1940 Buick 51
July 2023 - Body reassembly
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There were some challenges with reassembly to highlight.
- The gull wing hood pieces slide down the center stainless trim to form the hinge. After several coats of paint, the hood channel did not slide down easily. The solution is to use WD40 and 2 friends to hold up each hood upright with the hinged portion facing down to the ground. The stainless center would be pushed down on both hood channels simultaneously. With the help of friends, the 3 piece assembly is then mounted onto the car and bolted securely before attempting to close the hood doors. For me, both sides felt like they were binding but with gentle force and some greasing, they would loosen up after a few cycles of moving the hood pieces up/down to break in the newly painted channels that are rubbing inside the stainless center support.
- The front nose of the body that mounts between the two fenders are difficult to assemble with the fenders already on the car. I believe the factory normally assembled both fenders and the front nose together as a "front clip" that mounted onto the car altogether. Because of this, if you take the approach I did with the fenders already mounted on the car and install the center nose afterwards, some nuts and bolts are hard to reach but not impossible. The front nose has a cover plate on the bottom that can be removed to access the cavity between the radiator and front grille. You can see in the first photo above that I'm able to install all the bolts to hold the front grille in place from below. The grille has 3 sheet metal screws about 1 inch long that mount on the vertical edge towards the center piece, I used a long reach needle nose pliers to hold the nut in place on the inside of the nose from the access below while a friend would install the screw on the outside through the grille to the center nose.
With the car nearly fully assembled, I did more street driving up to 50 mph in the following video. This was the first time I was able to run through all 3 forward gears to verify the transmission and column shifter linkage was working correctly without issue. A couple new noises emanated. The left rear brake shoe spring had snapped causing the brake to drag and make a scraping noise, but the fix was easy. Both front wheel bearings turned out to be shot and was making noise. I did not document the process of replacing them, but essentially I hammered out the old bearings and then carefully hammered in the new bearing race for the inner and outer bearing, packed the new bearings with grease and then re-installed. After these small repairs, the Buick drives and runs wonderfully.