1. I pulled out the lamps and they were in bad bad shape. After sandblasting they looked like swiss cheese. Also 2 of the bolts had to be clipped out with bolt cutters because they were rusted so severely.






2. After sandblasting I got after them with a torch and some hard solder. I filled all the pin holes and rebuilt the parts which had corroded away with solder. I reblasted them and that's what you see here.







3. The pitting was really bad which left the surface very rough, so I decided to use a hammer tone paint which sort of bended the look of the paint with the surface below.






4. Next I laid out some scrap rubber and cut some body seals to go behind thelamp housings. Pretty straight forward, but a variety of punch sizes will help keep the holes tidy. In retrospect I sould have used a thicker more spongy rubber to make the body seals from.





5. These are the bezels, lenses, and lens gaskets I ordered from shoeboxford.com a website that specializes in 49-51 Ford passenger cars. They a a forum full of great information and they sell just about anything you could want. These bezels are pretty tough to find as no one is reproducing them at the moment. The lenses are the old glass style.




6. Here is a rear shot of the whole assembly. I used a universal dual contact light socket for these I picked up at Napa. It was cheap and easy enought to modify for my purpose and it fit nice and tightly. I fuinished it of with some bullet connectors, techflex, and some heat shrink. Overall I'd say I'm very pleased with these.






7. Once again nothing is easy. I hadn't looked that closely at the grille on this side of my car, but apparently she has been hit hard on this front corner. If you look closely you can see the grille is beat up pretty good by some former owner. I persuaded it back into shape as well as I could and eventually got it all to line up. I thought the other side with no apparent damage would be the easy one, but I actually had to totally disassemble the grille to get that one on. This is where the aforementioned thicker body seals would have come in handy.  

So what is a guyto do? Well this guy started looking around for an inexpensive way to get a fresh new harness in his car. I scoured the internet and came up with this 12 circuit harness from Speedway motors. I mounted the fuse box up under the dash behind the e-brake handle out of the way. You can see some of the old harness here next to the new one. 

 After securing it I had a big mess of wires to sort out. Some going forward to the engne compartment, some back toward the tail lights and some for the dash controls and gauges.

One of my biggest pet peeves wih any older vehicle is botched wiring. It's not just awful to look at and often times fails, it's downright dangerous.

I wanted to go back with fabric wiring harness, but I couldn't spend the dough for one. So back to the internet and I found a product called techflex which offers that fabric look but can be cut to fit.

The techflex can be tricky as it must be cut using a hot knife, or you could use my method and heat some scissors with a torch. It is time consuming, and I think there are probably easier ways of doing things. But this is the look that I wanted so I didn't mind spending a little extra time for a tidy job. Below is an example of how I sorted the harness. This is my horn powerI ran it in line with my headlights. I solder all terminals on before heat shrinking them. Again this takes longer than merely crimping but it offers peace of mind.