John S's Journal

So the clutch bleeding process was going to be a piece of cake. I had the pedal box from my ‘70 installed and ready to go. I had the slave cylinder from the ‘70 also installed. Confidence was high that I could shoot a couple of 60ml syringes up from the slave bleed nipple and be done in short order. Ha! Not so fast. What I hadn’t installed was the nice new flex hose from the ‘70 because they are a PITA to get to and I figured the hose on the GT would suffice. The fluid wasn’t going anywhere so I dropped the starter and the slave and the flex hose after wrestling with the corroded nut on top of the flex hose bracket. Then I had to do the same on the wreck but since they were nice and clean, no wrestling was involved. Just tight quarters. Not only was the GT flex hose plugged, but the hard line from the master to the flex hose. An acetone enema, a stiff wire and compressed air finally won out. After that was all cleared out and everything buttoned up, a couple of syringes of fluid and the clutch is bled.

My original intent was to get the car moving through the gears and stopping nicely with all new stuff and then switch attention to getting parts off the wreck so that I could get it gone and gain back some garage space. Then continue on rehabbing the OD that I started in on before the accident and sometime before driving season, pull the engine and transmission, clean up the engine and engine bay, install the OD along with a new flex hose since access would be so much better and put it all back in and get ready to drive the snot out of it next year.

That is still the plan but now I won’t need to change out the flex hose.
Small consolation for what I had to do today.

As if all of that nonsense wasn’t enough, I decided to tackle the brake bleeding. Again, I thought that this was going to be a piece of cake.
New everything, Speedbleeders installed so I could do it by myself. What could possibly go wrong? Well, how about a plugged up brake distribution block. Five bloody flare nut fittings to unwind, flush, and then hopefully get it to work. PB Blaster in all of the orifices and some patience paid off but again, way more time than I was anticipating. Took the one out of the ‘70, five more bloody flare nut fittings to unwind just in case the one in the GT didn’t play nice. Tomorrow, I have to put the starter back in that I needed to remove in order to get access to the slave flex hose. Maybe the one that I removed from the roadster will go back in the GT as it looks to be better. I feel like I was seeing double all day but it’s nice to have a clean parts car a few feet away to glean new parts from...