1962 Bel Air

This is an honest to goodness ’62 409. Cool, huh?

We did many restoration details to this classic. The vehicle had gone through a complete frame-off restoration, but the work wasn’t quite complete, and there were a number of things that needed to be corrected. Not every antique that gets a complete restoration gets done exactly right, but we’re happy to help finish them correctly.

Our customer bought this car pretty well complete, and brought it to us for the last details. We began with our normal cost assessment process. We are very careful to give every customer a careful look, and a firm estimate when the job begins. If there are any chances for the budget to be overrun, we note it right at the start. We don’t like surprises!

We fixed some dings in the body, and some substandard body work, and repaired the paint. We replated the front and rear bumpers, polished the trim, repaired the door lock cylinders, replaced some really poor trim, replaced the windshield and rear glass weatherstripping, replaced door hinges, and sill plates.

We also took care of minor mechanical restoration work for the customer, too. The original carburetor was really cool, but had more problems than was worth fixing, so we updated to an Edelbrock carburetor, and we updated to an electronic distributor. We repaired the very funky turn signal switch since a replacement wasn’t available, and took care of the normal electrical bits and repairs.

Then the brakes! Besides not being completely restored, the car had been sitting for a while, so the brakes left much to be desired. We replaced all wheel cylinders, but were able to keep the original master cylinder. And we replaced brake shoes, and rear wheel seals and bearings…they were really loud.

We also had to re-do the exhaust. It had some good quality stainless parts, but it hadn’t really been installed right, so we corrected the deficiencies here. We cut and reformed some joints, swedged joints correctly, re-bent some tubing, and installed proper hangers.

Then we restored the speedometer head! What a hassle. But it sure worked well when we were done. And we finished off this grand job with adjusting the shift linkage and installing a really cool Moon tach.