Tuesday, August 16, 2011

To The Garage

We did our final preparations for the trip to the garage in the end of April. We attached the heater box so there wouldn't be a huge hole from the engine bay to the cabin, went through some of the vacuum hoses and checked why the speedometer didn't work. And naturally, as always when going through new systems in the car, we found more things to repair...

The vacuum hoses going to the AC control panel seemed to be in fair condition but the hose going to the actual vacuum source was cut near the firewall. I would have to attach it somewhere. I don't know the actual position where it would have been so I guess any vacuum hose from the intake manifold will do.

The speedometer proved to be more problematic. The speedo cable from the transmission seemed to be OK but things were different inside the transmission itself. The driven gear was in the transmission but the drive gear around the output shaft was missing altogether! After some reading around the net, luckily the driven gear installation didn't seem to be as difficult as I feared. We would have to remove the drive shaft, unbolt the rear section of the transmission and pull the output shaft out. Then we could install the gear. I also found an excellent picture explaining the situation.


After I received the missing parts, we fetched temporary plates for the car again and started driving to the garage. It was nerve wrecking to drive the car for the first time since it had gone through engine repair and nearly the whole electrical system had been changed. My friend drove the Corvette and I followed him in another car the 35km journey to the garage. At one point of our drive he called me and asked if something had fallen off the car. He had heard a loud bang from somewhere but everything still seemed to work. I had not seen anything so we drove on. The sound would be explained to us later...

In the end we got to the garage without other major problems. One of the rear lights wasn't working properly but other systems worked fine.


We got straight to work as we had a long list of repairs:

  • Weld the driver floor
  • Fix holes left in the firewall when the old floor had been screwed through it
  • Change the rear body mount bushings and weld in new mounts
  • Add the speedometer drive gear to the transmission
  • Change the oil
  • Add some washers to the rear leaf spring to rise the rear up

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