Dance of the Shinys…

As expected, prior commitments make time this week to work on the Mustang fairly limited.

Thankfully, the time spent away was put to good use by UPS in delivering the parts I was missing from my aborted activities from last week:

I’d started work last week on installing the tail lights. I had what I thought were all the new gaskets needed to seal everything up. However, what looked like one gasket upon first inspection:

Actually turned out to be two individual pieces, a tail light bezel pad and a tail light lens gasket. I had only procured new bezel pads.

As I was ordering the tail light lens gaskets, I ran into something else I was missing. As it turns out, there are pads that go between the tail light and the body of the Mustang as well. I can be forgiven for not knowing about these pads as my Mustang did not have them installed when I removed the tail lights.

After the arrival of the boxes, I was fully equipped to rebuild the tail lights in all their padded glory:

The order of installation initially goes as follows:

• tail light housing
• tail light lens gasket
• tail light bezel pad

The above order gets you to this point:

The next step is to align all the holes so you can install the tail light lens itself. I struggled with this for about 10 minutes before I gave up and installed guides for everything to line up on using welding magnets and small screwdrivers:

With the guides in place, the lens went on easily.

At this point, I made what was almost a 70 dollar mistake. The lens attaches to the housing using screws at the top and the bottom. I installed the screws at the bottom first and even though I didn’t run them all the way down, I still ran them down further than I should. Attempting to then run the screws at the top down resulted in a broken “ear” on the lens.

Thankfully, the break was only in the attachment ear and did not compromise the water-tight electronic area and I was able to glue the ear back on for another attempt.

My second attempt had me put the chrome bezel over the lens and attach it to the housing using the screws on the left and right first. This applies a uniform pressure to the lens and helps it seat without the unwanted torque that causes things to break:

Lastly, I installed the body pad into the entire assembly which required liberal application of silicone lubricant to accomplish:

I then repeated the process for the other tail light and turned an unfinished tail of the Mustang:

into a completed unit:

The other unfinished project from last week that I revisited was the installation of the shiny bits around the door:

Last week, I discovered that one of my two drip rail molding was too loose after it was installed. The molding I purchased at the salvage yard was fine, but the Mustang’s lone remaining original molding didn’t fit well – likely because it was designed to be installed over both the drip rail and the Mustang’s old vinyl top. Since I didn’t want my passenger side drip rail molding tearing off at speed, the installation process last week was canceled while I purchased a new set.

There is a very specific set of dance steps that have to take place for all these shiny parts to install properly.

To start with, you take the roof weatherstrip channel and install the adhesive foam backing front to back. Once you get to the point where the weatherstrip channel starts to dive down from the roof into the quarter window opening, you install the quarter window bridge molding on the back side of the weatherstrip channel and overlay the foam on top of both pieces like this:

At that point, you can attach the weatherstrip channel to the inside door jam of the car:

The next pieces to attach are the “boomerang” moldings:

While installing a boomerang molding, make sure that the edges of the molding line up with the drip rail. The drip rail molding actually attaches to the boomerang molding as well and if they’re not lined up, the pieces don’t fit together right.

Ask me how I know…

With the boomerang molding installed, the last step is to install the actual drip rail molding.

These moldings are installed by slipping the top part of the molding into the top lip of the drip rail like this:

Applying an angled downward blow like this:

So the molding clips into place like this:

According to the University of YouTube, this installation isn’t too hard:

 

Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet.

Actually, the installation of the reproduction drip rail molding on the passenger side went fairly well. The driver’s side though just wasn’t going to happen with the reproduction part. Thankfully, the molding I purchased from the salvage yard was in really good shape and after less-than-the-reproduction-part-but-still-significant struggles, I was able to get the salvage yard molding installed.

The end result of all that effort was a nicely shiny’d up door and roof line:

That was all I had time for this week. Next week’s project is getting the doors latches operational again…