The Saga of the Ugly Duckling

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted an update. Not that I haven’t been doing any work to the car, just haven’t had much time to sit down and write.

Since the last update I installed the new fuel lines. Pulling the wire through the front stub frame when I took out the old line worked like a charm to install the new one. The rear one took a little bit of adjusting. Man, steel line is a lot hard than Ni-Copp to work with.

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The underside of the trunk was in great shape so to help keep it that way I sprayed it with Fluid Film.
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The new tank before install.
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I had three helpers when it came time to put the new tank in; ages 3, 5, and 7. I bet it would have been funny to watch. Seriously, they were a great deal of help. The 3 year old held the license plate bracket down out of the way of the filler neck. One of them ran the jack to lift the tank up and the other was holding the light and handing me tools. (Side note: The mount for the fuel gauge wire had metric threads. What is it with people putting metric threads on parts for old American steel, ugh.)

So, she’s been weaned from the bottle and is drinking from the new tank now. I discovered that the check valve in my fuel pump must be bad. When the car sits for a day there isn’t any fuel visible in the inline filter on the front of the engine. I guess I get to learn something new. I’ve never changed a fuel pump before. I'm going to keep an eye on it to see if the problem persist.

I spent part of yesterday flushing the radiator and engine. I must have ran close to 20 gallons of water through it before it was coming out remotely clear. I’m glad that I did.

Three out of five of the wheels that I ordered came in. I need to get them blasted so that I can powder coat them. They are 15x7’s. I’m going to be mounting 255/75R15’s on them at all four corners. I bought Cooper Cobra’s on ebay from discount tire. They look nice. By the time that I used a coupon that I had I go the tires for $90 a piece. I need to pick up one more for the spare.

I’ve got a call into a local shop to see about getting a price for putting dual exhaust on it. Pretty soon winter will set in and I’ll be done till spring.

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its really great to see your kids involved and interested. wow. get them turning wrenches at an early age. so sweet to see that. my 12 year old grandson and i are workin on a 64 dart slanty which will be his. already had him out drivin it on the backroads. keep up the good work.
 
Great build, Are you going to take care of that Surface rust on the rear frame rails? looks to be getting nasty.
 
Well, I finally had a chance to pull it in and fit up the new wheels and tires. Nothing fancy just a set of 15x7 with some Cooper Cobra GT’s in 255/60R15. They fit fine and turn lock to lock up front without any interference. I was pretty confident that they would work since that was what I remembered having on my car 20 years ago. There is lots of room to spare. I guess I don’t understand why the engineers made the wheel wells so big when they weren’t putting that big of a tire on the car. Oh, well it works out for us putting bigger tires on our cars.

The lighting in the garage was horrible yesterday so I had to enhance the pictures a bit to get them to where you could see anything very well.

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I also got the gauges in that I'm going to install in my floor console when I make it this winter.

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Wheels look nice, i am drawn to this car and that is Rare for me being a 4-door hater.
 
It looks nice...


I believe they were putting that much room under there for body roll and suspension movement
 
It is my desire to be at Carlisle with my 2 oldest in tow. They will be 6 and 8.

I've got a brake issue that I need to sort out. I hope to work on it a little today. After all of the brake work I did I don't have any brakes until I've got the pedal almost all the way to the floor. The only things I didn't replace were the master cylinder, lines to the distribution block and the block itself.
 
Once you've got the drums back on and the car on the ground, the brake adjusters do their job when you're in reverse gear. You can back up a couple car lengths, then move forward and repeat the process to see if the pedal comes up. I would also check to see if the brake booster is functioning.
 
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