Mint Condition

Well my oil cap mysteriously disappeared. My guess is that it rattled loose and fell out along the road somewhere. In any case, I bought a new one today, and she’s a beauty.

In the next before school starts, I’ll be tuning up the engine to get it in good running order. It’s still getting hot, and today it got all the way 220 ºF and overheated a little—the hottest it’s gotten since I bought aftermarket temperature gauge. I’ll be replacing the thermostat soon to see if that helps with the heat issue, as well as hooking up the automatic choke and air filter. I may just need to buy a new radiator though.

So on Monday, after getting insurance (almost $200 per month, yeesh) I took Nugget out for a drive! Two drives, actually. She still has a slight overheating issue, however. I’ll need to look into why the temperature gauge isn’t working, and it looks like I might be replacing the radiator. But she drives!

The backup lights are now installed! I had to drill a hole on either side to feed the wire through, since the previous owner had welded on new sheet metal and the holes were absent.

The passenger light is missing a screw post. I have the post, but it won’t feed through. On all the screw posts on both lights, the nuts are rusted to the posts, and the posts themselves unscrew, so it’s a little broken. Those will need be replaced someday, and preferably someday soon, lest my lights fall off!

On Thursday I went to the DOL with my dad and we transferred the title into my name (since I was only 15 when I got it, the title went to my dad), renewed the registration, and got new plates. Then I installed the rear bumper and valance best as I currently can (some body work needs to be done, but it holds sturdy for now).

I still need to put on the rear bumper guards (you can see the discolored paint where they’re supposed to go), but everything holds in place, and that’s what counts. Now that the plates are on, I just need to get insurance and install the backup lights, and I can drive it!

I put one of the horns in a while ago, but I couldn’t find the other one. I swear I had both of them to start with! Well, the other day, my mom uncovered the other horn when she was cleaning up outside. It appears to have fallen off the shelves on which I used to store my car parts and gotten buried beneath leaves and such. So now my car has both snail shell-shaped horns installed!

After purchasing some new rubber washers and cleaning up the hardware, I also installed the front seat belts. I’m not going to bother with the back seat belts yet, because I don’t think I’ll need them, and I’ll have to take them out when I do the interior anyway. At some point, though, I’ll end up replacing the seat belts with brand new ones.

The brakes are working! The brakes are working!

My grandpa came over to help me work on Nugget’s brakes. Originally we were just going to flush the lines to get new fluid in the system, but it got a little more complicated than that, and ended up taking 3 days.

First, we got three wheels bled, and then found out that the last wheel, the driver’s front wheel, had a really badly corroded wheel cylinder that needed replacement. So the next day, we replaced that, and realized that we should probably replace all the others, as they were likely to be in similar condition.

On the third day, we replaced the rest of the wheel cylinders with new ones, but we ran into a bit of a snag on the driver’s rear wheel. The brake line to the cylinder (a short one, coming from a joint) was rusted to the bolt, so while we were able to free the cylinder, we couldn’t really attach a new one. Plus, the line was kind of mangled. So we went to the auto store in town and got a new line. I proceeded to bend into a shape that would fit and installed that, and we bled the brakes on each wheel as we installed the new cylinders.

After this was all said and done, after three days of taking wheels off and on and off again and back on again, I took Nugget for a test run on the driveway. The brakes were amazing! Simply heavenly compared to how they were before.

So now there only remains a few more items before I can take her on the road! And what a glorious day that shall be.