Maybe an advantage of a really huge project is that if you get discouraged with one part of it, there is always something else to work on. I am so far behind on keeping this blog up to date, I don't really remember now the exact order in which things got done, but I remember very definitely that I knew the engine was going to have to come out of the car, and I had not yet started on removing it, when I decided to install the rear taillights. Logically, maybe it's a little dumb to install taillights on a car with a fundamentally flawed engine that needs to come out of the car to be repaired. But at that point, I just didn't want to even think about the engine. Also, before I discovered the coolant leaks I had been thinking that I needed to install the taillights soon. I had thought that I was almost ready to drive the car to the body shop, and if I was going to drive the car on public roads, then I would need brake lights, i.e. the taillights needed to be installed. It was something that I had been thinking about doing soon, it was something that needed to be done, and it was a distraction from the issues that I didn't want to think about, so it made sense at the time.
The taillight assemblies were made up of reproduction parts, and went together pretty easily. In my opinion the taillights on the '65 Impala are maybe it's single most distinguishing detail, and seeing them installed made the mass of metal in the garage start to look significantly more like a '65 Impala. As a consequence, that helped to reinvigorate me, and I was inspired and motivated to keep pushing forwards. I pulled the engine out, disassembled it, and took everything to the machine shop, and things progressed from there.
But, as long as I've started talking about the taillights, I think I am going to use the remainder of this post to cover the work that I did on the rest of the exterior lighting. This included the front turn signals, the headlights, and the headlight wiring. These were a little bit more complicated than the taillight assemblies, for different reasons. This work all got done in parallel with other, more important work, but it seems relatively tidy to just group all the exterior lighting into one post.
When I got the car and started disassembling it, I found that the front turn signal assemblies were in pretty bad shape. One of the wiring harnesses was broken off, and the other one seemed pretty crusty and rotten. I don't think either one had a plastic lens in place. I assumed it would be easy to replace the complete assemblies with reproduction parts, but that turned out to be wrong. I wasn't able to find anyone selling reproduction turn signal assemblies for the 1965 Impala. Fortunately, I hadn't thrown out the ones that were on the car when I got it yet, so I went back to see if I could clean those up and salvage them.
When I took a closer look, I discovered that the left and right assemblies didn't even match each other. Evidently someone else had struggled to find a front turn signal assembly for a 1965 Impala, and ended up replacing one of them with a piece off of some other car. I would guess it came off of an Impala from a different year, but it may have come off of some other General Motors product, or who-knows-where. That gave me the idea to broaden my search for reproduction parts. I made several more searches for reproduction parts, trying any supplier I could think of, and any combination of GM make, model and year that I thought might have something I could use. But, I never found anything that looked like it would bolt up. So, I re-committed to trying to refurbish what I had.
Each assembly consists of a housing, a lens, a gasket between the lens and the housing, and a bulb socket with a wiring harness extending off the back of it. The lens is the only thing that is really visible when everything is installed on the car, and I could get reproductions of the lens and the gasket. Those parts commonly deteriorate with time, so I guess there is more demand for reproductions of those. But the housing and the wiring harness were nowhere to be found.
The two housings could both be installed on the 1965 Impala, but they were noticeably different from each other, and did not install exactly the same as each other. They were roughly the same size, and looked pretty much the same at a glance, but closer examination revealed that one of them had three mounting holes, and the other seemed to only have one. Each one had two holes for securing a lens, but then one of them only had a mounting hole at the top, whereas the other one had three mounting holes: one at the top, and then a hole on each side, as well. This second arrangement seemed to be the correct one, as all three mounting holes lined up with corresponding holes in the '65 sheet metal.
Furthermore, the mounting holes were in different planes. Each housing has a flange that extends forward and sort of frames the plastic lens. On the housing with three mounting holes, the holes are in the plane of the base of the lens, where it meets the housing, and the flange runs around the outside of the mounting holes, as well as the lens. On the housing with a single mounting hole, the hole is in a small flange that extends off the top of the front edge of the flange that runs around the lens, so it is further forward relative to the base of the lens. I wanted to modify the housing to mount more similarly to the "correct" housing, if for no other reason, then because three mounting screws seem more secure than one.
I came up with a relatively simple plan to add side mounting holes to the "incorrect" housing. I cut a flange out of a piece of sheet metal, which was designed to run the entire width of the turn signal housing, with extensions at each side for the additional mounting holes. Because I wanted those holes to be in the plane of the base of the turn signal lens, like on the "correct" housing, I then cut slots in the sides of the flange that ran around the outside perimeter of the housing, and put the slots in that plane. In this way, the flange could be slipped into the front of the housing, such that the extensions on each side passed through those slots. This effectively located the flange in the housing by mechanical means, and screwing the plastic lens in place would clamp everything together. To make the assembly watertight, I applied a liberal smear of RTV when I slipped the flange in place, which further helped to secure it. Like most of the best examples of custom items that I've made, it looks like garbage, but I think it will do the job. This created an assembly with mounting holes on the sides that would install on the 1965 sheet metal just like the "correct" housing, and a mounting hole at the top that would work just fine with the addition of a small spacer sleeve around the screw, to take up the gap between that flange and the mounting surface.
The picture below shows the two housings after I had knocked some of the rust off, and the flange that I made (top left) in order to add the two extra mounting holes.
Cleaning up the housings and repainting them was relatively easy, but the wiring harness and the bulb socket would be the difficult part to refurbish. The harness is integrated into the bulb socket, and the bulb socket is installed into the housing with no intention of it ever being removed from the housing. The turn signal housing is steel, and the body of the bulb socket is copper. It appears that the two pieces are assembled by slipping the end of the bulb socket into a hole in the housing until a lip on the outside of the bulb socket butts up against the back of the housing, then folding back the extra length of the bulb socket inside the housing to form a lip that prevents the socket from pulling out of the housing. In other words, the two parts are joined by permanently deforming the socket such that the two pieces cannot come apart.
It was relatively easy to remove the old sockets from the housings. Because they wouldn't be re-used, there were any number of ways they could be destroyed in order to remove them. But what to replace them with? In the process of searching for reproduction 1965 Impala turn signal assemblies, I found that Year One does offer reproduction 1968 Impala turn signal assemblies. They are a different size and shape from the 1965 assemblies, but they use the same type of bulb socket and wiring harness as the 1965 part. So, if I could remove that socket and install it in the housings I already had, I could probably make do.
When I received the reproduction 1968 assemblies, I saw that the inside of each housing was painted white, presumably to reflect the light from the bulb, so I painted the inside of my housings white, also.
I cut up the housings for the 1968 assemblies, in order to give myself better access to the area where the socket was joined to the housing. Fortunately, because the socket is made of copper, it was relatively easy then to take a small flat-blade screwdriver and carefully pry up the lip that held the socket in place. Then I could slip the socket out of the housing, slip it into my refurbished housings for the '65, and use a hammer and punch to flatten the lip back into place, effectively joining the reproduction sockets and harnesses with my refurbished turn signal housings. The lip certainly didn't look as nice as it did before I bent it up and folded it back down, but it's not visible once everything is assembled, and the reproduction socket and harness is certainly a huge upgrade over what I had.
At that point I had two refurbished turn signal housing assemblies that I felt pretty sure would work well for me.
The last detail to work out was that the 1968 harnesses used a different style of plug than the 1965 did. The harness needs to pass through a hole in the inner fender and then connect to the main wiring harness in the engine bay. On the 1965 design, the body of the plug is a piece of rubber large enough to also seal the hole in the inner fender, like a grommet. In other words, the electrical connection and the grommet are integrated into one piece of rubber. On the 1968 design, there is a rubber grommet to seal the hole in the inner fender, which is molded around the wires, and then there is a separate electrical connector on the end of the wires, where they connect to the main wiring harness. Fortunately, the size of the hole in the inner fender seemed to be the same between '65 and '66, so the grommet would still work, but the plug on the end of the 1968 turn signal harness did not match the plugs on the 1965 main wiring harnesses. This was easy enough to fix, however, by just cutting off the plugs on both turn signal harnesses and the main harness, and installing a couple of two-pin connectors that I had ordered online.
Whenever possible, I tend to order reproduction parts for stuff like this, because it's quicker, they are usually easier to install, and I like things that look like original equipment. It is, however, somewhat satisfying to puzzle through and figure out a way to make things work with what's available when reproduction parts are not an option. But thank goodness that reproduction parts often are available, because if I had to go to these lengths for every detail on the car, I might never finish it.
Ah, wait, though, I almost forgot: there was one more detail to the turn signals. After I had everything installed, front and rear, I went to test whether the turn signals worked. As it turned out, they would light up, but they would not flash. I had used LED replacement bulbs for all the brake lights and turn signals, and because LEDs draw less power, they don't generate the heat required to make the stock-style flasher work. After looking around online for longer than I expected it to take, I eventually found Ron Francis part number EL40 on Summit.com. This is a set of two flashers designed for use with LEDs, and they plug in exactly like the stock units would. So all you have to do is pop the stock ones out, and pop these ones in, and you're all set. I had seen people talking online about different ways of making other stuff work, but it all required additional wiring. These are maybe ten dollars more per flasher unit, which I decided was worth it to me just for the simplicity and ease of installation.
So, that takes care of the taillights and the front turn signals. I still had a couple of projects relating to the headlights, though. The first one was just to install a couple of relays for the the high and low beams. With the stock wiring harnesses, the power to the headlights goes from the battery, through a long, thin wire, to the headlight switch on the dashboard, through that switch, through another long, thin wire, back into the engine bay, and eventually to the headlights. All that long, thin wire has a resistance to it, and it is possible to end up with sufficient resistance that the headlights will actually be noticeably dimmer. One solution is to mount relays in the engine bay, so that a small current draw will go from the battery to the headlight switch and back to the relays, and the relays will then carry the higher current draw from the battery to the headlights. Putting the relays in the engine bay makes a shorter path for the wiring to the headlights, and wiring all of this yourself allows you to use larger gauge wire, with less resistance.
I installed headlight relays in the Monte Carlo, once upon a time, and I was pleasantly surprised by the results. I put the relays in at the same time that I did some other project, so when I finished that project and had the car running again, I wasn't even thinking about the relays the first time I turned the headlights on. But I turned them on and thought, huh, the headlights seem brighter ... oh, yeah, I installed those relays. So that made me a believer in headlight relays. I suspect that part of the reason for the noticeable improvement on the Monte Carlo was probably because the wiring harness was old and crusty and deteriorated, so when I put in new wiring for the headlights, the improvement was significant. The benefit of putting relays in the Impala, which has all new reproduction wiring harnesses, may not be as significant, but I put the relays in, anyway.
The wiring for the relays is very straightforward. If you have any question about it, you can look up any wiring diagram for a typical automotive relay, and it should be pretty clear. But there was also the question of how to mount the relays. In the Monte Carlo, I had just drilled a couple holes in the crappy old plastic inner fender, and bolted the relays to the inner fender there. But the Impala has nice, freshly-painted, steel inner fenders, which I felt less-inclined to casually drill holes in. I also wanted to do something to try to isolate the relays from vibration. I don't remember if it was the Monte Carlo, or maybe some other project, but I think I remember a plastic relay fatiguing and breaking off, due to vibration, so I wanted to try to avoid that.
The steel inner fender had a conveniently-placed dimple in it, in the general area where I wanted to mount the relays. It looked like it was probably intended as a guide for a hole to be drilled, in order to mount some optional equipment there. Maybe the windshield washer fluid bottle? Anyway, I decided to drill a hole there, and to use that hole to mount a bracket, and to use that bracket to mount my two relays. I drilled the hole, and painted the edge of it with POR-15 to try to prevent rust from starting there.
For the bracket, I just wanted two 90-degree bends, so that the relays would be mounted parallel to the inner fender surface, but raised up off of it. Sort of a "Z" shape made with two opposite 90-degree bends. I had a piece of aluminum angle in the garage, which already had one 90-degree bend in it. I figured it I could cut away everything that wasn't a bracket, put another 90-degree bend in it, and drill a few holes in it for mounting, I'd be all set. To make the bend, I put the piece of angle in the bench vise so that the vise was grabbing it right where I wanted the bend to be, then I kind of tucked a piece of scrap steel up into the "armpit" of the bend that was already in the piece, and hammered on the end of that steel to bend the aluminum over the edge of the jaws of the vise. I hammered it flat to make the bend as crisp as I could, and in the end it came out pretty good.
The upper bend is the bend that was already in the aluminum angle when I started, which is why it looks relatively nice and crisp. The lower bend is the one that I made, and I think it looks OK, too. When I went to drill the holes, the drill bit skipped across the surface of the bracket and chewed it up a bit, so I used a combination of a file, sandpaper, and maybe the wire wheel on the bench grinder to remove those marks. That's why it has a little bit of a "brushed" look.
I mounted the bracket rigidly to the inner fender. To try to isolate the relays from vibration, I mounted the relays to the bracket using long bolts run through rubber grommets. The grommets were sandwiched between the relays and the bracket, to try to create some little shadetree vibration isolators. I just kind of snugged the nuts down to put a little compression on the rubber grommets, but not so tight as to take all the flex out of the rubber. I used nylon lock nuts, so that the nuts wouldn't back off when everything was just kind of snugged together. This was probably over-thinking things, and probably won't be effective, but, hey ... what the heck, worth a shot. Lastly, I used a label maker to label the relays and the plugs "HI" and "LO," to keep the high-beam and low-beam circuits straight if everything ever gets unplugged at the same time. Actually, though, it occurs to me now that it wouldn't matter if the plugs got switched around, as the relays are identical and interchangeable, but ... oh, well, it's fun to use the label maker, and it makes stuff look official.
That pretty much took care of the headlight relays. The other project on the headlights was much less functional, and mostly just for aesthetics.
In the '60s, in racing series where the race cars were based on production street cars, the headlights were typically either removed and blanked off, or at least covered with an "X" of tape. I guess the idea was to keep broken glass off of the track in the event of a wreck. I've always wondered how effective the taped "X" was at keeping glass off the track, since the tape did not completely cover the glass light bulb. But, it looks cool, and maybe that's the most important thing.
In the SCCA Trans Am series, in the mid-'60s, it was more common to cover the headlights with an "X" of tape. In NASCAR at that time, the headlights were removed and replaced with a metal blanking plate. In some cases, the car's number might be painted on those blanking plates, usually on the passenger side, although some minimal research seems to indicate that this didn't really become common practice until the late '60s.
Anyway, I've always liked the look of the blanked-off or otherwise protected headlights, and I especially like the detail of putting the car number on the headlight area. I wanted to do something to try to recreate that look on the Impala, but without sacrificing the functionality of the headlights.
I don't remember exactly where I got the idea from, but somehow I became aware that maybe someone was selling metal grilles designed to cover motorcycle headlights. I suspect maybe I saw something in a photo of a custom motorcycle, or maybe a race motorcycle. Anyway, I looked around on eBay and I found someone who was selling these circular metal grilles designed to cover motorcycle headlights, and I thought maybe I could do something with that.
It's a bit of a tangent, but it's kind of interesting to note that for a long time there was pretty much just one or two standard sizes of headlight. Even into the 1980s, there were still only four options for headlights: big circles, little circles, big rectangles, and little rectangles. Because of that lack of variety, I felt pretty sure that I could probably find one of these motorcycle headlight grilles that would fit the headlights on the Impala. Indeed, I was able to, and I ordered four of them.
It would be relatively simple to install the grilles, just slip them in between the headlight bulb and the retaining ring that holds the bulb in place, and sandwich it all together. The retaining rings were old and crusty, and it would be no big deal to clean them up a bit and paint them black, to match the grilles. Each headlight had three small "nipples" on the front of it, and I would have to put notches in the grilles to clear those nipples, but this would also serve the purpose of making sure that the grilles were always clocked to the same orientation.
The photo below shows one of the grilles, as received.
And the next photo shows one of the grilles, after adding the three notches to clear the nipples on the headlight bulb.
That was all easy enough, so naturally I had to make it more difficult.
As I mentioned above, in the late '60s (around 1969, I think) it started to become common in NASCAR to paint the car's number on the passenger-side headlight covers. That was always a detail that I liked when looking at race cars, so I decided to try to figure out a way to put a number on my passenger-side headlight grilles. My first idea was just to paint the number on, but my concern was that pattern of the grille wires would break up the outline of the numbers, so that they wouldn't show up well enough to be easily read. I thought it would be good to put a wire outline of the numbers on top of the grilles, but I wasn't sure how to attach the wire outlines. The most obvious idea was to weld them on, but I don't have welding equipment.
Eventually, I decided that maybe I could braze the wire outlines on. I had some experience with brazing from the welding class I took in high school, and I found this video, which was good for refreshing my memory. Also, the guy recommended some specific products for the job, which gave me a starting point for shopping. I decided to give it a try.
First, however, I had to pick a number. This was a bit of a challenge, because I'm indecisive and I really like numbers. The first and most obvious choice would be 53, because I came to realize while I was in high school that 53 is my lucky number. But I also really like numbers that are divisible by 11, specifically 11 and 22, but also 44, and all the other numbers between 0 and 100 that are divisible by 11. I put number 11 on the trophy-winning pinewood derby car that I built when I was in fifth grade (although the number that was assigned to it for tracking during the tournament was 53). Number 11 also holds the distinction of being the winningest car number in the history of NASCAR, thanks to victories accumulated by Ned Jarrett, Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip, and others. So I was tempted to put number 11 on the headlights, in hopes that some of that NASCAR success might rub off on my car. Then again, the paint scheme that inspired the stripe on my car came from a car driven by Jim Paschal, which was numbered 41. I have, for some reason, sort of a subconscious thing where I associate a color with each of the numbers 0-9, so part of the reason why I might like or dislike a two-digit number is because of how its colors look together. Number 4 looks red to me, and number 1 looks white (or maybe a little yellow-ish), so number 41 looks great, to me, on a black car with a white stripe and red rims. For those reasons, I was also tempted to use number 41. In the end, though, I decided that the smart thing would be to not tempt fate by picking some number other than my lucky number, and I settled on 53.
Next, I looked through the available fonts in Microsoft Word to find one that I liked for the numerals "5" and "3," and then I played with the size of that font until I had something that fit the size of the headlight grilles pretty well. I printed out a copy of "53" in that size.
I had some old wire coat hangers that seemed to be about the right thickness of wire for what I wanted. I took a couple of those, stripped the paint off of them with the wire wheel on the bench grinder, and straightened out the bends in them so that they were just straight pieces of wire.
I got my printed copy of "53," my pieces of straightened coat hanger wire, and a pair of pliers, and I carefully bent the wire into shape, to follow the outline of the "5" and the "3." One thing to note: with the results that I was able to get, I could really only pick one sharp corner on each number. That would be where the loose ends of the wire met up. All the other corners would be more rounded off. So there was a little bit of forethought to put into that. On the "5," I put the sharpest corner at the top right, and on the "3" I put it at the center right, where the top and bottom curves of the "3" come together.
When I was done bending up the wire number forms, they were essentially flat. The grilles have a curvature to them, like a headlight, so I placed each number where I wanted it on a grille, and kind of bent the sides down to match the curvature of the grilles.
I was a little worried at that point that maybe the pattern of the grilles was still breaking up the shapes of the numbers too much, but for the time being I just kept working on them.
Before brazing the wire number forms onto the grilles, I wanted to remove the paint from the grilles. I thought I could just remove it with the wire wheel on the bench grinder, like I had done with the coat hanger wire. But, it turned out that the paint on the grilles was a lot more stubborn than what was on the coat hangers. I started to wonder if maybe the grilles were actually powdercoated.
I had discovered earlier that powdercoat will not deteriorate when you spill brake fluid on it, but every kind of paint that I've encountered will. So I tried soaking a grille in brake fluid. That seemed to soften up the paint to where I could scrape it off with a wire brush, but even then I had to soak each grille in brake fluid overnight, brush off most of the paint, then soak it overnight again, and brush off the rest of the paint. I did this for all four grilles, even though I was only putting numbers on two of them. I wanted them all to look the same, just in case the paint I used had a different level of gloss compared to the paint that was on the grilles when I got them, or something like that.
At that point I was ready to braze the wire number forms onto the grilles. I took a few little wire twist-ties, like the ones you'll sometimes get on a bagged loaf of bread, and I stripped off the flat plastic cover so that I just had a short length of small-diameter wire. I used those to twist-tie the wire number forms to the grilles in a few places. My original plan was to try to braze each number at every place where it crossed a wire from the headlight grille. Part of the reason for that was because I was thinking that maybe I would cut out the grille pattern on the inside of each number, to make the numbers clearer, and I didn't want any loose ends of grille wires hanging out in the middle of the headlight. That certainly would have been secure, but as I started to get into the process, I decided that the brazing was going to be enough of a hassle that I would just try to tack each number in half a dozen places or so, and hope that that was secure enough. And that also meant that I would not be cutting out the grille pattern in the middle of the numbers. Anyway, I brazed the numbers in place, with maybe half a dozen brazed joints for each number, and after finishing that, I cut away what was left of the wire twist-ties.
The last thing was to paint the grilles. I primered each one, then painted them all gloss black. At the same time I also primered and painted the headlight retaining rings. These are chromed on a stock '65 Impala, but I had decided to paint them to match the grilles.
I was still trying to figure out how to make the shapes of the numbers stand out a little bit more, and in the end I decided to use a white automotive paint touch-up pen to paint the areas inside the wire number outlines. The touch-up pen includes a small paint brush which is pretty good for painting details, but I masked the outlines of the numbers just to make it easier to keep the white paint off of the number outlines.
At that point, the grilles were ready to mount on the headlights, which was a relatively simple process of fitting each grille into a headlight retaining ring, then mounting that retaining ring as it normally would be, which captures the grille between the ring and the headlight.
Eventually, there was one more modification. After finally driving the car up to the body shop, I found that there was a spot where the paint on one of the grilles had already cracked and flaked, or maybe been chipped by a pebble or something during the drive. So after getting the car back from the body shop, I removed the grilles again, touched up any areas where the paint had cracked or chipped, and then painted the grilles and retaining rings (as assemblies) with a couple coats of clear POR-15. The POR-15 is a thick, heavy paint that will help to hold the grilles and retaining rings together, and will probably also help to reinforce the brazed joints. Then I reinstalled everything and adjusted the angles of the headlights, and called it "done."
In the end, I was pretty happy with the result. I think I ended up with the perfect level of subtlety for what I was looking for. The white paint and the wire outline makes the numbers clear enough that you can read them, but when you're looking at the whole car, they don't jump right out at you. When I finally got the car back to the body shop again, the owner of the shop told me that the car had been there a full week before he noticed the numbers on the headlights.
Speaking of looking at the whole car, I guess I'll end this post with a gratuitous picture of the car, in progress:
I had planned to make this one big entry with all of the activity that took place between the engine coolant leak and getting the car to the body shop, but it's already so long after just discussing the lighting features, I guess I will cut it off here. More to come on the other activities later....
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