My 240z (Zoey) Restoration : Front Blinkers

Restoring a car to some people might just be putting all the pieces back together and everything works (and this is just fine). I like to go through all the parts; first to see exactly how they tick, and second to make sure they are in the best condition they can be before they go back on to the car. This means cleaning and making it look pretty!

With the front blinker, I got them in the condition i would expect them to be in. Yes, they worked but they looked like they had some miles behind them.

Besides having a nice even coat of dust around them, when I opened them up I suddenly found more work than I was expecting.

On one of the covers, a machine screw sheared, there was a preexisting chip (thankfully the chipped piece was inside the lens) and the bolts that are used to mount the blinkers striped out.

So what was originally going to be, open up, wash, reassemble, became slightly more complex. I started by removing the rubber and the light, so that the plastic housing was left. I washed that with some Simple Green (degreaser). Three of the four tabs that were welded to the bolts for mounting stripped off, so i had to remake then with some scrap steel and bolts:

Then I moved on to the lenses, one of them was fine, the other had a chip in the side and a seized screw in the hole, which after trying to remove the screw cracked the plastic some more. Thankfully these to imperfections are relatively easy to fix. Oddly enough the best glue to use for something like this is Super Glue, because what the super glue will do is melt a thin lay of plastic and with the pieces are pressed together they become one piece again and if done correctly, it can look like nothing even happened. Once the glue was dry, I cleaned the lenses with some Simple green, then buffed out the lenses using one of my favorite products Wizards Shine Master. I will be doing a right up on this stuff because it is truly amazing, and brings out a magnificent shine.