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

welcome !
She's a beauty!

 

Very little work was done on the wagon this weekend but I did a fair amount of driving. It felt GOOOOD!!

I noticed the other day that there were a number of tiny rust spots on the roof of the cargo area. It seems that while the wagon was in the body shop last year, they didn't cover the paint while working and scattered grinding detritus all over the back of the car. There must have been 50 little spots on the back of the car. I climbed up on a small step ladder with a tub of Rubbing Compound and two rags. One rag for polishing and the other one to lean on to prevent the roof of the car from burning my hand while I was working. As it was, I burned a couple of my fingers while polishing. I did manage to get the roof cleaned up but clearly it was waay too hot out so I went into the garage and did some cleaning inside the Grand Marquis to cool off.

The Mrs. had some shopping to do and I volunteered to drive so I could take the wagon for a spin. It was great to drive it around town and watch people react. The shiny 5 spoke wheels really attract a lot of attention. I had trouble moving through parking lots because of people stopping to look at the car and I got a lot of thumbs up from people passing me on the road. A good time was had by all!

 

cool, wiz! Are the wagons fairly rare where you are?

 

It isn't just the shiny wheels - the whole car is a clean stand-out. Pride of ownership is evident in the pictures you've shared. People admire a nice clean car that looks new even when it is many years old.

 

I guess they must be less common than I thought. I know of 5 others that I see around town. Some clean and cared for, some really battle scarred.

I went to Canadian Tire on Saturday and parked one spot over from a white '91 Cappy that a local car detailer has labelled as his work vehicle and an impromptu car show broke out. I noticed as I was wandering the store that, at one point, there were 5 people standing around looking at the two wagons. Silly, I've been hunting that white Cappy for over a year now trying to get pictures of it and I drove off without snapping a single pic.:banghead3:

 

That sharpie trick looks like it worker really well.

 

Yeah...I'm really impressed with that trick!

 

I wish I could remember who's idea it was. I read it here on the forums somewhere so I can't take credit for it.

 

I went out yesterday, washed the wagon, polished the rims, and cleaned all of the glass. I treated the black bumper trim with Back To Black but I wasn't knocked out with the results. I've been having trouble keeping the black rubber trim on my wagon as black as I would like. Back To Black works for a little while but not terribly long. I used to use a product way back when called Basic Black (I think) that I liked better but I don't seem to be able to find it anymore.

I noticed today that the black molding on my front bumper was very rough when running my hands over it. This was after having washed the wagon just yesterday. I figured I would see if I could get it cleaner than I have. I gave it a good polishing with Rubbing Compound and was amazed at how smooth and new the rubber looked. I could feel the rough spots scrubbing of while using the compound. I hit it with Back To Black again after I got it cleaned up. Here's picture of it in progress. The left side has just been cleaned with Rubbing Compound and the right side hasn't been touched yet.

 

You will have a new car when you are done with it, wiz!
About Back To Black....I have been disappointed lately with it, too. I used to love this product, but, it doesn't appear to be the same old product. I am very dissatisfied with it now. I bought a new bottle of it and will be tossing it in the trash. Your work on your bumper looks like a better idea, although, I would look for a BTB replacement. I haven't looked for or tried anything else yet.
I do have a product I used to sell at shows and it does wonders....just remembered it. But you can't buy it anywhere. Let me know how it goes with your recent experiment.

 

I heard about a truck bed rejuvenator last summer called Forever Black that was supposed to be fantastic. I couldn't find that brand so I bought another product called a truck bed rejuvenator. Without a word of a lie the stuff in the bottle was fabric softener. I'm still hunting for Forever Black or a suitable alternative.

 

I love those, they ride so nice!

 

Work has been a little hectic lately and I'm actually pretty lazy when I get home so I've been working indoors. We recently cut off our cable to stop feeding the Rogers conglomerate so I'm building a custom in-house streaming media system. When it's done we'll be able to watch all media sources (locally stored movies or Netflix) from any TV in the house, pause video, and unpause somewhere else. All was working well until I used one of my backup hard drives as a media streamer. That left me without a backup drive, and also meant that my media wasn't backed up. Needless to say a drive failed and I lost almost a Terabyte of TV and Movies. Close to 1000 TV shows and about 30 movies all down the tubes. Now I'm expanding and rebuilding the media system with redundant drives like I should have done in the first place. That's what I get for cutting corners. I received a second Atom-based PC in the mail today with some new wireless gear and my high-speed, redundant disk enclosure should be here in a few days. Once I get all of this ticking I can play with my wagon again. None of that is wagon related, of course, it's just frustrating and exciting at the same time.

I did take last Thursday and Friday off work to head up to Barrie for the Spring Auto Flea Market. We drove up on Friday so I spent all day Thursday working on the wagon. I picked up a Mothers Clay Bar and worked over all of the paint and even the woodgrain to get the whole car smooth again. The weather was too hot to polish and wax the paint again, but it still made everything look pretty good.

I took the dash apart again to try and find my rattle. I discovered a broken mounting tab under the dash so I put together a piece of plastic to use as a washer to hold that mounting tab tight. We didn't hear a single rattle (from the dash) all the way up to Barrie and back. It finally started to rattle again today so perhaps I didn't find it after all. Guess I need to keep looking.

On the bottom of the doors of the Roadmaster there are some rubber strips that seem to act as a weather strip under the rocker panel. The rubber strip on my front passenger side door seems to have stretched. You can make out a bit of it in this picture.


I think it looks like hell so I removed the rocker panel, cleaned out 18 years worth of silt and mud, scrubbed the rubber strip and put it all back together again. It worked perfectly for a few days before that telltale corner started to droop again. Guess I'll have to head to a wrecking yard to look for another strip of rubber.

The rear quarter panel stainless moulding on the drivers side has been dangerously loose since I bought the car. After my experience with damaged mounting clips on my Pontiac, I've been avoiding removing that trim for fear of not being able to put it back. I finally had no choice so I carefully removed it, flushed out all of the silt, and found most of the trim clips were just fine but they had fallen off of their mounting pegs and were laying inside the moulding. I was able to put it all back together again apart from one clip. I had taken a number of mounting clips from a Roadmaster sedan on a junkyard trip but it turns out that only one of the three different clips is compatible between the wagon and the sedan. The one clip from the sedan that can be used on the wagon, is not the one that was broken or even one that is likely to break. Needless to say, I've been unable to find a replacement for that broken one. It's amazing just how many places around the 'Net sell moulding clips, but no one ever seems to have the ones that I'm looking for.

 

I've been sneaking in a few repairs here and there as time allows but haven't made a great deal of progress lately. Mostly I've just been driving!:icon_drive:

The various rattles around the wagon have triggered my long dormant OCD so I've been pouncing on those one at a time. I had to reinstall my cracked and split door panels as I haven't picked up some SEM to get those grey ones that I bought re-coloured. I've been cutting out the factory plastic liner that's under the door panel and replacing it with some of the insulating bubble stuff from Home Depot. That's working pretty well. I reinstalled my rear door panel and apparently missed a screw hole with reinstalling the pull straps. The next time somebody got in the back seat and gave the handle a good hard tug, the pull strap came off and cracked a mess of trim. I pulled that panel off the other day just to stop all of the plastic clattering. Looks like I'll have to fabricate something of my own to address GM's lame interior parts construction.

With all of my door panel swapping, I've noticed that the carpeting on my kick panels is really dingy and threads are starting to pull out of it, almost as though someone has been brushing it with a really stiff brush and stretching the fibers out. I laid the door panel on the table and trimmed out the long fibers with a pair of scissors to get it all back down to a uniform length. I pondered trying The Mrs sweater shaver but I didn't figure that would go over well. After all of my experimenting with carpet cleaning last summer I gave it another go on the door panel. I took a 900ml (30 OZ) spray bottle and put about 10ML (two teaspoons) of bleach, 10ML of concentrated Tide, and 20ML of vinegar as an anti-foaming agent. I filled the rest of the bottle with water and went to work. I sprayed the carpet thoroughly with the solution and scrubbed it with a toothbrush. The first door I used a fabric water sucker vacuum to pull out all of the cleaner. The second one I just took out in the driveway and hosed it off, that worked just as well. The difference was amazing. The carpeting came back almost like new. I have some before and after pictures so I'll try and post them up when I get home tonight.

I've finally started detailing the engine compartment a little bit to clean up all of the body shop dust that accumulated in there last summer. I'm a long way from finished but it looks one heck of a lot better now.

I polished and waxed the hood and fenders a few weeks back but wasn't really happy with the results so I picked up a clay bar and went over the whole car, including the Dynoc. I'm amazed at how much better the water beads off of the surfaces now even though I haven't reapplied any wax to it. I can highly recommend Mothers Clay Bars.

 

You've actually been DRIVING it??? I was thinking that you were a frustrated biologist and you bought the wagon to use as a dissecting project! Anyway....however many years from now when you are reasonably CLOSE to being satisfied with the car....you can start on mine! Wait.....mine may be worn out by then!
Glad you are enjoying that wagon, wiz! You have to have a lot of love to do all the work on it that you are doing.