So the last few weeks I have been working on cleaning up some hardware for plating. I am pulling together hardware that all needs to be clear zinc. I haven't been able to use my Caswell system to get good results on some of these larger pieces so I am going to ship a lot of clear zinc to them for barrel plating...

Question for those who know, why are the horn standoffs made this way with the six layers of really thin metal? Does anyone know?

@Zed Head @HS30-H

On another item does anyone know how to reproduce this spring? It cause the door handle lever to return. It's 1mmx2mm flat stock turned into a spring. Is there a source for this stock that I could bend my own spring?

One of my locks had very little of this spring left

7 hours ago, Patcon said:

Question for those who know, why are the horn standoffs made this way with the six layers of really thin metal? Does anyone know?

As far as I understand it (and I've seen the same thing on several different makes of old cars) they act as a spring/damper, which has a positive effect on the sound quality and also insulates the mountings from high frequency vibration when the horn sounds.

But they certainly have an air of late 1860s rather than late 1960s, so I empathise with your curiosity.

Thanks Alan, that was one of my suspicions for the reason but they changed the horn mounting to a steel bracket but mounted on a center rear stud in later years. So I wasn't sure...

I have looked at them pretty closely. It is one of the parts I have considered reproducing. Because of the construction they are difficult to coat properly and they corrode badly because of the spaces between the plates. Not a complicated part to reproduce but they would probably be sort of costly because I would have to have someone cut me all the plates

I had the thought that there is probably some patent literature about it out there and found one that describes a design whose purpose is to isolate the sound/vibration from the car body. It's translated from Chinese so makes for a weird read.

In short, I think it stops the people in the car from feeling the vibration. Buzzy butt, probably. It's from 2008.

https://patents.google.com/patent/CN201300772Y/en

I tried to find a patent from around the Z time frame but patent searching is hard. I did find this though. Radar equipped cars in 1972.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3833906A/en

I need some reference dimensions for where the door sills go on the rocker panel. Mainly the interior black one. Maybe use the rocker seam as a reference?

I have a set that I've never used if you need any measurements let me know. Any way these might be helpful?

Are the original holes still present? I bought new ones and they matched the holes in the body. What measurement are you needing?

Thanks for the offer Cliff! I actually already bought a new set.

I finally got the car up on the cubes on some dollies.

It was a little sketchy but I got it up without dropping it

Evidently the water pump on this engine is bad... :(

I worked on the original door sills some today. They were pretty rough. I used the bead blasting cabinet with low air pressure and some crushed glass

After that I used some glass beads on really low pressure to shine them up a little more. I found the location of the inner black sill cover by using a pick and locating the original screw holes. The new black covers only have three holes; the originals had five but I think I'll leave it this way for now.

The screws are stainless and I polished them up before putting them in

I also bought the speedo seals from Zcardepot and put those in yesterday. We'll see if that fixes it...

2 hours ago, Patcon said:

I need some reference dimensions for where the door sills go on the rocker panel. Mainly the interior black one. Maybe use the rocker seam as a reference?

Is this what you're looking for?

Here's a couple more pics

Edited 17 hours ago17 hr by CanTechZ
Added two pics

Thank you, yes that is what I was looking for