Doors and fenders on!

The interior is almost complete and we have installed the doors and fenders. We will have to do quite a bit of body work on the doors and fenders, so they will be coming off at least once or twice for some sanding and painting. The headlights have been installed and are working. It takes quite a bit of finesse to get these body panels mounted properly! We took a video of the car being started up after installing the doors, enjoy!

All the kings horses and all the kings men...

We have been putting some overtime in lately on the project, and have made quite a bit of progress. The wiring is complete! FINALLY! And the interior has been put back together. Cassie finished with the headliner and side panels, and they have been installed. The trim and front seat has been installed as well. We are finishing up the rear deck panel, and am looking to recover the back seat due to some sun damage. The car is starting to look like a car once again! We have installed a cold air intake on the LT1 due to the stock system not fitting. The Roadmaster had a little more room under the hood than the Impala toward the front. It starts up and sounds great. Here are some more photos of the car:

Back to the project

We have been enjoying the summer, and have decided that it is time to devote some spare time to the project. The body is installed, wiring has been installed, but not complete, and the car does finally run! We have gutted the interior and are installing a new headliner and carpeting. Currently the priority has been installing the radiator support, and getting the front inner fenders mounted. Here are some pictures of our progress:

Updates

During the past couple of weeks we achieved a milestone, we managed to get the body mounted to the chassis. The body mated to the chassis easily, and fortunately no modifications were necessary. We have removed the sagging headliner, and have sent to get new fabric and sun visors recovered. We repaired a rusted out drivers seat floor, by cutting out the old floor from the Buick donor car and welded it in. Also we have begun the arduous task of putting all the electrical components together. The electrical progress is going to be a bit of trial and error, hopefully more trial for our case! Next week we hope to get the gas tank installed, the body securely mounted to the frame, and get the front frame rail/ bumper mount fixed. Then we can start putting the front end back together. We are excited now that the car is starting to look like a car again, and our progress is allowing us to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Weekend work

We have been busy working on the project this weekend, accomplishing many tasks. We removed the sagging headliner, and have begun the process of scraping the material off of it, and ordering new material. We also fixed a hole in the floor by cutting the driver's floor pan out and welding in a piece from the Roadmaster. It fixed the rusty spot nicely. I will have pictures of the process up soon!

Still slowly working on the project in '08

Another year has come and we are still slowly making progress on our project. We haven't been able to spend alot of time on the car, but have made some good headway on certain items. The steering wheel gave us some trouble, but we took both wheels and made one from them. Also the Roadmaster instrument cluster was mounted into the dash assembly of the Impala.

My wife has become a master at the parts blasting cabinet. She has painted many of the chassis components as well as anything else that could possibly rust on the underside of the car with POR-15 paint. She has also been helping me with the disassembly of the interior of the Impala to make way for the new electrical system.


The steering coulumn fits nicely after being cut up, welded, and painted. We had to take the firewall mounts from the old wheel to mount onto the new one, take out the airbag controls, remount the Impala steering wheel, and paint it black to match the interior. We used the Roadmaster steering assembly because it has the cruise control, VATS security key, and it was a tilt column. Suprisingly all of the electrical connections match from the old system to the new one.

The instument cluster was a must have, due to all of the information that comes from the new electrical systemthat was incompatible with the old cluster. We weren't about to map out every system on the car, so the new cluster was a must, and it seems to fit in the old dash nicely. We belive that the new column and instrument cluster were good decisions to keep, and hope that they will work once we have all the electrical system installed.


Currently I am in the process of installing the electrical system from the Roadmaster into the Impala. I have eliminated most of the unused items that were integrated with the Roadmaster, such as power locks, windows, mirrors, keyless entry, etc... Now comes the hard part of incorporating the new electrical with the old. I plan on keeping certain electrical functions from the old car including lighting, HVAC, and a few other odds and ends. I hope that we don't have a fire when we hook up the battery! One more thing, as we were installing the electrical we found some rust in the driver's floorpan, and that will have to be replaced. We hope to have that done sometime this month, as well as the preliminary wiring. I will post more as time allows. Thanks for reading!