Thursday, July 07, 2011

Harwood 3” Cowl for “The Project”

It turned up yesterday. 

I’m not impressed with Old Dominion shipping.  The driver was pretty cool, I just backed my truck to the back of the tractor trailer and he just slid it in (yea, my Cummins Dodge is BIG, it was only a few inches below the deck of the trailer) but the guys at the dock sucked, didn’t seem to want to do their jobs- they couldn’t seem to figure out how to call and arrange a delivery, after a few days of trying I finally got the dock number from one of the main centers and called the guy that was supposed to call me.  For that matter, it was getting delivered to a business so they should have been able to delver anytime instead of letting it sit on a dock for a few days.

Anyway…

The back corners were banged up (actually poked through the box) and the space behind the passenger side headlight got smacked by something but otherwise it’s in good shape.  Nothing that I can’t fix.  I was surprised, I weighed it and it was 26-27#, where the stock ‘bird hood that I had on the car was 57-58#, and I know that a formula style hood is in the low 70’s.

I decided to test fit it on the project car around 3am last night, actually Christina helped me get it on the hinges around 10 when I ran out to the gym, I finished bolting it on later.  I’m betting the neighbors appreciated the impact driver.  I had about ½” gap in places, more at the front.  It also sat about almost 1” high at the back and more than that in the front: DSC_4208

DSC_4209

When I got home tonight I spent a few minutes moving stuff around while grilling some ribs and ended up with it pretty well aligned.  I still need to move the headlights around, and the passenger side has roughly 1/32-1/16” more gap and sits slightly higher than the driver’s, the front bumper is crooked/needs to be fixed (the steel bumper support was partially crushed and twisted when I bought it, I have a nice aluminum one from my ’83 to replace it eventually), this is what I ended up with (need to find some weak struts for it).  I’m pretty happy with how it looks:

DSC_4220

The dinged up spots need a little body work, but the back corners have slightly the wrong angle anyway, so I would have had to sand most of the banged up areas off when I finish it. I’ve also aligned the headlights a little better but didn’t bother taking any additional pictures.

BTW, I think that these are the only real pictures I’ve posted of this one anywhere… My wife has named her Cherry, but I don’t know if she’s going to stay “Cherry Red,” we’ll see…