and do some work on it and install new mounts.  That might be a problem too because too much rise and they will be touching the wheel control arm. They aren't as low as this picture shows because you are looking up at them on the hoist.

 

 

The tips were another problem.  The old pipe fit up a little tighter between the fender and the gas tank.  The 3 inch pipe had to run a little lower.  These pics are looking up at the tips while on the hoist so, they don't really hand as low as it looks.

 

Broomba - The Movie

 Well, all the challenges I've run into so far have to do with the fact that the 1970 LeMans was the only model and year that the chrome bumper ran all the way to the top of the grill like this...

All the other years of LeMans and GTOs had just the bumper along the bottom or similar configuration.  This makes it impossible to find reproduction parts for my car since most people with front end damage would make a GTO clone anyway.  So, today's project was repairing the mounting brackets for the grill inserts.  The inserts were plastic to begin with and the prior owner's minor collision had broken them.

 

 

So, off to the hardware store to buy a small sheet of 22 gauge steel.  Then I measured, cut, bent and drilled each piece to fit inside the molding and behind the broken tab.



After marking the holes, for screws (each tab was different) I drilled a pilot hole and then hit them with self etching primer.

 

 

 A couple of coats of black enamel...

 

And then in go the screws.  The screws going into the plastic molding pointed toward the grill, had to be started, backed out, cut off, and then put back in because they were too long and I was too cheap to drive to the store to buy short screws.  I don't know if I could have found them that short and as wide as I needed anyway.

 











 

Here's a view from the bottom showing how the new metal bracket will bear the stress...hopefully.  I really had no other choice.  I did a couple of test spots with fiberglass and it wouldn't grip the plastic even when it was roughed up.  Not to mention, when the temperature changes plastic and fiberglass, having different molecular makeup, expand and shrink at different rates so, it would never have stayed, especially after torqueing a fender screw on top of it.



 I may end up shaving some of the longer screws or doing something different at mounting time.  Without putting it all together its hard to estimate where the mounting bracket will sit in the bumper bracket.

I had a couple of projects today.  First, a salvage parts guy sold me a hood release rod for a GTO, he told me it was compatible when I questioned him.  It isn't.  He had just assumed I was making it into a GTO clone.  The big chrome grill on the LeMans sticks out further, so... yup.  I had to make my own.  Here's a pic of the GTO pull on the left, my creation in the center, and the prior owner's clothes hanger on the right.  Quarter inch steel rod bent with my patented hood pull rod bender (pipe wrench).  Hey, if I can do this with my limited skills and tools, anybody can.

I put a coat of sandable primer on the upper grill.  I'm not posting a pic of that.  It just needed another coat.  Then I started on today's real project.  You can see in this picture that the passenger side of my car is faster than the driver's side.  Well, at least it gets there first.

The prior owner's accident pushed the bumper up and kinked the fender which broke the upper grill I've been repairing, and pushed the fender back.  So, today I loosened all the fender bolts, pulled the fender up and out slightly with some shims, then aligned the hood a little and now it looks like this.

 

 

The hood still needs straightened.  GM was notorious for putting short hood braces on the hood hinges.  After a dozen or so closings, the hood bends at the end of the hinge.  Not just the cars.  I had a '70 GMC pickup with the same problem.  When I get a welder I'm going to put some angle iron bracing in the hood.

This project took a lot longer than I thought.  Every time I thought I had finished, I would get some more decay crumbling away from an unseen rock chip or something.  Anyway, 37 hours and a quart of fiberglass later...

Before.  Here's some pictures of the cracks and breaks.  These were caused by the prior owner running up on something like a parking barrier.  It pushed the bumper up, which pushed the grill up, which broke the upper grill.

I had to do the repair on this part.  I have not been able to find a replacement.  I think that's because whenever someone has damage to the front end of a LeMans, the turn it into a GTO clone.  The only differences between the LeMans and the GTO are the front end and the wing on the trunk.  So, most people turn their damaged car into a GTO clone for less than a restoration.

The repaired part stripped of paint.  I didn't bother to sand down the parts that will be covered by the bumper.  Partly because it won't show but mostly because I wanted all the strength and thickness possible wherever I could hide it.

And, the finished product primed and ready for a final sanding.

I straightened the front fender.  It still needs a little finesse, but it's back down where it should be.  Here's a before and after.

Jason got a good laugh and said, "When that hospital rig turns loose, I'll drive ya down."  Ya, I'm sure that you professional body shop guys have a special fender straightening tool thing.  I don't so, what you see is a come-along winch hooked to the tow hook from my old Jeep and hooked to the fender.  The other end of the cable is hooked to a pry bar that is wedged into the staircase going down into the basement, with a 2 x 4.  Well, it worked and I still have most of my fingers.