Thanks Mike. Good advice all around.
The painter didn’t mask anything, including the harness. It’s all cream color . I cant really identify much of it. From my findings, this was painted years ago and sat. It still has some of the masking tape and it’s hardened over. I’m fairly confident this harness is unusable.
Very questionable approach on the body here. If it was me, I would have welded up all the holes and cut the arches. No idea what was going on then but weird for sure. For the actual paint , it’s good. I have minimal experience with the chaminox color so I can’t really tell if they matched it good but it’s all the same color , the paint covered well and shines nice with minimal orange peel. It’s quite glossy and the overall exterior paint job is actually nice. I would have sprayed it better but I guess every painter feels that way . What really is off is the engine bay. That kind of sloppiness would never pass at my shop.
harness is covered in paint and bed liner.
and yeah, bed liner in a engine bay…WTF?
I want to go back to original but it feels like I need to invest a big chunk of $ to achieve that. Some big ticket items need done, like the $1600 harness and $700 air box , $2000 behr ac system, expensive oem wheels, etc. I don’t know how much $ I wanna invest into this ride. The easy part for me is getting the body back to original like dumping the flares and air dam , then welding up the 100 holes which I’m sure would turn out to be a huge hassle. Im sure id burn through a few along the way. lol. I dont mind the bodywork or paint though, that was my job for 30 yrs. lol.
not sure I wanna go through all that time and $ and end up upside down.
Id guess that a decent restored to oem 74 2002tii is valued in the $20k-$30k range. If I went original I’d definitely exceed that range with parts and my labor.
if I go a modded route I can get to the finish line sooner and probably a lot cheaper.
I wouldn’t mess with the body much. I’d plug the knee trim holes with grommets and get the turbo style decal to cover it up
add a short rear bumper , waist trim and badges and call the body done!
To get it running again I can
do an AAW wiring harness on a $500 budget and swap out the timing stuff and intake to go carb or Holley sniper. Not sure I really wanna do that though. I’d love keep the oem kugelfisher setup. So many tough choices to be made. 🏁🏁🏁