Seafoam65

Craig........report back how closely the Clark's Green upholstery matches the original in terms of thickness of the material and the color match. I keep expecting my Driver's seat to split open somewhere although it's in great shape at present.

That hole would drive me crazy......I'd be staring at it every time I walked by the car!

What about the hideous looking gaping hole in the fender? It's crazy to leave them off unless you are going to weld up the fender holes and repaint the fenders.

Listen to your wife!

If he buys a rust free parts car to get the sheetmetal he needs, he would be buying a restorable car to cut up and destroy to repair the rusty parts car he has now. Does that make any sense?

Use your old foam! If there is a bad area it can be padded with upholstery padding to fill it out. New foam does not compress like the original foams did, making the seat uncomfortable and causing your head to be in the headliner unless you are a midget.

Hugo, if you are a married man, please refer to my post on the thread regarding the true cost of restoration on this same page in the forum!

Perhaps I need to see an optometrist for a correction on my contact lens prescription, but my eyes tell me that the 65 Riviera is 50 times better looking than any 60's T-Bird! No contest end of story.... kind of like the difference between a Volkswagen beetle and a Ferrari GTO. Or Marilyn Monroe vs. Ethel Mertz......no contest.

They forgot the divorce lawyer's fees and the loss of half of your assets........these costs are a very common result of doing a frame off restoration if your wife is not on board with the project. We have seen this happen on this forum during the middle of a total restoration. The divorce lawyer typically gets involved about the time that the car is completely dismantled, the wife's car has to sit out in the driveway getting snowed on, and the engine and chassis are completed. We've had a couple of Riviera frame -offs end up in divorce court since I've been reading this forum........Usually the resto is going like gangbusters with the completed chassis on one side of the double garage, the untouched totally dismantled rusty body on the other side of the garage, the wife's car outside in the snow, and then Christmas holidays and the first week of January she drops the bombshell. Any of you guys who did a complete frame-off on your Riviera and the wife is still your wife.......you owe her a trip to Hawaii, a nicer house and a new wardrobe and fresh flowers once a week........that's just for starters.

Ed,I bought some extra material for my green interior from SMS 9 years ago, but at that time the only correct green they had was very thin gauge vinyl like what was used on the door panels and arm rests.....not the correct heavy stuff for the sitting areas of the seats. The thickness of the vinyl was very thick on the custom interior seats. The last time I looked, Clark's had the green material but they claimed it was not an exact match, but fairly close.....I haven't seen a sample of it. If my car needed upholstery for the seats, which it does not at present, i would have leather dyed to an exact match and do all the seats in green leather. There are companies that can dye leather to any desired color. There is a lady who has been advertising a green front passenger seat out of a 65 Riviera in the Riview magazine for about a year.....not sure if it ever sold or if it is currently for sale but it would be worth looking into to fix this man's problem. Being on the passenger side, the seat back upholstery should still be in good shape.

Back in 1966 my next door neighbor was a Ford Dealership mechanic. He worked on all the T-birds that came in because none of the other guys at the dealership could stand the frustration of trying to work on them. My neighbor was a heavy drinker and he joked that working on T-birds drove him to the bottle!

Ted, if you really want a wood wheel you are going to have to step up to the plate with more money than that for a complete setup.........that was a screaming deal at 1250.00. If you had gone 1600.00 you probably could have snagged it. The unbroken original horn bar on the wheel in question was worth 700.00 just by itself. You are talking about unobtanium parts where the demand outstrips the supply.

get a storage unit!

The proper color for painting the grill is called Argent Sllver........same color was used on all GM car grills throughout the 60's, also same color used to paint ralley wheels on Chevrolets and Pontiacs. Eastwood has the Argent silver paint that is correct for your grill. I touched up the original paint on my grill with the Eastwood Argent Silver and it is a perfect match and the touch up is undetectable.

When i was 12 years old I talked my Dad into special ordering a 65 Riviera instead of the 65 Lesabre he intended to order. Ours was white with saddle interior and was built the first week of production for the 65 models. I washed the car and kept it waxed for the next five years before going off to college, and I learned to drive in it in 1967, so I've been into 65 Rivieras for 57 years now and counting. My opinion has never changed.......no other car ever made by anyone can compare with a 65 Riviera! I still keep in touch with my friends from junior high, and they still talk about my Dad's Riviera. Not long ago one of them referred to it as a four seat Corvette and pointed out that it was the envy of our neighborhood.

If your alternator was an O'reilly's unit, it would not be surprising for it to be defective out of the box. I had to quit selling their alternators and starters about 7 years ago because it got to the point that all of them were bad right out of the box. I switched over to Advance Auto Parts alternators and starters and I only get about 1 out of 50 that gives me any problems. The other parts that are no good at O'reilly's, whom I use for most things are their rack and pinions (100 per cent of them leak after one year), their drive axles(100 per cent of them have torn boots in a year's time)their brake master cylinders(high defective rate) and their brake pads(all of their ceramic pads squeal, and all you can buy is ceramic on late model applications. I use Advance Auto Parts on drive axles and rack and pinions with no comebacks whatsoever. I use Centric brake pads with no issues at all from a local supplier.

My guess at this point is that your recently installed alternator is defective.......very unusual problem for them to overcharge but I have seen the 60's Delcotrons do this on a couple of occasions......

Ted, I see the auction ended with a winning bid of 1250.00.........a good deal in my opinion......was that you who was the winning bidder?

You need to try a mechanical regulator.

I agree......broken cable

I have seen this a few times....what happens is that the connection at the battery post inside the battery is corroded and losing contact. A battery that does this is dangerous because you can get an internal spark at the bad post connection that can lead to an explosion.

Ted, there's a complete one for sale on ebay right now....auction ends in 5 days....currently bid up to 200.00. I would opine that it is the nicest used wood wheel setup I've ever seen on ebay. The ad claims it is off of a 65 Skylark GS. I'm not certain but I think the wheel hub is the same for the Skylark column.....I know the rest of the wheel is the same. If the hub is wrong on this wheel, I have a nice hub I can sell you. The most amazing thing about it is that it has a nice unbroken original horn bar on it. It is so nice that I would say if you can buy it for 1300.00 or less you got a good deal. If you have to get in a bidding war with somebody else who wants one badly, the price will go higher than that. The wood wheel setup I bought for my car wound up costing me 2000.00 after I had the wheel rim wood grain redone and had the center cap rechromed and bought a repro horn bar.

I use the 24F battery which allows me to use a tar top battery topper which looks like the original battery top on a 65. You can't buy a tar top battery topper to fit a 27 series battery. Regarding the voltage regulator, I have found the old style mechanical regulators to be way more reliable than the electronic ones. I've seen tons of the electronic ones be bad right out of the box. When they are bad they always overcharge.

Ed I believe normal practice back then was to build cars till the end of July, then work on the new model changeover during August and resume production on the next model year September 1, so I would guess it was built the next to the last week of production. It is my recollection that the salesman told me and my Dad this when he special ordered our 65 in the middle of July 1964. He told us no 65's would be built in August and our car couldn't be built before the first week in September. our car wound up being the 166th 65 Riviera built and it was built the first week in September.

In looking at the picture more closely I can see that the part is horribly pitted.........worth negative zero dollars........very expensive to restore that grill!