*Above: Interior View After My Wife and I Finished Cleaning
The previous owner of the car was kind enough to supply a tow truck to deliver the car over to my (Nik) house here in Winnipeg. We put it in my garage so that I could do some of the initial work before getting into the big stuff.
My wife and I worked on cleaning. The car had not been licensed since 1983 so it had been sitting for a long time. The interior and exterior were very dirty. Once we got through the dirt, we could better see the car's potential. It took hours of elbow grease. The leather on the seats was very dry and on the verge of cracking. I wanted to make sure that I softened it up before anyone really sat on the seats. I used a bottle of Red Wing boot oil that came with some boots I bought from them. It worked great. The dashboard shines like new and I think I saved the leather from really cracking.
The next thing I did was put a lot of the chrome back on the car. The previous owner had begun to remove most of the chrome with plans to have it rechromed. I wanted to do this so that I could inventory the boxes of chrome that came with the car. An Imperial has gobs of chrome, so this process took hours. I am happy to report that the chrome was all there except for three hubcaps.
