Hope Springs Eternal

I've been slow to push forward with Buick repairs, but I do have an upholstery appointment scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. The guy I spoke to could picture the car and compared it to an Eldorado convertible of the same era that he'd done a few years ago. That's a good sign.

Another good sign is that a Carolina-blue clone of the Riv has just gone up for sale on Autotrader in another northern Atlanta suburb...its asking price is $12,500. I'm not at all sure it'll pull that, but it's nice to know that someone else thinks it's worth that much, especially this year...one big difference: the blue one (shown below) has about one-third the miles.

Call it Progress

I haven't updated the blog much, but I have been slowly edging the Buick toward the showcase. In the past few weeks, I've:

1) taken out the rear seats to clean out beneath them, and get them ready for new upholstery;

2) swapped out the power window switches in the rear control panels (but that still didn't get them to work);


3) cleaned the leather interior trim in the back seats;
(photo by my very patient and forgiving wife)

4) given the hood a second coat of polish to fill in some of the deepest scratches;

5) decided the heater blower motor worked just fine, but there's a loose wire in the HVAC control unit that disables the fan speed switch. The control unit also does not successfully change the air flow from the floor to the dash vents or the defroster vents). I can't decide if a new control unit is the right way to go, so I'll be pricing them out.

6) shopped on-line for reupholstery shops -- I want to get that done by March 15th; and

7) sanded down the little (about 2cm) rust bubble on the trunk right up near the right-hand hinge. I'm looking for a warm, overcast day to break out the touch-up paint, and get to spots like that.