A Nice Restoration of a Rustbucket

Wednesday, January 21,2015
Sunny, and very, very, cold!

A Nice Restoration of a Rustbucket

   January is turning out to be very cold up here in Montreal.  The good news is that time is speedily moving along. It's a mere 60 days or 8 weeks and 4 days to March 22(the spring equinox). At that point there's another 60 days until warm weather comes to be able to go outdoors without a jacket. 

Meanwhile, Mr. Joseph Desaulniers is helping me keep busy,and sent me another set if photos of a "rustbucket" - before and after.  The world "rustbucket" refers usually to a car or truck that has badly rusted. In the 1960's-1980's American car manufacturers (and international manufacturers) produced cars that would rust.Back then.people liked to keep their cars a long time. Eventually, people complained enough to get governments to regulate car manufacturers so that they produced longer-lasting car bodies. They did this with better materials, better paint, and somewhat rusting car parts that rusted fast (e.g. the underneath of the car, wheel wells, and so forth.  Of course, also included was the replacement of a large portion of the car with plastic!

   Joseph send me a set of photos of a before and after cast iron car that he restored. Interestingly, for this particular car, he didn't repaint it, but left the un-removed paint stay. It's a mere shadow of itself,but beautifully shows what the original colour pattern was - red and blue.

Before

This car certainly is ugly before it was to be restored. However,it shows worse that it is. The surface is not rusted as bad as it appears,and Joseph was able to remove the rust and re-painted black exterior paint. 

The photo below shows that the car was re-painted 

black over blue at some time during its history.

The photo below is an excellent reference photo. It shows you what the original colours were - blue, and red. The red is shown on the top piece at the bottom. If you were to repaint the car,these would be the colours to use.

 The above and below photos show you how the 2 car parts would be assembled. The wire would be used to hold the top and bottom parts together. I'm not sure that this is the original wire or mechanism that would have held the car together. The reason that I mention this is that some manufacturers made sets of toys that would allow for interchangeable parts.As such, the removal of the parts had a flattened hinge-like spring, that made removal easy.

In the above illustration, the wire appears that it would have to be unwound.

After

Below are the photos of the finished and restored car. I've seen this car model, and it's rarer than the usual ones where the entire top part of the car would be one pice, and the underside (chassis) would be another. In this case, just the cab is the top part.

I.n surprised that the old tires and wooden rims are still intact. I'm sure they're very dry, 

but Joseph took great care not to damage them

I would think that Joseph use a wire brush head on an electric drill to remove the rust.He probably also use steel wool for the finer work,and hard-to-reach places of the toy. As you can plainly see, the actual body of the car is in quite good condition. 

What I haven't seen before is the round circle on the door, where the end of the steel rod was hammered flat to secure the left and right sides of the car together.

What's interesting is that you can easily see that the old expression "don't judge a book by its cover" clearly applies in a "sort-of-way" here. I don't' know how much Joseph paid for the original 

"rustbucket", but he turned it into a fine collectible!

Thanks for dropping by and as always

have a great part of the day or night,

wherever you may be,

Stacey

toysearcher@gmail.com