Month: January 2008

I got out to the shop for a couple hours tonight. I’m going to try to make it a nightly habit. I’m going to have to if I’m ever going to get this thing done.

My verdict, for now at least, is that my heater channels are good. I’ll have to replace the rocker of course, and probably the middle section, but I could just patch the couple inch section that’s rusted through. Even if it’s ugly, no one will ever see it.

I started cutting plates to bolt onto the hinge and striker mounts so I can weld up my door openings. I’m going to do this to stiffen the body while I take it off the pan. Before I do that though, I’m ordering some hinges and strikers, probably from House of Ghia, so that I can make sure my body is straight. I’m kind of concerned about the left side striker panel. It’s bent up a bit. If that door hangs straight, then I’m good for now, but if it doesn’t, then I have more work to do.

I’ll get more pictures of my progress hopefully tomorrow. It’s mostly just more butchery.

I haven’t had a chance to touch my Ghia is the last week. My 74 Super, which is my daily driver, had been developing a strange noise, and I decided that I’d better find out what it is. I listened it for a while, and eventually settled on it being my alternator. After calling around, I found a rebuilt one for $90, and put it in. Pretty easy once I figured it out. I could do it now in about an hour and a half. So I started it up and “GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”. Shit. Okay, so that’s not what it was… My old alt really was going bad though, so it’s not really money wasted.

The next day, I decided that I needed to take the alternator belt off and see if it still did it. Nope. Okay, the fan is hitting. It didn’t do anything when I spun it by hand, but that’s definitely what the sound was. So I tore it down again so I could get the fan off and stick another shim on it. Well, I figured out that I hadn’t put any shims between it and the alt, they were behind it. So I put it back together right, and everything worked.

Until I got home a realized that the only running light that was working was my left rear. I stuck a new fuse in, and it immediately started to burn. Shit, a short. I’d been mucking around in the back when I was trying to get to the front of the fan, so I figured that I’d pinched something. The next day I spent trying to figure out a wiring harness that I’d bought with no instructions. I figured out where all the wires went, and also that there was no way I was going to get it in my car with it all assembled. So I gave up on that idea, and started looking for the short. Figured out that it was the license plate light, so I just unplugged that, and it’s fine.

In the meantime however, I’d also removed the dash, and I don’t like what I see under there. All kinds of homebrew fixes. I don’t want to deal with it though, so I’m just going to cover it back up so I don’t have to look at it. I did manage to close off that annoying fresh air leak that makes me cold in the winter.