Slow, Driving Rustoration 1972 Dart

Get after it man!

I painted the roof F8 yesterday, today the body work gets back in F3!

Driveway paint job unlocked. Its rough and will require wet sand and polish, but I'm happy with it.

Tonight I spent 3 hours on the first round of wet sanding the orange peel. 1000 grit, water, and a little dawn, rinse repeat. 14 sheets for the sides and the roof. I didn't paint the hood or trunk.

Tomorrow I'll be doing 2000 and 3000 grit rounds but that won't take a long hopefully.

Then compound and polish and get it ready for the Tulsa cruise.

Total of 12 hours the last 2 days wet sanding and buffing it. It rained all day and I went to my brother and sister in law's shop. The power went out for about 2 hours with two panels left to polish.

I got the trim and lights back on.

Still have odds and ends to finish up in the morning.

Here's a couple of dusk photos after a power wash.

I'll get some dry photos if it ever stops raining this weekend.

On the road to tulsa 160 miles so far and I just filled up with my best mileage ever 21 mpg. I'm going between 58 and 67.

Long story short. The Dart did great, no real issues down and back home. Handled the city streets like a champ. I ended up driving home at night so I did replace one headlight that was burnt out on low beams.

The Tulsa Route 66 Cruise was cool until it wasn't.

Good news, they set a new classic cruise record. Bad news is they left about 1500 classic cars sitting in the heat when they decided to close the route down. Too many cars for a record breaking attempt is a great problem to have. They handled it ... not at all. I sat in a parking lot disguised as a city street waiting to get into the staging area. By the time I got in 4 hours later, they had closed the route and opened it to normal traffic.

None of the event "organizers" are taking accountability. Only Derek Bieri came out with an honest assessment and understanding what we went through. He wasn't even an organizer, just worked to promote it into the huge event it became.

I'm glad they broke the record, just wish I could have really been a part of it. I took 7 days vacation and worked for 2 months to get ready for it only to be let down by the event organizers.

I saw Derek's post on FB yesterday. Sounds like it was a real sh*t show. Glad you got to at least be a part of it, even if you didn't actually get to be in the cruise. You were there and that's all that matters. Even backups get a Super Bowl ring. You can say that you were part of something special.

BrianT said:

I saw Derek's post on FB yesterday. Sounds like it was a real sh*t show. Glad you got to at least be a part of it, even if you didn't actually get to be in the cruise. You were there and that's all that matters. Even backups get a Super Bowl ring. You can say that you were part of something special.

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I'm still mostly happy I went. I feel good about my part in it. I just feel like the organizers abandoned us and have made no statements accepting responsibility for what happened after they secured the record.

The fact that I rushed the body work and paint is on me, but now I wish I had taken more time considering the outcome of the event.

The car looks much better for sure and I'm happy to have it looking like this finally, but I'm going to have to look at all my little mistakes for a while and know I rushed it. But that's on me, my decision.