John S's Journal

My favorite job. What a pain. It needs to be done unfortunately but it is so stinking tedious. Remnants of the original paint remain but also some black paint as well. And the usual pockets of grease, oil and dirt. Utilizing all the weapons, degreaser, wire brushes, drill with rotary wire brush, putty knife, Scotch Brite pads. Made some headway but more tedium to come.

Got the flywheel surfaced. Wanted to lighten it but lathe time at the machine shop was $100/hr and he said it takes an hour to remove a pound. To get to 16# from 21# was going to be five hours of lathe time.
Nope! I settled for $50 to surface it and called it good.

Talked to Joe Curto about getting a rebuild kit for my HS4’s. He has most of the parts but was missing the AAL needles and said to give him a couple days and he’d get back to me. These were the original one year only AUD 465’s for the1971 model year. I believe the following year, HIF’s were introduced. When I revived the car from its 34 year slumber last Fall, I just plopped the HS4’s from my wrecked ‘70 on rather than take the time to clean up and rebuild the originals. Just wanted to get it running and assess the condition of the car before tearing into it.

I need to do the same for the distributor. Once ai hear from Jeff at Advance Distributors to see which of the 3 distributors would be preferable, it’s going to get sent out for him to rework.


Saturday
Did some much needed garage cleanup. Not a whole lot of time to devote to the project but I did manage to swap out the positive battery cable with one that I had salvaged from my wrecked ‘70. It was virtually brand new and was one that the Interstate battery shop made for me. A nice flexible 6 ga. red welding cable. What an oily mess under there working the old cable out of those rubber clamps and working the new one in. I’d love to get that underside pressure cleaned before Ido any more work under there but I don’t see that happening until the car is back on the road.

Went through my parts stash and found a lot of things that I thought I would have to order. Gaskets, Viton rear seal, etc. so I don’t know that I’ll need to do an order just yet. Ordered some Duplicolor engine paint and a Speedi Sleeve on Amazon so next up is to pull the backplate and do some more paint prep. The engine that I painted for the ‘70 came out ok but I missed some spots in my cleanup efforts and the paint didn’t stick well in those areas. Mother’s Day tomorrow so a day with family and a break from the dirty work.