With the hood done, we were looking for another project. So Glade, Boone, Rachael, Michelle and I decided to install the freshly painted, new to the car grille and headlight surrounds. It seemed like a fairly straightforward thing to do but we quickly came to realize it was anything but. The Gremlin front clip is all metal, but the inner fenders and radiator support are long gone, and the flimsy fabricated metal tree designed to hold everything in place had been on the car for fifteen years, three Drag Weeks and a wreck! In short, everything moved around, and we were trying to bolt up these nice forty year old plastic pieces which didn't remotely fit, with a bunch of irregular and mismatched screws thrown in a box. Michelle and Boone put about two hours into it, Rachael was on it for three, while Glade and I wrestled the sheet metal around for four! We had the headlight brackets out twice, slotted some of the mounting holes, swapped them side to side, and finally had to do some metal messaging to get everything in place, all very nerve wracking on fresh stuff!

The end product was significantly stiffer and easier to slide on the car afterwards, and that worried me that the plastic would get broken up at the mounting points by the end of the week, but so far,so good. It was around midnight when we finished it up, so Rachael, Boone and I decided to call it a night. It was pretty clear Dale was going to still be out there when we arrived Saturday morning, and we didn't want any of that!