I broke a good vent window support in a '60 Imperial yesterday trying to
deal with the cage nuts that hold it on. Fortunately the post was pitted
and probably no good, but I hate like hell breaking stuff. There's only so
many of these things to go around.
The front post feeds into the door and is held on with two bolts, which
unbolt from the back through a hole in the inner door. The access to the
front of this panel is limited, awkward and hard to even see in what I am
doing, so of course the cage is in there. I got the driver's side off by
chiseling through the bottom opening and taking the nut off with the vent.
The top luckily came off for me on this side.
But the other side, both nuts turned enough to get loose then the caged nut
started turning in the cage. The cages are rusted out and weak, so you
start pushing on the sides and they just collapse. There any simple way to
deal with these things short of burning a big hole in the door somewhere to
get at them? I'm wondering what I could do if it was a car I wanted to
save the door on. There's no easy way to get a hacksaw on it, about all I
can see is maybe a small grinder or cutoff wheel could take the head off the
bolt and then you could get the thing out intact.
The guy wanted a pair, also, so if I go pull one in the junkyard I don't
want to be lugging a torch back there 1/2 a mile through the woods. Bad
enough I need a chainsaw to even get to the one Imperial up there.
The guy who invented these things should be forced to try to take apart
every one on old rusty POS cars like this. Of course it was probably some
engineer who figured either we'd never need to remove them, forgot that cars
rust, had someone in the cost department decide to skip the rust protection,
or some other excuse.
Thanks
Bill K.
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