Daily Log for: April 08,
2002
It's been a while since the last update, and we've made a fair amount of
progress, although not as much as anticipated. I had to take a business
trip to Las Vegas for a few days last month and that really seemed to stop
any momentum we had. But we're back on it now.
Among the major accomplishments was getting the motor back together and
running properly after having the valve guides reamed to the proper size.
We also solved a couple of the oil leaks...the pan gasket and the front
cover gasket were both leaking. It's a good thing we took the front
cover off, because we had forgotten to bend the tab up on the nut on the gear
on the end of the camshaft.
We had a big struggle to get the brakes bled. We tried and tried
to bleed them, but it seemed like the master cylinder just wanted to pump
the fluid out, then suck it back in. We tried pressurizing the system
by drilling a small hole in the top of an extra cap for the master cylinder
and using an air gun at low pressure to put air in the reservoir. This
worked great to get fluid into the system, but we still couldn't bleed the
brakes. So we finally tore the master cylinder out (after pumping all
the fluid out using the pressurizing technique). Everything appeared
to be assembled correctly, but it still wouldn't work properly even on the
bench. So, we took apart a new cylinder I bought from Moss (I didn't
want to install it because the reservoir is a round plastic unit, as opposed
to the square metal one that's original) and compared. It looked identical
until we took the seals off the piston. The ones we were sent for rebuilding
my cylinder we significantly larger. So we installed the smaller ones
from the new unit, re-installed the master cylinder, and tried again. Success!
We still need to bleed them some more because the first push on the
pedal is a little soft, but the next pump is rock solid!
We also got the tires mounted this weekend. A friend of mine has
a tire machine so I ran them over to him and he had them installed in less
than an hour. He also dismounted one of the old tires for me so I could
clean up the wire wheel and paint it for use as a spare.
We're hoping to set the car on the ground and drive it up and down the
street this coming weekend, just to see if everything works correctly.
Here's a couple of bad pictures of the front of the car after installing
the grill and bumper.
I put the right side tires on so I could take a few pictures of it with
the chrome wire wheels and Michelin X-One tires...pretty sharp!
