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I went to the local auto paint shop and they had some special very bright, very transparent red which was the exact same shade as you would use for repainting faded tail-light lenses. But it wasn't for that. It was intended for high-end air-brushing or a sexy paint job on a hot rod etc. Very expensive at $30 for around 4ozs.Uses normal thinners like Dulon etc.

Don't remember the brand name but I can try and find the bottle if you want. It might have come from the US originally.

I tried a few ways of painting it on a piece of thin plastic and the best outcome was painting the chrome-look details with the finger-nail brush (very fine, worked well) then I sprayed the red over the rest of the plastic with one of those small aerosol 'test sprayers'. Called a 'Pre Val Spray Gun' made by the Precision Valve Corporation in Yonkers, USA. Handy, because you don't want to use a full-size gun . . . an air brush would also do the job well.

Then where you want red and the chrome showing behind it you do the reverse, just brushing the silver over the back carefully but not too much so as to lift the red. Spraying it would have been better but I just brushed it and was pleased with the result, because you are not looking 'through' the plastic so don't see imperfections.

Most of the old chrome and red had peeled off the lens so I scraped the remaining loose stuff off best as I could. It turned out nice.

Also Testors (the toy model paint company), makes a variety of metallic paints that should work as well.

I disassembled and cleaned up my spare grille, it has nicer chrome than my original unit with the "Korean War Chrome" crappy finish. Some corrosion and a couple bolts twisted off so I had to drill out the remains and retap the holes. Reassembled with new hardware and the "teeth" from my original grille, have to keep those!

I had to replace the turn signal light sockets as these were rusted out, I found some universal sockets for the 1157 bulbs that I am using (12v), they crimp into the holes but I added some epoxy in the back too. Wire them with my proper coded and colored wires and made sure that the marker uses the single element, while the turn signals use the dual elements in the bulb - learned that from a discussion on Charlie's blog (51/52 Packards).

We bought some vinyl, burlap and foam on sale so I stripped the rear seat and we are plotting out our designs for the seats and door panels. If my wife's sewing machine turns out to be unable to handle the vinyl material, our upholstery guy at work says she can borrow one of his 17 (!) machines.

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Not much progress lately on the Ghost, life got in the way. Now that we've gotten past a few big events and I've gotten my ND and Alberta summer crews into the field I can get a little time to work on the car again.

I had put some hubcaps on last fall, then removed them to detail and of course that process chipped up the paint on the wheels. So I removed them all and touched the paint up today. Took the opportunity to grease all the front end zerks, and now I've pulled the exhaust system off so that I can shorten my front pipe about an inch, which will allow the muffler to move forward a bit and give me some room to fabricate a hanger at the rear of the muffler. Stuff only I will know about but it was bugging me.

My lovely wife is feeling better and has made some progress on the rear seat cover, once she is happy with the details she'll sew it up and then I'll see how it fits on my rebuilt seat padding.

I tried to test fit the rear wheel skirts but the LH fender is too beat up at the rear, so that side doesn't fit. But the skirts themselves are in decent shape, so we'll get them correct when the body work gets done.

There was a car show at a town a few miles west of home this evening, so we thought we'd take the Ghost over to check out the cars and have a burger. As we were pulling into the parking lot a guy comes running out and waves us down, "you want to be in the show?" Well I said we really aren't in show condition, no back seat etc, but he told us why not so we let them park us in the show line. Lots of pretty, shiny cars there but once I popped the hood on the Packard we had a crowd, didn't manage to go see the other cars until the thing was nearly over due to the questions and conversations. Unintentionally fun time.

wow that is awesome!

This afternoon we got ourselves psyched up enough to try to install the rear bottom seat cover that my wife sewed up. We had determined that we definitely needed listing wires to avoid tearing the vinyl, so we bought some cheap muslin and she sewed pockets on for the wires. The old wires in the old seats were rusted nearly away, so I picked up some cheap baling wire at the farm store. It's pretty thin wire, so I doubled it and twisted the wires together with a drill, now it's just right. Once we learned to trust our measurements we positioned the foam and batting the way we wanted and stretched to cover onto the frame. My wife compressed the springs while I stretched and hog-ringed the cover in place. This gave me the opportunity to tell her that she is too skinny because she had to put her foot on the frame and stand on it, so I got some brownie points for that. One down all the rest to go!

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Bravo, it looks really nice.

installed the cover on the rear seat back today and test fit the seat in the car, looks pretty good. The seat was tested on a drive around the block and voted way more comfortable than before, so success I guess!

Wondering about the process? Stripped down the seats and tossed all the mouse-peed etc foam and padding. Copied the remains of the original cover fabric, but in vinyl now. Sandblasted the worst of the rust off the springs and frame, then painted with some left over spray paint. Covered the springs with burlap, including the extra panels that were on the original seat like on the top of the seat back. 2" medium density foam, some judicious trimming to fit, then cover the whole thing with a layer of batting (I used synthetic because that's what they had, but cotton works too). I glued some jute padding along the front bottom kick panels and along the top of the seat back to fill the areas out. Stretched the cover over and hog ringed it in place after installing listing wires, see previous post. Test fit it all in the car, a couple more carefully placed hog rings got rid of those wrinkles. On to the front seats!

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How soon are we putting up the shingle?? I need seat covers too.....
John