Cementing bonds after fixed contact

So I've been doing something I have no business doing.  That something is being in the same room as this.

And also this.

Case in point: I didn't think to use gloves, so my hands look like I've contracted some exotic disease, fit to be showcased by the media as this season's hot new pandemic.  I'm probably better off, though -- the only thing more horrible than bare hands and glue is gloves and glue.

You may be wondering why in the hell I'd be using contact cements for anything related to my exhaust; I'd wonder that, too.  Fact is, I'm not working on the exhaust right now.  I'm not even talking about the exhaust right now.  I'll talk about the exhaust when I'm ready to talk about the exhaust.  Until then, it doesn't exist.


I said I don't want to talk about it.

No, the contact cement and it's propellant aspect are being used to finish something I started working on looooooong before I even started thinking of starting this page.  Probably close to two years ago.  That is this:

This is a pile of garbage.  Well, let me take that back -- it was a pile of garbage, but I stripped it down and painted it after removing the rust and rodent remnants that it contained.  Prior to that, it was a heater box. So while it's no longer garbage, it still has the same utility as if it were.

The rebuild kit I bought for this was of respectable quality, and I can only assume it's improved from when I bought it.  The weak point, however, is in the documentation.  Despite that, there is an incredibly useful step that I had ignored in my haste to make a mess (or "fix" the heater box, as I said at the time): take a buttload of pictures before and during teardown.

Even if I had done that, it was two phones ago and an age before I decided to put my neurotic clumsiness out there for the world to have the option of seeing, so any pictures I'd have taken wouldn't be any use to me anyway.  I have the service manual, of course, though I haven't found the chapter on "How to fix being a dumbass and tearing your heater box apart before putting it in a tub for over a year".  Yet.

What I have found is that AMC thought the Pacer and Matador sections of the chapter on heaters needed to have fully-detailed, exploded diagrams of their respective heater box assemblies, while the section covering the Hornet-chassis models could make due with a mostly-black picture of one side of the assembly for those applications.  I'm hoping that the parts catalog I have at the house will be a little more help.

Regardless, I'm doing what I can with what I have available, and right now that means smearing and spraying glue all over my person and getting what I can on the sealing foam and metal surfaces.  I also get to reassemble the box, which introduced me to peel rivets.  They're pretty neat.  It's like a jack nut crossed with a pop rivet, but none of the dickery.

But don't let my complaining fool you, because I still managed to get the better part of this stuff reassembled. 

If you're wondering what's going on with the worse part of it, since the better is assembled, well. . .  I'll let you know.  When I *ahem*. . .  Well, when I find it.