Back to the upholstery: I took the box of material to the French upholsterer in early January. It’s still there (good craftsmen always have a backlog, you know the song) but the seats ought to be ready within days. I can’t wait to see the result.

Now it’s the turn of the door panels. I had to redo part of the old backing. An Imperial door panel is much more complex than that of a Chrysler 300. It’s in three horizontal sections fastened together. The upper one, of sheet metal, is rounded at the top. The middle section, of plastic-stiffened cardboard, is molded to a concave shape. The lower part is made of hardboard. Only this flat bottom part is available from Goers, since the molds needed for the other two have long since disappeared. The metal piece was easy to restore by rust removal and a coat of rustproofing. By good fortune the middle section was only slightly deformed, and that at the front, owing to water infiltration; so it was soon made usable again, with the help of fiberglass reinforcement. I remade the bottom part with all its mounting holes, and finally fastened the three pieces together. That ought to do.
The back door panels, of sheet metal and hardboard, were in excellent shape, ready to be reupholstered. And that Spanish chrome restoration? They had been in Spain since June 2000 and it took ten phone calls to get results. I went there and saw that some of the pot-metal pieces had come out quite poorly. Only the tailfin rings and some of the pieces from my salvage car were presentable. The chrome-on-steel parts, however – the bumpers – were perfect. The chrome man was deeply chagrined, saying that with every polishing of the pot-metal pieces, new pitting appeared, and nothing could be done about it. What crappy material ! It seems that the pot-metal pieces on my car were much more affected by pitting than those from the salvage car, probably because my convertible had spent most of its life near the seaside in equatorial Ghana.

To sum up, some key pieces of trim were unrestorable: the moldings along the sides of the front fenders, one of the headlamp doors, the hood front molding, the optional hood eagle ornament, and a windshield side inner molding. An e-mail to Bob Hoffmeister brought me, for a price, naturally, the two fender moldings and the hood molding. Soon I should have the headlamp door from him. But the eagle ornament for the hood wasn’t so easy. I tried E-bay and located one, but the price of $385 was just too much. The windshield molding, another part peculiar to convertibles, just couldn’t be found. The chrome artisan, himself mortified and feeling my pain as well, offered to make the two pieces out of aluminum and chrome them. So we’re not just restoring but remanufacturing parts! If the eagle emblem from Spain turns out well, I may offer others like it on the market for the bargain price of $384.99...

Another task is to clean that precious relic, the grille. It’s made of anodized aluminum except for the ridges of the crossbars, which appear to have been chromed. Each little rectangle has to be polished with 000 steel wool. It’s tiresome work and I decide to polish only the parts that show, the bottom and sides of the rectangle, because to see the rest you have to lie on the ground.

That was a grievous mistake. When I place the grille on its "closure," a chromed horizontal plate between the bumper and the grille, the bright chrome of the closure reflects to the eye those downward-facing sides with all their rust! But wait, aluminum doesn’t rust. Those rusty-looking driblets are probably traces of the original adhesive with which the bars were fastened together. The aluminum aged gracefully but the glue didn’t; it changed color. I started to scrape away those driblets but soon stopped. That’s not the way! Touches of aluminum paint did the job.

Gleaming aluminum grille, from above	Same upside/down. Notice the rust-colored dribbles reflected by the bumper chrome.

At last it’s time to reassemble the Imperial’s "face." It comes in 11 pieces so I thought carefully about the right procedure. Mount the grille first on the centre bumper, then the closure – no, that’s wrong, the extensions won’t go into place if – In short, it took a full day to get everything back together. The result was everything I had hoped for. It seems that this history without an end won’t go on forever, after all.

Other pics (click to enlarge)

Head-on view	License plate has changed and the right-side rear-view mirror is in place	You can’t take a picture in bright sunlight! This is 1/1000 second at f.16, still not enough
	Tailfin	Attaching the sun visor (a type peculiar to convertibles, along with its mounting bracket, which I don’t yet have for the other side)

actualised 05/01/2001