A month’s worth of work

I haven’t posted any updates in a while, but I have been getting some work accomplished.

I soldered the heater core and it seems to be holding pressure, so hopefully that won’t leak on me.  Once that was done, I put the heater box back together, sans the AC evaporator, and installed it in Dirty.  The crashbar went in, as did the pedals, dash, shifter, and console.  I also re-did the Megasquirt mounting, deciding to install it where the glove box would ordinarily be, with the ignition module tucked behind the dash.  All the wiring should be hooked up properly now, with the original combo switches behind the steering wheel.  I’m not sure what happened to the wiring harness in Dirty (I know I did it, but I can’t figure out why or where I would have put the connectors), so I snipped the connectors off the dash harness on Stinky and soldered them onto Dirty’s harness.  The only non-functional component at this point should be the horn, and that will be easy enough to fix.

I was also able to sell off a couple bits from Stinky, but in the process I discovered that both fenders are pretty well useless due to rust.

The transmission has been removed from Stinky and needs to be cleaned up.  I’m going to replace the axle seals, drain and replace the transmission oil, and clean up the housing as best as I can before I start taking out the autotragic from Dirty.  There is a fair amount of oil on the clutch from a leaking rear main seal, so I’m going to pull the clutch, clean it, and then examine it before I decide if I’m going to re-use it or replace it.  Once that decision is made, I’ll go ahead and jack up Dirty, pull the axles, drop the transmission, replace the rear main seal (since I’m there anyway), and then install the clutch and transmission.

While the transmission is out, I’m going to replace the blow off valve with the Forge one that I bought off neons.org.  With the new transmission in place, I’m going to replace the injectors with some that I got in the same deal, and then I’ll need to hook up the heater hoses, pressure-test the intake pipes, get a new battery, and it will be ready for its first test drive.  If that’s at least moderately successful, I’ll get the mirrors on, double-check the lights, fix the horn, and see about getting it tagged.