I've made the leap from wagon lurker to wagon owner

Reinstalling the roof rack

I was fortunate that the roof rack screws on my wagon didn't leak. Since I had to take the roof rack off for the roof repair, I figure it's unlikely that it will all just go back together and not leak. With it all apart I decided to replace the crappy captive nuts in the roof with some WellNuts that I picked up from SpaeNaur.

In case anyone hasn't seen a WellNut here is a link to the SpaeNaur catalogue. There are some diagrams on there showing how they work.
http://www.spaenaur.com/pdf/sectionC/C147.pdf

I had to drill out the captive nut holes in the roof as they were too small for the WellNuts that I purchased. In order to do that the captive nuts had to come out first. One of them had already spun free when I was removing the rack and it seemed likely that others would do the same if I tried to drill them. Here's the steps that I used to remove the nuts from my roof.

You can see here, the even though my roof hadn't started leaking yet, the captive nuts were rusting. It was only a matter of time before they started to leak. On two of the holes the rust had started to spread out and was bubbling the paint about 1/2 an inch out from the hole edges. On those two I stripped the paint and primed it before finishing up.


To remove the nuts, I took a Dremel tool with a cut off wheel and made two cuts in the nut on either side of the screw hole.



It only took one nut's worth of practice to be able to do this without damaging the paint at all. Once the cuts were made I simply inserted a screw driver into the screw hole and pushed down gently while cranking the screwdriver handle around. This caused the cuts to collapse and the captive nut dropped neatly into the car.



Using a Titanium step drill I drilled out each hole to a size that was appropriate for the WellNuts that I had purchased. In hindsight I wish I had drilled them slightly smaller. The upper flange on the WellNut wasn't as wide as I would have liked and on a couple of occasions I accidentally pushed them right through the hole. After I drilled out the holes I sprayed the newly exposed metal with a rust preventative primer. These will all be under the roof rack rails so I didn't get too fussy about finish for now.


I then spread some RTV-based gasket material under the flange of the WellNut's and inserted them in the holes. I spread the same gasket material on the threads of each screw when I threaded them in.


The biggest hassle with reinstalling the rails was that the screw holes in the rails have openings in them for some reason. The WellNuts need the mounted item to have a flat surface to hold the upper flange tight against the metal of the roof. Seems silly to me for these holes to be in the underside of the roof rack. I don't know what purpose that serves. I wound up cutting some small pieces of rigid plastic to act as washers and sit between the bottom of the roof rack rails and the top of the WellNut flange. It was a little fiddly but it worked out well. In the end, my roof rack now stands about 1/32" off of the surface of the roof and water passes under it and into the gutters nicely. I'm not sure how suitable it would be to try and use the roof rack anymore but I can't see me using it for anything anyway. ('Cept maybe for hauling a Christmas Tree home)


Here you can see how the WellNut compresses causing the Neoprene to spread out on the underside of the roof. It actually holds down quite nicely (once I made those washers to prevent the WellNut's from being pulled out of the holes and into the cavities on the underside of the roof rack rails).



Now, not only is my newly blackened roof rack finally reinstalled but my wagon is now waterproof!!!! What a novel idea!

Once the rack was on and screwed down I put my garden hose up on the roof and sat in the cargo area for a while looking for leaks. Not a single drop came through. The large puddle on the floor from me knocking loose the rear weather stripping as I climbed in was a different issue.

 

I'm getting back on track with reinstalling my interior. I have only two spaces in my driveway and I need to get all of the interior parts out of my garage and back into the wagon in order to get the wagon in the garage. The city won't let me park my Pontiac on the streets overnight once winter comes. The cutoff date is Oct 31st so I have to have the wagon at least partially reassembled by then.

I was out of action for a while with a bad back and couldn't lift seats and whatnot to get them back into the car. I'm moving around fine now so I wanted to get started again.

I threw away the rust caked factory sound deadening material and replaced it with some of that HVAC bubble wrap from Home Depot. That will do the trick until I can replace the carpet next year and put proper material down. Now the carpet and front seats are in place. The carpet isn't clean by any stretch of the imagination, but it looks one heck of a lot better than it did. I'm anxious to get the carpet replaced next year and see how much better it looks.

BEFORE


AFTER (I goofed and snapped this one before I reinstalled the plastic covers)


BEFORE


AFTER


BEFORE


AFTER


BEFORE


AFTER

 

YOU HAVE BEEN BUSY! How does seat hardware get so rusty in just 15 years?

 

That's easy to say, but I'm afraid it's not true.

I planned on removing the seats and carpeting for cleaning and getting it all reinstalled while my wife was in Mexico. I got started on that in July and I'm still not finished. The car wound up in the body shop for some repairs for two months and now that it's back I just haven't been able to get started again.

The previous owner had really crappy floor mats. They went to the trouble to regularly undercoat the car, but allowed snow and whatnot to soak into the carpet. The floor pans had some holes in them, and the sound pad under the carpet never did dry out. It just laid there quietly rusting through the floor. The undersides of the seats, the seat frames, and some of the panels under the dash got the worst of it. All of the painted surfaces were fine, it was just the bare metal that was so bad.

As frustrating as it was to find, I really enjoyed rebuilding the seats.

 

That french fry in one of the pictures looked pretty darned appetizing. Wonder how long it was there?!!

 

Looks like all your hard efforts are paying off, nice job, nice wagon!

 

I have detailed hundreds of cars over the past 25 years and I do not know which is the most common find under the seats (probably a whole different thread):
french fries
penny with gunk on it
a peppermint
toothpick

Generally if I do not find a french fry, I have not looked hard enough. And the strange thing is they always look like McDonald's.

 

My back seat revealed a lighter, one of Grandma's stockings (?!), and a strange assortment of fridge magnets. Of course, I also got $0.42 and a toothpick. Strangely I also found one of my own tools that had been missing for about a month. I'm tempted to take the back seat out of my '81 Parisienne just for fun.

 

We had snow and bitter cold here yesterday but today it was up around 55F. Perfect weather for car repairs.

My intent was to go out and troubleshoot the wiring issue in my Pontiac but it didn't go so well. Looks like I'll have to tear out the dash to find the problem. That'll be a matter for another day now I guess. I could hear those new rims in the garage calling my name so I started work shining those up instead.

I've read a mess of tutorials on cleaning up polished aluminum rims. Everybody seems to have a different idea so I figured mine couldn't be any worse. After a previous failed attempt that I documented here somewhere I decided to give it another run.

As you guys will recall, I was able to get a bit of a shine on the rims but there were some black specks that just wouldn't come off. I tried several polishes and even some tar, wax, and grease removers without any luck.

As it turned out, the tiny black marks were actually the start of some pitting. I tried a couple of abrasives like rubbing compound without any success. A plastic dish scrubber that I liberated from the kitchen was too abrasive and left scratches that I didn't want to have to try and get out. Finally I settled on 2000 grit wet/dry sandpaper and some wet sanding that worked perfectly. With only about 20 minutes of sanding I had both the small pits in the aluminum and the water marks gone. It was a simple step to polish the rim up with some Blue Magic Metal Polish from there and the rims shone almost like new. I have a few more spots to remove but now that I understand the process better, I think I can improve on it and speed it up as well. I should have them all ready to install in no time! The sunshine and warm weather is invigorating and now I want to work out there all the time. If only I could become a kept man and not have to go to work in the morning.



One polished, one still covered in crap.

 

As posted in your post in another thread.....

WOW, Wiz! That's not easy! NICE JOB, seriously. It looks great.

And a great tip on how to remove those black pit specks!

 

What's up with the Poncho?

 

She's very sad. I wound up driving her this winter after having promised her she'd never see snow again. I feel pretty bad about not keeping my word. She's voiced her displeasure by messing with the electrical system.

Lessee, the dome light doesn't work (although the underdash courtesy lights on the same circuit work fine), the cigarette lighter doesn't work along with the trunk release, and the glove compartment light. Now, if I open the door or turn on the interior lights, my power door locks don't work. If I close the door so that the interior lights go out the door locks work fine. This tells me that I have a current load problem, probably in a failing connection point.

I have a factory service manual and found that all of those items are on the same circuit. All of them connect to a single splice point in the dash and one wire goes from the splice point to the fuse panel. The manual says that the splice point is right behind the speedo. After removing much of the gauge cluster, I found that the splice in mine isn't where it's supposed to be. it's down further behind the dash, closer to the fuse panel, but not easily worked on from the floor. I figure either the splice point is failing, or the fuse panel is corroded or has overheated connecting points. Since all of the splices are sealed up real good with liquid electrical tape, I figure it's more likely that there's a problem on the back of the fuse panel. I don't know as much about cars as I'd like, but electronics/wiring I know backwards and forwards. I figured I would pull the fuse panel down and have a look. Since I've found a few other connection points in the car that have overheated/melted, it seems pretty likely to me that the problem is there. Unfortunately, the wiring is snug enough that I can't get the fuse panel turned around from under the dash. On the upside, I removed the headlight minder circuit board while I was in there. It has a failed solder connection on an interesting lead-disk fusible link. I can fix that on the bench and at least get my headlight reminder working again.

None of the problems are critical so it will likely wait now until I'm driving the wagon so that I can remove the dash and work at it gradually. For now I have a 10 foot jumper cable made up that I keep in the glove compartment. I run it from the trunk release button out to the battery in case I ever need to pop the trunk. The trunk lid isn't aligned right and the latch is too snug for the key to work. I've realigned the lid several times but it always seems to shift back again.

 

Thanks 'Fox! Isn't it amazing what can be achieved with a healthy case of OCD and some elbow grease?

 

Welcome!!!

 

Well I popped the hood again this morning for another look at whatever is leaking. Thankfully, whatever it was didn't leak a great deal overnight. It looks like I was way off on my guess about the oil cooler hoses. It turns out those are on the other side of the car. The steering console comes close to the frame and the brake lines run under there. The fluid is definitely not brake fluid. I'm definitely going to have to pull out the steering column as the leak is coming from the spot where the column comes close to the frame and brake lines. With best of luck we'll get some warmer weather next weekend and I can start tearing things out.