Old Timer Garage

 

If you haven't read the tenth part of this restoration you can find it by clicking on this link: 1960 Cadillac Coupe de Ville - part 11

12. Re-painting of the engine and restoration of the interior

After the chassis got restored and the body got back onto the chassis, the next logical step was to take care of the engine.

This engine was already restarted and checked up before this whole project was started and it was working fine. The only thing is that its paint was peeling off and because it had been parked in a field for so long, the seals and gaskets dried up and when it got restarted, they cracked and started leaking and the same thing happened on the transmission.

So the engine is first cleaned up and degreased together with the transmission and all the accessories taken apart so that they can be painted separately. The idea is like for the rest of the car to restore it as close as possible to its original appearance. This means that the valve covers will be painted in blue and the rest of the accessories in black.

This was a pretty straight forward job once the guys received the seals and gaskets to be replaced and just a few days after that, the engine was back onto the chassis and the rest of the restoration could carry on.

In the meantime, my brother had brought them the brand new windows that I had had delivered to his house and the guys at the workshop took care of finding the different rubber pipes that were needed for the engine as well as the rear windscreen rubber seal that was missing from the bunch of seals I had initially ordered.

Then starts a long and painful task (in my opinion) which is to rewire the whole car. On this topic also comes the question of what to do with the autotronic eye and the power trunk mechanism.

The autotronic eye is this system that makes the headlights dim when a car is coming the other way at night, then switches them back to full lights once the car has passed. It is composed by a sensor that is fixed on the middle of the dashboard and looks like an eye and the control unit that manages the headlights. On my car, the eye was still there but nothing else was, not even the wiring. And the power trunk system was simply not working.

After talking to the owner of the workshop, we agreed that it was worth hiring an electronician to rebuild a complete system with modern components. He got me a quote for that and I gave him the go ahead to get this done on both systems. I am not fully sure that it will be done as it should but at least I am going to be able to test how good a job they can do on that and I am happy about this because it could come in handy later.

And while they are working on the electrics of my car, another problem is starting to become visible on the horizon: they are going to get ready to start working in the interior and the upholstery but I am still waiting for the original Cadillac cloth to be delivered for the seats. It has been on order for at least 4 months already and after asking for an update again and again, it would appear that it could take up to two years to get it!

There is no way I am going to wait that long to finish my car so I decide to talk to the workshop again to see if there is a way to find fabric that would be as similar as possible to the original cloth. They guy tells me to give him a couple of days and he will come back to me with an update. And sure enough, a couple of days later, he came back saying that he couldn’t find anything similar enough to what I wanted in Mexico but that he had been able to find another supplier in the US who could provide the original Cadillac cloth within 5 days of receiving the order and the payment. So I sent the money and asked him the place the order for me.

Now everything is sorted and they can get on with what is left of the restoration work. On my side, I am already starting to look for what the next project car could be. I have several options at the moment but I am not fully sure about what to do. First and mainly because as I still haven’t got my Cadillac finished, I can’t be 100% sure that its quality will bring me any money and then, because I am not completely sure yet as to what strategy to adopt for the next project. In my mind I have two options: either I go for another Cadillac similar to this one or I go for a car of much more value that could potentially make for a bigger profit. I know that the guys in Mexico can handle Cadillac and that they will restore them well enough so getting another one of these would be a mild risk (if everything goes well up until the end of this project of course) but at the same time, it might be worth risking a little more on the next project and try and find a higher value car to try and make a bigger profit and test the guys in Mexico further. The main problem with this is that I am not sure how well and quick a car of this type of value would sell and I might take the risk of keeping this car for a number of months before I am able to sell it. So the jury is still out on this one. I haven’t made my mind up and probably won’t until I see the result of the restoration of this Cadillac.

In a perfect world, I would love to keep this Cadillac for myself but I have to be realistic because I want to see how far I can push this project and it would be nice to get my investment back.

If everything goes according to plan, in the next part of this restoration, the interior should be finished or at least well advanced and the car almost ready to get back on the road again...

To be continued... here: 960 Cadillac Coupe de Ville - part 13