Monday, April 20, 2026

Well, I’m getting closer to the finish line on my driver’s door rehab project, but its not been nearly as easy as I expected.

For starters, getting the wing vent assembly back in the door requires you to do a dance of sorts between the window glass and the wing vent. Its a damn tight fit regardless.

With the door glass in, I could get the wing vent in, but how to get the wing vent regulator in was a different story entirely. I could barely hold the regulator up high enough to get it in place to install; and when I did, I couldn’t get the wing vent stem to insert in the regulator while holding it and trying to jockey around the wing vent.

I worked on it Sunday but no damn luck. And I went out to the garage today, still nothing but frustration. Time to call in reinforcements!

I called my wife to come outside. Long story short, her arms are longer than mine. She held the regulator and I handled the wing vent, raising it up high enough so she could let the wing vent stem catch the regulator. After that, it was just a matter of persuading the stem to mate with the regulator. It took a little time, but once we got the first mounting screw started, we were home free.

But it wasn’t easy.

Now while I had pulled the wing vent assembly out of the door, I decided — for the hell of it — to check the fit of the new wing vent chrome frame and the regulator. After all, this is a reproduction part, it SHOULD fit as well as the original, correct?

Apparently, not all repro parts exactly match the specs of the originals!

The reproduction wing vent frame would not even fit in the regulator slot it was designed to fit. Not no way, not no how. Well, there’s your problem!

Well, not exactly the problem at hand, but had I successfully aligned the regulator and the wing vent stem, there was no way in hell they were going to mate. So I got out my 5-1/4 grinder and set about thinning the stem that inserts into the regulator. I ground the shit out of it — so much so that it was a very easy fit. If I could get the frame stem and the regulator aligned, the would mate, easy peasy. Of course, the devil is always in the details.

With the thinner wing vent stem, working alone, I still couldn’t hold the regulator and also jockey the wing vent. After beating my head against the wall for another hour, it was time to ask my wife for help. After showing her the problem, she kept an eye on the regulator and where the wing vent stem was located, and which way the wing vent needed to shift in order for the two parts to align. With the two of us on the job, it didn’t really take long to get the regulator installed.

WHAT’S LEFT YOU ASK? Well the wing vent is in the regulator and the regulator is mounted. I still need to install the mounting screws for the wing vent (two top, two bottom), and I need to install the attaching screws that secure the regulator to the bottom of the wing vent. Once those are fastened, I can install the lower adjustment screw on the bottom of the vertical wing vent track. I’ll probably need to adjust the window track on the inside lower part of the door shell.

But I’m on the home stretch, and will have my window done before the first Sunday cruise-in event for the Whiskey City Cruisers.

I’m not very happy with our informal car group, or at least some of the group. I’ve tried to suggest ways to improve our events and nothing seems to pass muster. The most recent “deal” was when I asked my daughter to revise an amateurish flyer prepped for a car cruise next month at a well-known minit mart. My daughter did a beautiful job on the revised flyer. Well, we included the well-known logo for the grocery, our local guy said the store didn’t own the logo, another guy did. And he wouldn’t let us use it, for certain. I went to talk with him and he had no problem with our use of the logo. Huh? He was described as an ogre who hated our car group.

I went to talk with him and found him pleasant and he had absolutely NO problem with our use of the logo. I told our group’s promoter we were cleared to use my daughter’s flyer and had the logo owner’s blessing. His response?

“We’ll remember that if we do this event next year.”

Huh? WTF???

There’s no comparison to the original flyer vs. the one my daughter created. The original one you had a hard time figuring out what they were advertising. I guess I wrongly assumed that if the logo owner cleared our use of the store logo, we would use my daughter’s version to promote the event.

Now I understand this put the decision maker in an awkward spot. A group member hand-drew the artwork on the original, though it was pencil sketch and did not reproduce well. If he had selected my daughter’s flyer, it would have put him in an awkward position I guess. But isn’t the goal to promote the event with greater effectiveness? And isn’t an attractive flyer going to grab more eyes than something that looks like it was drawn by a middle-schooler? I don’t mean to be mean to the guy, but I think he has a very high opinion of his own “art.”

For a t-shirt for the group this year, he slightly modified the Mr. Horsepower woodpecker logo and used it for our group’s t-shirts. There’s no question he ripped off Mr. Horsepower logo, but even that wasn’t as slickly done as you might expect. I paid $20 for a black tee with the logo, but I don’t plan to wear it.

In fact, there’s evidence in an image search for “Mr. Horsepower” that the artist ripped off his design directly from another source, basically line for line. Anyway I’m going to have tees of my own created from my daughter’s logo.

So there. LOL

DRIVERS DOOR UPDATE! I have the wing vent mounted and basically done! All that’s left is to trim the fuzzy track that runs across the top of the window opening and its done! I’ll do that tomorrow. I have a meeting to attend tonight at 6 p.m.

Many thanks to my wife, too. Without her help I would still be cussin’ the thing!