Replacing air vent grills just in front of windshield

[baltobernie]

Handle the cowl with care when removing and reinstalling. Don't put excessive upward or rearward force on it, or you may crack the windshield.

[manoa matt]

On early cars the height of the cowl panel can be adjusted by a screw with a rubber cap on it. Later cars had a white vinyl screw. The screws are located at the sides of the cowl panel near the fenders at the rear edge of the cowl panel. Even later cars had a metal brackets that supported the rear edge of the cowl panel just under the windshield at 1/3 points.

Be careful removing the rubber screws that secure the vent panels, they are the hardest part on the car to replace. I don't know of any vendors that carry them and they are usually brittle with age. Spray them with lubricant first and grab them below the metal bracket that retains them when twisting them out. If you grab the loose end you run the risk of twisting them in half right at the bracket.

While the cowl panel is off check the condition of the waterproofing in the "bathtub". If you drive in the rain, water will sit in the tub for some time before draining out or evaporating. Any cracks in the waterproofing will allow water to corrode the base metal and soon you will have water in the interior footwells.

[RRoller123]

Well, my thanks to all the great info shared by the good folks on this site. My cowl renovation/broken grilles repair has gone pretty well. I was able to find the broken grille pieces in the cowl tub and glued them back together. Loctite now makes a 2-part squeeze-tube adhesive specially formulated for plastics (Lowes). (I had initially tried 2-part epoxy, which failed.) The new adhesive worked very well, but it takes 20 minutes to set so you need to have a stable fixture to hold the part. Probably not going to hold it in hand for that long. The uncured adhesive also does NOT tool well. So I did the following, and the cowl goes back on the car tomorrow; undercoated the well, cleaned out the heater box area, restored the wiper mechanisms, painted the grills (silver), painted the cowl heater cover (black), painted the motor cover (black), restored the spray jets, replumbed the spray jets, cleaned up paint overspray from PO work. There are no rubber adjustment screws at the FRONT fender/hood/cowl interface, so I am going to have to shim the cowl to get it to match to the level of the fender and hood. The adjustments at the windshield work fine. Here is a cowl pic. As we say in New England, it looks wickud pissah.

[img][IMG]http://i1205.photobucket.com/albums/bb4 ... 3small.jpg[/img][/img]

[124JOE]

fyi theres one set of img codes front and back too many
you can edit it-----------this is a good one to

[RRoller123]

@124Joe: How did you get this picture? I thought I only listed the reference photobucket code for the cowl photo? I am really confused about adding pictures to the forum site! It would be a lot easier if they could just be copied into the text like pretty much everywhere else allows. Pete.

[124JOE]

when you listed the pic here you clicked our img code
but it came with its own so theres too many codes on your cowel photo
you can go back and edit it so it will show

i went to photo bucket i veiwed you album and copyed this pics img link and paste it here
you almost have it keep trying

[RRoller123]

Well here it is all buttoned up and aligned. My sincere thanks for all the advice from the Forum! I am pleased with the silver grilles, and the fender alignment has been solved too. The grilles have warped/stretched whatever a little over the many years so the alignment to the cowl openings in not perfect, but it is acceptable. I had to really "modify" that silly connector that holds the (2) grille pieces side by side in the middle, it needed at least 3/16" more width than it was providing, so that the outer ends would be conntained under the cowl.

http://i1205.photobucket.com/albums/bb4 ... 4small.jpg

http://i1205.photobucket.com/albums/bb4 ... 3small.jpg