Spring Has Sprung

The weather has been pretty warm this week and I had some time to work on the car between my honey do assignments.  I finished installing the few remaining pieces of weather strip and the wind lace for the headliner.  I ended up having to remove and reinstall one of the interior quarter trim panels as it wasn’t seated properly and wouldn’t permit the wind lace to be installed.  I’m not crazy about the headliner, but it will be something that I will just have to live with.  I also finished up a couple of easy jobs under the hood by installing the windshield washer and the fan shroud.  The car has never had a fan shroud in all of the time that I’ve owned it.  It hasn’t had an overheating problem, but I’ve been told it is supposed to have one.  So now it has one.  I also replaced the trunk weatherstrip with a new one that is softer and compresses more easily.  It seems to fit much better than the other one I had installed.

At this point the car is pretty much together minus some detailing that it needs.  I decided to reward myself by backing the car out into the driveway and washing it.  I haven’t applied any wax yet but it looks pretty good.  I also took a quick stab at cleaning all of the dust from the body shop out of the engine compartment.  It looks better but it is still very dusty.  I need to dedicate a whole afternoon just to get it cleaned up.  Maybe one day next week I can work on it some more.  I planned to go for a short ride, but before I left I snapped a few pictures.  Here they are.

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After taking the pictures I went for a short 20 minute ride.  There were a few squeaks but they most likely came from the polyurethane bushings I put on the car years ago.  The engine ran smooth and had a fair bit of torque but I think it can do better.  I plan to advance the timing a few degrees and see how it likes it.  My biggest complaint was the rear view mirrors.  Both of the mirrors kept loosening up and losing their adjustment.  For the passenger side I could never get it to adjust so that I could actually see behind me.  Once I got back to my driveway I removed the mirrors and found a screw inside that I tightened up.  That kept the mirrors from coming loose.  I plan to work with that adjustment some more and I think I may actually be able to get the passenger side mirror to be useful.