Sunday update

Frank writes...

Sunday saw more work on the tail light for Shaker Heights 18. The good news is that the first tail light is done, except for paint, so work will now progress to the second one. There are only two of these tail lights on the car, so good progress is being made.

After last weekend there wasn't a whole lot that still remained to be done. I drilled some holes in the sides of the housing for the wires and located replacement hardware as needed for putting the whole assembly back together. The outer casting and "tin can" are shown above. You can see the small piece of steel bolted to the inner ring of the casting; Richard cut and installed that to replace a portion of the casting (hidden under that little piece) that had broken. After this photo was taken, he drilled and tapped a hole in that little piece of steel so that the inner ring, which holds the piece of red glass, can be bolted in place.

Here's Joel holding the assembled tail light.

And Richard rigged up a short extension cord attached to alligator clips and put power to the thing. Voila! The light bulb is the original out of the car, and judging by how rusted/painted solid the whole assembly was, that light bulb is definitely several decades old and probably dates back to Shaker days. Many thanks to Richard, Joel, Greg, and everyone who has helped with getting this little thing restored. After the photo I disassembled it again and put a coat of primer on the housing and on the little steel insert described previously. After it's painted, it will get installed on the car. The next couple of times I'm out I'll spray the outside of the housing black and then paint the inside of the housing silver... unless someone with a can of spray paint beats me to it during the week...

In other news, Greg and Nick were working all afternoon on trying to get the heaters in the 409 working so that the car can be used in cold weather. Gregg swung through; he mentioned that he was working on extracting horsehair insulation from the walls of the M-35 over in Barn 2. Hopefully an illustrated update will be forthcoming at some point. And finally, Tim was doing more woodworking (using the morticing machine at one point) and mentioned that he had tightened the canvas ratchet straps on the 453 on Saturday. I tightened them a little bit more myself, including re-installing one that I inadvertently over-tightened and yanked off the canvas.