July 8  2000, continued.
The outside looked pretty good, but there was still some work left. First up was new paint for the grille. These SS grilles are pretty hard to find, so I have to take good care of this one. I scrubbed up the chrome trim a little bit to make it shine, but at 25 years old it will only shine so much. Then I masked all of the chrome and painted the grille. I also have a couple of NOS headlight buckets. These are still available in most Nova catalogs. I did have to repaint them black to match the SS grille. I used Krylon semi flat black for all of these parts.  I touched up the SS emblem while I was at it. The car also has new grille mounting brackets to replace the bent originals. The grille mounting brackets for 75 Novas will work on 76 to 78 SS and Rally grilles.

Here the finished front end. It looks pretty good now. I used Mothers back to black on the bumper trim.

The trim along the drip rail was missing. I replaced it with this door edge molding. I found this in Pep Boys. This stuff is pretty handy, the glue is pre applied in the groove, you just have to push it on over the pinch weld and trim it at the ends, and you are done.

This makes a big difference in the cars appearance, though you cannot really tell from these small pictures. Here is a picture showing the trim along the back seat side window.

I received the new SS stickers for the car. I was surprised to see that they were not the same as the NOS stickers that I got with the car. The repros are a little bit bolder, and the letters are connected at the N and at the bottom of the A.
Here are some pictures. The sticker on the left is NOS, the repro is on the right.

I have the repro stickers on both sides of the car, but I kept the one NOS sticker on the back of the car. Here is a shot showing the sticker at the rear of the car. I also added a Chevrolet emblem to the trunk lid. 

Now the exterior is pretty much finished. I am going to post a page of exterior pictures, and then there will probably not be any updates for a while. Later in the summer I hope to have some suspension and steering upgrades to show, and the engine needs attention too. I still have not decided what to do with the engine, but the valve guides seem to be pretty bad on this one.