Just a couple updates today.

Patterson got some new tires today. We purchased some inexpensive Cooper Trendsetter 235/75/15 tires that have a bit of a vintage feel. We then moved Patterson’s old tires to Rusty’s wheels, so Rusty has some better shoes also.

Meanwhile, Ann added her touch to Patterson by painting the air cleaner lid (which is actually a cake pan mounted upside down) blue (you can see it sitting on the fender in the pic below).

Yesterday, I spent a good amount of time fixing items that I thought were fixed, but weren’t. For example, the brake pedal was hitting the column shifter rod (between the column paddle and the transmission). I thought maybe I had installed the rods incorrectly, but after removing the rods and puzzling through the situation, I figured out that the column itself needed to rotate clockwise several degrees. When I started undoing the bolts to make that happen, I found they were loose. That was a surprise, as I hadn’t worked on the steering column itself (though I had rebuilt Rusty’s column, which proved vital to deducing the fact that the column needed to rotate). Long story short, I rotated the column, tighten it up, reattached the rods, and the brake arm now clears the rods.

I also re-routed the vacuum lines that go down to the reservoir and back. Now they are more protected from the moved of the column shifting and away from the exhaust manifold.

I purchased a newer condenser yesterday and installed it, but I wasn’t really happy with the performance. I am going to get an NOS one from Old Car Parts (see the post below) and see if that works better.