1931 Auburn – Getting ready for Atlanta Concours
For the past month we have been hard at work getting the 1931 Auburn ready for the Atlanta Concours. We started by cleaned and stripping any old loose paint on the chassis and laying down a fresh coat of black. Next we cleaned, stripped and sanded the engine and repainted it with a fresh coat of green paint. There were several areas around the fender trip that was beat up from road rash so we had a color match done and we cleaned up and re-shot the red trim on the rear fenders. We also had several areas where the blue needed to be re-shot so we took car of that while we ere this far into it.
The harder part was replacing the running board rubber. The running boards had a smaller section of them done in rubber and the rest in paint. The correct set up is a complete molded rubber that can only be found from one supplier (and yes they were proud of it). Having never done this before it was scary working with some rubber that cost over $1000 and it being permanently glues down to the metal.
The process was to glue down the flat part first, let it set up in clamps for 24 hours then come back and glue and clamp the rounded part the next day. With the first one I did I had an issue where the clamps were creasing the bottom rubber on the curved section so I had to do a little dress up after the glue set.
On the second side I bought a wood dowel about the diameter of a sharpie and that pushed the clamps away form the rubber edge enough for them not to interfere with the rubber. Overall they turned out nice for my first attempt.
I did not have the lower stainless steel edging so I had some made and it just arrived. The next part will be figuring out how and where to drill in it to mount it properly.
We also had a mobile interior repair guy come over to fix the minor nicks in the interior and one section on the carpet. Boy did that turn out great!
We are finally very close to being finished, we load the car on the trailer tomorrow and hit the road to Atlanta on Friday.
