Fixing up a '71 Grand Safari

I didn't get any doors, I only got a front clip. I didn't remember this being an issue with my car and I looked back at the pictures and remembered why. My car doesn't have door handle straps. It only has armrest handles.

 

Ah, OK. So thd straps must've come along a year or few later.

 

Straps were a Grandville\Bonneville thing starting in '72. Catalinas didn't have them at all through production with the base interior.

For the record, where the straps mount are the slightly larger holes just to the right of the horizontal bracing and 1/3 of the way up on the vertical bracing in the photo below.

 

Here are some pics, first one is front, second one is rear. There are two holes on the front door which seem to be suitable for the long strap, but no metal nuts anywhere. On the rear door is nothing what seems to match the short strap.
Anyway, i'll have to drill some new holes, i guess.

 

I wonder what Vetteman is up to these days? Any progress on the wagon?

 

Since taking my new job, and the two girls now, I have much, much....MUCH... less time than in the past. Saturday is about the only day I have time to get anything done, and that's after tending to the rest of life's necessities. I've had several emergency projects come up that caused my garage to become in such disarray I could barely walk through it. I finally got it cleaned to the point that it is again usable.

I currently have all the painted sheetmetal in my fathers basement. I just moved a bunch of wagon parts over to his barn loft to give me some room to work. My next step is to get all the ziploc bags I have of all the fasterners and hardware, like body bolts, and number them and lay them all out. Them I'm going to have to count everything and take an example of each to the traveling clip-man. He's a guy that comes to town in a van and sells automotive clips, fasteners and bolts. Once I have the new, non-rusted hardware, I can begin putting the front clip back on.

The bad news is that my camera just quit working a few weeks ago. We've wanted to purchase a decent camera for a while, so we blew the budget on an entry level DSLR camera, but unfortunately that means I don't have a point and shoot to take project photos with. I'm hoping to hit up some yardsales soon to see if I can find a cheap one to take project pictures. I take digital pictures of everything to remember how to put it all back together, so without a camera I don't think I would be able to do anything.

 

A modestly-priced cellphone will do, for snapshots. Often times, people are eager to get rid of them and get Smartphones or the like, instead.

 

Well, I'm glad to hear it (the wagon) is still progressing, even if it is slowly. Good news. Keep up the good work and don't forget we love to see old wagons back on the road, but never at the expense of the things that are truly important.
Keep us posted.

 

Be careful of which phones you use; make sure it has a Micro SD card, separate from the SIM card, or you may not be able to get the photos off the phone. I ran into that with an old Sprint flip phone; at the time, if I took a pic, I had to use a Sprint picture server service, and there are a bunch of pics I now cannot remove from the phone without having to pay an expert to do it.

 

The Micro-SD card is, indeed, the easiest for photos. I've got some on my Nokia which are also stuck there, until I can WLAN them over to my router. It doesn't have an SD-Port. though. It's still possible. However, difficult. Blackberry-patented phones, on the other hand, are no-brainers for uploading images and they don't even take the aforementioned cards.

 

Yeah, everyone's got their own system. Right now, my phone won't load the pics from the camera to the Micro SD for some reason, so I'm working with a friend on it this weekend.

 

What, what, what???? I'm all swimmy headed, mind muddly!

Hey to Brandon!

 

In case you need more parts for your '71, this one is being parted out.

https://cincinnati.craigslist.org/cto/d/1971-pontiac-station-wagon/6556779657.html

 

Grizz could use the tranny for his '54, if it's the 400 version

 

I was just thinking yesterday, I hadn't seen anything on this thread in a while.