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The car's now off in the hands of the body guy. I've been unpacking front sheetmetal mounting hardware and interior trim pieces that need to go out to be installed or painted. They're all wrapped in newspaper.
Newspaper dated December 1996. Which is both depressing enough to send me scurrying for the Scotch and delightful enough to send me scurrying for the beer. It's taken ten years to get to this point, but at least I'm here now.
I've been finding all kinds of NOS bits I didn't know I had, which is a good thing, but it looks like I've bought a few too many fender trim mouldings, at least one set too many of headlight bezels, etc. When I've finished sorting out the boxes I'll have a reasonable inventory of what I have, like a surprising amount of excellent condition NOS aluminum tailgate trim. And what I don't have, like a good two-speed-with-washer wiper switch to go with my NOS two-speed wiper motor. I will also, soon enough, have to find appropriately-talented people to clean and reanodize the rest of the aluminum trim, and to clean up some of the stainless.
Ah, stainless.
If I were sitting here in 1964, clicking away on my cutting-edge Smith-Corona Electra typewriter, I'd throw in a few words of appreciation for modern metal-stamping and plastic-molding technologies while lamenting the lack of truly craftsmanlike content in mass-produced American cars. I'd probably note the use of plastic moldings and fake wood cladding on the Country Squire models, the substitution of nylon carpeting for wool, the near-universal use of cold, shiny, vinyl upholstery.
Forty-three years later, I can walk out in my driveway and cast my eyes upon a fairly expensive German sedan. For all the very elaborate engineering, and all of the remarkable materials technology, that went into that car, there's nothing even remotely like the fifty pounds or so of high-grade stainless steel trim stampings that were routine on '50s and '60s-vintage middle-class US iron.
I can step back into the house, sit down at my generic ruthlessly-cost-optimized Chinese-made keyboard, and contemplate the wonders of mid-century American manufacturing technology. We were the Arsenal of Democracy, and that meant we made more than a few bucks figuring out how to do amazing things cheaply in vast quantities with high-grade materials. For a couple brief decades, some of that expertise trickled down to the auto industry so, as I unroll forty-three-year-old stainless steel trim from the December 19, 1996 issue of the Foster City Progress, I can usually expect that unless it's been crunched somehow it's no worse than lightly scuffed. Potmetal, of course, is another story.
Still, my wagon illustrates the very beginning of the slippery slide that followed that Golden Era of cheap cars with expensive trim. There's almost as much anodized aluminum trim on the car as stainless, though at least all the aluminum stampings are good quality. By the later '70s, of course, aluminum trim would be the rule where brightwork was used at all, and the stamping quality had deteriorated to the point that it might as well have been pounded out by mallet-wielding chimpanzees.
In other news, the transmission is here, but some of the adapter bits to bolt it up to the engine are still sitting at the transmission shop. I didn't get a chance to bolt it all up and figure out what I want to do for engine mounts, but it looks like it's going to be easier than expected.