Status

Saturday (5/19) was a fairly busy day that saw me putting the engine compartment back together. I installed the new battery tray which proved to be time consuming with the body mount nuts giving me fits trying to slide them into place.

I installed the new engine gauge feed wire harness and noted a few fitment problems: the temp gauge sending unit threads are too small causing the slip-on fitting to slide right off and the oil sending unit wire needed some adjustment to make it fit. I will be cutting off the nice slip-on plug from the coil wire to fit it to the MSD Blaster 2 coil fitting. I am waiting for the stock coil mounting bracket and hardware to arrive from Mustangs Unlimited so that I can finish that part of the reassembly.

All of the pulleys, the brackets, and the cooling fan are painted and ready for re-install. I have all new hardware to re-mount everything (thank you, Tacoma Screw Products). The new water pump hardware kit also helped to not only dress things up under the hood, it also give me peace of mind about the how secure the new hardware is (my old bolts were pitted and rusty and were more than a few decades old).

I have on order a new voltage regulator (just because the old one is, well, old) and while I could just re-mount it, I would rather hold off until I get the new one. While inspecting the headlight feed wire harness, I noted a spot that had suffered heat damage from the close proximity to the headers. The previous owner had not re-attached the harness to the inner fender/shock tower after the accident damage was repaired. Since it wasn’t re-mounted, the harness sat extremely close to the driver’s side header. The damage is fairly minor and I will be cutting out the damaged areas to the two wires, and splicing (soldering) in new sections and recovering with heat-shrink. The hole section will be re-wrapped and the harness will be attached to the proper area, away from the header.

My choke parts arrived from Holley on Saturday which will allow me to complete the rebuild and reinstall the carburetor (talk about fast service from the folks at Holley).

I will have to plug along during the evenings and weekends to get this car finished. I will be taking one more week in June to complete the suspension and brake rebuild.

Stay Tuned.