It’s not very often that us Chicagoan’s have an opportunity to enjoy 60+ degree weather in February. While most men my age like to play golf when its this nice outside, I like to play with my cars (some boys never grow up).
I spent the afternoon piecing the front end together. You might say that I have done that before, well yeah technically, but not with all of the the parts that need to work together actually being in there together at the same time.
All those things make a difference for fit and finish!
Before & After
So, for all of my short attention spanned readers last September I bought a ’76 Royal Monaco that looked like this –
That now looks like this –
Gratuitous Body shots…
Here are a bunch of pictures that I don’t feel like writing captions for at the moment.
While I have a shit ton of work still ahead of me, I’m here to tell you right now that you can convert a Royal Monaco without having to find the perfect set of fenders, or cutting tips and welding, etc.
Fiberglass is a wonderful material to work with when you need to fabricate pieces on the fly and on the cheap! Yes it is a total pain in the ass and if you don’t have any prior experience you’ll make mistakes like I did, but hell it was still cheap. I still learned. And at the end of the day I can say I built this from nothing.
Using fiberglass allowed me to track down the parts that are easy to find (Easy being a relative term here folks!) that I really really needed to pull this off and also allowed me to use pieces from my Royal Monaco that were perfectly good.
My fenders have no rust, my front bumper is clean, no pitting. I would be crazy not to try to use those things.
I wasn’t going to pass by a perfectly good ’76 Monaco, and I sure the hell wasn’t willing to let her sit in the garage while I sought a set of fenders that were A) Cheap enough B) Close enough. As many of you know those are not easy to find and when they do come up they are expensive and far away!!!
All it takes is some patience and the willingness to screw up and say that’s okay I can fix this.
I hope that up to this point my blog has been educational and entertaining.
At the end of the day I’m making a replica Bluesmobile, not a concours recreation of a Shelby Cobra meant to sit on the course of Pebble Beach. Although it would be freaking cool to have a Blumo there. You know shitty the place up bit.
Do what you can with the means and talents you have available. Have fun. Pursue your dream.
But most importantly, do what you can to get ‘er close enough to drive this summer and enjoy her. You always have next winter to fix things you you don’t like or need to be fixed.
Peace.
