thebeerbaron

The new engine is mostly back in the Blue Beast.

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I'm taking a couple of vacation days this week to work on the car out in CT. I'm house-sitting for my parents while they're visiting my nieces and nephew out in Aspen. I'll take a couple days of pure garage-time, then work short days from home. I have the luxury of working remotely, I'll do that and then head to the garage at the earliest possible moment (stock markets close at 4pm, so shortly after that!).

Last night, after getting the engine in and attaching stuff, I noticed the clutch pedal acting weird. There was no clutch pressure. The pedal snapped to the floor, then stayed there until I pried it off the carpet. Then it snapped back up to the top. Very odd.

I got to the shop late this morning after realizing I didn't [i]have[/i] to wake up early and rush there. I stopped on the way to get a replacement fuel hose and some clamps for the new coolant hoses. After fooling with the clutch more, I was getting nowhere. My friend Dean the car-restorer stopped by and helped me diagnose. After mucking about for a while, we found the clutch master wasn't pushing much fluid at all. An expensive trip to NAPA later, I had a new master and got to spend hours bench bleeding it, then bleeding the clutch system. The best bench bleeding technique was to do a gravity bleed. On the car, the best technique was to use a check-valve and drop the end of the hose back in the reservoir tank. It still took a bunch of pumping, but eventually I got good pedal pressure. Whew! Yet hours of time wasted.

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I managed to clean up the end of the exhaust pipe where it hits the remaining exhaust stuff. I really hate plain-steel exhaust systems. Look at that corrosion! Ick. More hours wasted.

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In the end, I think the tally for the day was - got the hood scoop mounted, new master cylinder and clutch system bleed, new heater hoses installed, one new fuel line, belts installed, exhaust cleaned up, oxygen sensor installed, engine mount nuts installed, and that's it. Lots of little, time-consuming jobs. Argh!

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