Well it has almost been a year.....

Here is our first real chip. That red paint just doesn't want to be covered up!! Really, dad and I expected this. The grill, which is what you are seeing here, was not really in the best condition. First of all, it was plastic, and not really meant to be painted in the first place. Second, it HAD been painted several times. Once by the previous owner and once by Dad and I, prior to this big job, so the fact that it chipped, not a big surprise. I am still just a little bit disappointed, but hey, we can deal with this right??

Another view:

Don't know that Dad was really happy with this solution, but it was all I could do at the moment. I didn't have any touch up paint, so I had to run to the store and get some black nail polish. I just didn't want anymore moisture in there, so I did what I could. Dad says that when we put my original bumper back on (cause the after-market one that I got SUCKS and doesn't fit right) we will sand blast this little grill and repaint it too. Gosh, this is just a never ending project.......but I LOVE IT!! =)

Are you ready for this????

Here she is!! Finally we are done! After I brought it home Thursday, I tucked it away in the garage. I was going to have to clean it before it could be polished since it was so dusty. Friday, after I got home from work, I hand washed it (it was 35 degrees outside) so she would be ready for polishing. I was so dedicated, that believe it or not, I wasn't even cold =)

This is after I took her back out to Dad's this morning to have her polished. After we did that, I came home and slathered on a finishing wax.

What a beauty!

No chipped paint here!

Such a feeling of accomplishment!

For those of you that forgot what she looked like before......
As much fun as I had with this whole project, I have to say that I am glad it is done. Winter is almost upon us and it is getting too cold to be working on a project like this. I have to thank Dad and Holly for all of their help. Dad spent a lot of time helping and I can't thank him enough. He really came through for me on this. Dad, I promise I will leave you alone now =)

Day Nineteen

Well, the headlights are in, the ground kit is installed but I can't really say that she is done. We still have some polishing to do, but I will be taking her home tonight!

Gonna be a fun drive home!

The master mind behind it all......DAD!!

Day Eighteen

WOW! It looks like a car again! I had the day off today, so we spent all day putting her back together. The hood looks pretty scary, but no worries, that is just dust =)

After today, all we are lacking are headlights, the right door panel and the ground kit. Looks like I will be getting her back before the week is up!

Day Seventeen

Not much to report today. We just did a lot of painting. We didn't spend all day at it today because Dad had some things that he had to take care of, but we still got a bit done =)

We were both pretty surprised at how well this piece turned out. It had so much old paint on it that I was unable to get off, so we thought it was going to be a mess. As you can see, it turned out pretty darn good =)

This would be my new front bumper. As I mentioned before, the original one had so much paint on it and we didn't even want to risk painting it. It was definitely worth buying a new one just for the piece of mind that paint wouldn't be chipping off it.

Left fender. It doesn't have a special story =)

Day Sixteen

We have interior!!! We got every bit of interior installed tonight except for visors. I don't have black ones yet. Surprisingly, those have been pretty hard to find.

It is all pretty dusty right now. Also, the driver's seat is like sitting on a rock =) I am going to have to break that baby in!

I don't know if you can see in this picture, but Dad put the electronics and the window in the passenger door before I got there. Now we just have the driver's side left to go. Our goal tomorrow is to get the Driver's door and fender, front bumper, front ground effect and both mirrors painted. I hope we get there because that is all that is left to paint! I would have my car back by next weekend! Probably just in time for the first snow of the season. That would be my luck! Oh, by the way.....I still have black paint on my arm but it looks like it will be all gone soon. I guess Dad's prediction of a week and half was right on the money. He should know, he paints himself all of the time! =)

Day Fifteen

The paint has dried and it is time to install the pieces that were painted on Sunday.

Here we have the spoiler and the hatch. Rob came out and helped us tonight because that hatch is pretty heavy and awkward. The guys muscled it up there while I bolted it in.

The door and the fender. Starting to look like a car again!!

Day Fourteen

We got four large pieces painted today.

This piece was the most important. The hatch must be installed before any of the interior can go in because the bolts for it are under the head liner. This car is much like a puzzle =) We couldn't put in any interior because the head liner wasn't installed, and we couldn't put in the head liner because the hatch wasn't painted.....well finally we will be able to get all of those things done.

Passenger side fender

Passenger door and rear spoiler. The spoiler was quite an interesting project. As you can see, we had to hang the door and the spoiler from the ceiling in order to paint the entire pieces at once. The spoiler was the most awkward =) We hung it from the ceiling with a hook, but it hung crooked. I got to be the lucky one to stand behind it and hold it. Talk about trying to be one with my car! My arm along with my clothes and my neck got painted black and then clear coated =) I had a mask on so my face was protected, but I went home quite sticky that day.

Ah, the beauty of black paint! I attempted to get it off in the shower. HA HA! Even using a toothbrush and nail polish remover (ouch) didn't work. Dad said that it would wear off in about week or so. Guess it is a good thing that it is getting cold outside because I am sure I will be wearing a lot of long sleeves =) The price you pay for beauty!

Day Thirteen

Happy Halloween!! Today was a good day! Everything went so smoothly! We got the dash installed, the steering column put back, replaced the two rear speakers and put in the new carpet! I can hardly stop smiling!

She looks like an entirely different car! I am going to have to make a note of the mileage though. She actually has about 116,000 miles but the new cluster's odometer says 147,000. I will have to write that down somewhere, or else I will just never know how many miles she actually has. Like I care anyway =) I think she is happier now too because it used to be when I let her sit for even a couple of days, the motor would fight and not run very well at first.... Through this entire process, the motor has purred like a kitten every time! You go girl!

Better view of the new carpet. So Beautiful!!

Day Twelve

The transfer. The object closest to you in the picture is my old dash. The one that you see Dad working on is my new one. This is the transfer process. We are transferring because the new dash that we initially used turned out to have a big owwie on the top of it. Neither of us noticed it until we got the whole thing (harness and all) installed in the car. I was a little disappointed, but I was just going to have it fixed by a local upholstery person, but since we had to take the entire thing out again, we decided to switch back to my old dash and just paint it black.

That's a lot of wires!! It is so neat though, that since we have been messing with these wires so much, I know so much more about my car and understand it so well. Not perfectly of course, but pretty well =)

We have a bumper and taillights!! She is starting to look more like a car again! This is getting exciting!!!

Update on the harness

Well, it turns out that the harness is NOT usable. Even after getting an instrument cluster that matched that particular harness, things just wouldn't work right. As I said before, the car starts and the big things work, but just not everything. With the new instrument cluster, only the temperature gauge and the oil pressure gauge were functioning. The speedometer, tachometer, gas gauge and amp gauge were just pegged out. Bad news for us because now we have to take that harness all the way back out. I purchased a wiring harness specifically for my type of car (1998, 3.8 V6) today and it should work out very nicely. I also bought a new instrument cluster since we fried mine =) Even with the set backs, this has been such a fun adventure and I am totally looking forward to the final product! I will post more pictures when I can. I will be going back out on Wednesday to do some more work. Hopefully painting more pieces.

Day Ten and Eleven

Just one picture for two days, weird I know. The reason for this is because I don't think anyone would be interested in pictures of a bunch of wires. =)

We got the new dash and wiring harness installed on day ten. Day eleven was a bit of a setback though. Come to find out, the wiring harness that I bought is out of a 2000 Camaro, not a 1998 so we had a little problem. Evidently, the 98 Camaro had a little bit different instrument cluster then a 2000, so when we started the car, it got fried. This is all due to my ignorance and not actually asking what year the car was that the harness came out of. I assumed it was a 98 as well (since everything else matched) and didn't even bother to ask. I don't know if it would have mattered anyway since I was pretty adamant about having power windows which would not have been possible with my own wiring harness. Fortunately, most every thing else works fine. Besides a few small things that will have to be worked out. The car runs, heater and a/c work, transmission etc, therefore, this harness will be usable. Good thing too because neither Dad or I want to take the dash back out and exchange harnesses again! Next step....new instrument cluster!

Day Nine

Second time's a charm! Dad (while I was at work) sanded all the way back down to the primer and started over.

By the time I got out to the house, it was time to try again. I was so nervous!! Dad had cleaned out all of the air lines to be SURE that we wouldn't have a water problem this time, and we didn't! We are back to black, minus the dimples.

The lighting wasn't quite as good this time (it was dark outside) so the pictures didn't turn out quite as good, but you still get the idea. It looks great!

Day Eight - Part 2

A day of excitement loaded with disappointment =(

It is finally time for the body to get painted! First comes the black sealer to make sure the new paint sticks nicely and to cover up all of that red and green on the inside! Looks great so far!

I know, wow right? The paint looks like a mirror, but looks can be SOOOO deceiving!

Just to see the whole thing black was so amazing! Even with the bad news that was about to come, I still couldn't wipe the smile off of my face!

Here comes the bad news. I don't know if you can tell from this photo, (unless you can enlarge it and zoom in) but there was water in the air lines. There are dimples or water spots all over this beautiful new paint!! If you are able to zoom, it will look like hundreds of little white spots all over the paint. It was so sad to discover this, but all you can do is just be positive and hope that tomorrow will be a better day.

Day Eight - Part 1

Paint Removal! Unfortunately it has come down to this. The paint on the bumpers and rear fascia have just too many layers of paint on them. This was a lot of work but it will certainly pay off in the end. By doing this we are taking away any possibility of the old paint breaking loose beneath, and that is worth every hour this took! =)

This is the rear bumper. Come to find out, it is not the original. It was black. The paint remover can only remove one (in this case two because the paint was so bad) at a time. That leaves us with the original black paint that we will be able to sand down to a paintable finish.

Back bumper again.

This is the front bumper. Shows the paint remover at work. Very interesting! Looks like some sort of science experiment and it burns the crap out of you if you get it on your skin! I also discovered that it isn't very good on contact lenses either =) No worries, there were no injuries. A little over spray got around my sun glasses and blew into my eye. Needless to say, I couldn't really see out of that contact for the rest of the day. The drive home wasn't fun either!

The front bumper after paint remover. That red paint on the grill area just DOESN'T want to come off! Dad must of done a really good job painting that part when we put the ground kit on. =)

Day Seven

Progress!! The hood and two sections of the ground kit got painted today!

The hood looks like a mirror! The cloudy spots that you see are just reflections of all of the sanding dust in the air. The hood does not have any cloudy spots on it =)

The ground effects.

The car itself pretty much looks the same. We removed the window washer fluid reservoir, the air intake, windshield wipers and the cowl. All of those things had to be removed so we could paint all of that wonderful green that you see on the front =)

Day Six

We got a little bit of primer sprayed and sanded today. This primer's purpose is to fill sanding scratches. There are a lot of these since we had to use large grit sand paper to "shuck" the bad paint off.

There were so many layers of paint and the final layer (red) was painted so badly that it just wasn't sticking anymore.

The hood got some primer too.

Day Five

Notice anything missing?

We didn't do much today. Actually, I didn't do ANYTHING, but Dad removed the dash. We determined that it had to come out too since we are changing the entire wiring harness. We also discovered that it is the wrong color. All this time, I thought that my dash and center console were black. Boy was I wrong! The new interior that we got is black, my dash and console are GREY! The dash would have needed to be changed, wire harness or not, for this reason. It would have looked very tacky to leave the grey dash and have everything else be black.

Now it really looks like a sled =)

New Interior!

I know it looks kind of scary right now....but this is her new interior. I went and picked it all up today. Unfortunately it rained all day so everything is soaked. Gonna take lot of cleaning and a lot of lysol to get this stuff presentable =)

My new wiring harness is part of this mess. I bought it so I could put in power windows and mirrors. Looks like that dash is going to have to come out after all =)

Another view of the harness and the rest of the mess =)

The seats. Once I get them cleaned up, they are going to be just beautiful! They have been sitting in a wrecked Camaro out at the salvage yard for a couple of months now, so they don't look the greatest, but it's nothing that a little leather treatment can't handle =)

Day Four

I don't have any photos of the car today since it pretty much looks the same. Today's agenda was SAND SAND SAND, so I posted a picture of what sanding for 8 hours will do to your fingers. I didn't realize that I had sanded through my skin until about the 7th hour. To answer the burning question...Why wasn't I wearing gloves??? Details, that's why. It's hard to get into all of those little spots when you are wearing gloves. Because of the state the car is in, detail is extremely important. I was willing to trade the skin on my fingers for detail. No I am not crazy....just determined =)

The Re-vamp Project - Day Three

Tear-down and Sand

She is now pretty much a shell of a car. There wouldn't be anything left her if not for the motor, drive-train and dash.

Now that she is bare, the real sanding has begun. This is going to be key to this project because as I mentioned before, the previous paint job was done so carelessly.

This picture is a little dark because I had to take it without the flash. The flash was picking up all of the little paint particles in the air and reflecting them back at me =)

As you can see here =) No there is nothing wrong with the camera, just lots of paint dust in the air. Dad and I both neglected to wear masks this evening and I went to bed with a terrible headache! I have learned my lesson! You bet your butt I will be wearing one on Sunday!

My little sled! We have removed all of the interior for two reasons. One, the car in green underneath. Two, I am getting all new black interior! Including black leather seats! It is going to be so beautiful when we are done!