January 7th, 2000 Back to work.

Now that the holidays are over, I can get back to work on the car! Getting back up to speed was harder than I thought. I haven’t had a chance to get to the stores to buy supplies, nor have I ordered parts from the mail-order houses because of the Christmas rush, but now I find myself short on supplies. I need wrinkle paint for the fuse cover and hood latch that are freshly stripped, not to mention the usual assortment of nuts and screws that are missing to attach various parts like the pedal cluster and door switches. I did manage, however, to attach all the lights on one side of the car. This includes the headlight, foglight, front turnsignal, and side marker light. I made up ground wires for each light to insure good grounds. None of this extra wiring will be seen when the splash shield is installed, so only you and I will know! The right side is almost done as well, except for a couple of M4 nuts I’ll need to get.

I installed the wiper motor, but not without a very important tip from Francois. The motor is a Lucas motor, and has a long flexible spiral wrapped cable coming out of it. 

This cable feeds into a  tube that goes to each of the wiper arm shafts. Each wiper shaft mates to this cable much like a worm gear, so when the motor is running, the cable pushes, and pulls a few inches (or is that centimeters?) each way thus turning the wiper shafts in both directions. Feeding this cable back into the tube takes a little bit grease, patience, and knowledge of how this mechanism works. When the cable gets to the first wiper shaft, you need to turn the wiper shaft while pushing on the cable. Eventually the whole cable will be fed into the tube, and both wiper shafts will be turning in unisyn.

I wanted to try fabricating a better floor pan for the left side of the car where the accelerator pedal mounts. Francois had dropped off some sheets of aluminum, so I decided to give it a shot myself. Instead of cutting the sheets of metal with shears like Kenny did a couple of weeks ago, I decided I would have an easier time cutting aluminum with a jig-saw. After I shaped the aluminum, I tried fitting the floor section in. 

The aluminum bent much easier than the galvanized sheetmetal, but my metal working skills leave much to be desired. What probably would have taken less than an hour to make, took me an afternoon of struggling. I haven’t decided which floor section I’m going to use, the aluminum, or the galvanized steel. I discovered that I can actually attach the steel floor to original floor with good alignment. The aluminum floor section doesn’t fit as well, and worries me about it’s durability over time. I recently read an article on panel adhesives, and how they’re stronger than welds, and they do a great job at securing dissimilar metals. I feel that if this is true, the galvanized sheetmetal will be much stronger and more resisitant to distorting than the aluminum once it’s well attached to the existing floor with adhesive and pop rivits. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

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