GPW Grill Wiring, Welting and Felting

I recently completed the fitment of all the components that mount to the grill. This included mounting the headlights, blackout marker lights, and wiring as well as installing the grill welting and air deflector felts.

The welting was purchased from Ron and is made by MV Spares. Once again, MV spares makes a great product, but then hampers the restorer by providing crappy fasteners. In this case the rivets are just too short. The MV Spares rivets are so short, in fact, as to make them unusable. I had to re-use my original rivets, despite their brittleness. An advantage, I guess, is that I get the proper parkerized look rather than the bright, shiny and incorrect look of the MV Spares product.

In some cases, because the new welting is thick, even the longer original rivets were tough to install. I used a pair of thin vice-grips with a wedge between the rivet forks to tighten and clamp down the rivets. It worked well.

While installing the welting I added the grill-to-hood bond straps from Paolo’s kit.

I also completed the installation of the air deflector felts. In a perfect world, these would be made of horse hair, but I used the MV Spares felt product. In this case, the supplied staples actually fit. I used a pair of needle-nose vice grips to squeeze the staple closed and all went smoothly.

Here are pics of the final fitment of all of the grill components, first along the top and then along the bottom. All of the wiring clips and hardware are original GPW.