11/16/02
Fuel Problems, and Welding the Exhaust

I’m probably boring all of you by talking about driving my car, but I still haven’t gotten over the fact that MY CAR IS ON THE ROAD! I haven’t been able to make headway on all the projects, but at least I get a chance to take the car out for a drive every week. The winter sun was low on the horizon, and it lit up the dash in golden light. It’s nice to look at this picture and see all work I’ve done from refinishing the steering wheel to making the shift knob from scratch. She’s come a long way…O.K. enough day-dreaming. Back to work!

I’m still being haunted by fuel leaks! The fuel filter area is bone dry, but now that I’ve fixed one area, I can see there is still a leak back there. It looks like the electric fuel pump is leaking. When I was under the car a few weeks ago, there was so much fuel leaking from the filter housing, it masked the leak from the fuel pump. François rebuilt the fuel pump over a year ago, and thinks that perhaps one of the gaskets went dry, and isn’t sealing. There’s also a brass plug at the base of the pump that may need some thread sealer like teflon tape. Unfortunately this fix will mean the pump has to come out. Wouldn’t you know it, I just filled the tank! Hopefully if the weather is good next week, I’ll go for a drive to drain some gas from the tank.

Sticking with my fuel problems, my fuel sender still isn’t working properly. Everything works fine when I take it out, but it looks like the float is getting hung up on the baffles inside the gas tank. Part of my sender mechanism broke when I got it, so I had it repaired, but it doesn’t exactly follow the original movement. You can imagine how hard it is to test the new movement of the arm when it’s mounted in the gas tank. Unless I have X-ray vision, I can only guess what is hanging up the float. The hole where the sender mounts is about two inches wide and under the package shelf of the rear window, so looking in is not easy. I may try to borrow a “lipstick” camera from work to have a peek inside.

I took the brackets I made for the exhaust up to my friend John’s shop to get welded.

John first welded up the seams in the brackets with his TIG welder.

Using some exhaust hangers to measure and place the brackets, I took a wire wheel to remove the undercoating and paint so “Junkyard” could weld to some clean steel. As John welded, I kept a close watch on errant sparks near the leaking fuel pump!
 

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