So we pulled the original-style grille that TeriAnn swapped me
for the recessed black unit off my '71 and set about cleaning
it last night. Windex took care of the water-soluble dirt,
the bits of leaves, the cobwebs, and left the grille clean but
still pitted and dull-looking.
I took out the Turtle Wax chrome polish and a roll of blue shop
rag paper towels, set the grille on newspapers on our patio table,
and began cleaning it while Kim potted up some seedlings.
I started with the grille surround, which is chrome-plated. Within
a few minutes I had portions of it gleaming like new; there was
very minor pitting still visible, but for the most part the finish
of the plating was fine underneath.
Then I started on the "teeth" of the grille, the vertical bars that
lie behind the surround. These are aluminum, and most of them were
covered with oxidation, with black corrosion, and with a light film
of grey, dull crud. The chrome polish wasn't the best thing for
this, but it worked; a few wipes with a towel impregnated with chrome
polish and it began to clean up. A little more elbow grease and it
began to take on a gleam.
"Aren't you going to do the back?" Kim asked, about the time her
last seedling was in its new pony pack.
"Oh, I guess so," I said. "It won't show, but I'll know it's not
clean."
"Here," she said, "let me have a go at it." Windex took the webs
out of the V at the back of each vertical bar; Kim's favorite cleaning
tool, the Q-Tip, got bits of grit and gunk out of crevices and hidden
spots. "There, isn't that better?" she said after several minutes.
It was; and I had to admit that I would be able to see that part of
the grille from inside the engine bay.
The worst of the black corroded bits came off only with great
difficulty, though, and as they were on the front, they made the
bars look like the teeth of Alfonso Bedoya (the actor in "The
Treasure of Sierra Madre" famous for "We don' got to show you no
steenking badges"). I got the Dremel, found a felt buffing head
for it, and plugged it into the extension. While Kim took a first
pass at one end of the grille, I used the Dremel (which made the
most ALARMING noise) to get some of the worst of the corrosion
off the aluminum.
Kim took a turn, pouring some of the chrome polish onto a newspaper
and dipping the Dremel into it to coat all sides of the felt. "Good
idea," I said; I'd been rubbing it in with a paper towel without
terribly good results.
"Hey, I went to college to learn to do this," Kim said, just as she
held the felt head against a sharp edge of metal and neatly sawed the
tip off; we watched it spoing off the grille and roll under the table.
"Maybe you should have gone to grad school," I commented dryly.
Eventually we had the aluminum even and bright, and the chrome
around it even brighter. I went to install it in the car (I'd test-
fitted it the previous day, but today needed to make a more permanent
fit) and after a little drilling and filing got the upper supports
to fit without hanging up the hood latch. Then I backed the car
out of the garage.
"Wow," Kim said. "It sure makes the rest of the chrome look crummy."
"It does, doesn't it?" I said. "We'll have to take the bumper off,
and those trim rings around the parking lights, and the headlight
bezels, and..."
We just smiled at each other. In three weeks we're taking this car
on our 15th anniversary trip to Monterey. I need to rack up some
miles on the rings and figure out the fuel starvation problem (more
later), but it's coming along quite well.
--Scott Fisher
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