John S's Journal

You always hate to go backwards when you’re restoring something but it couldn’t be helped and isn’t a huge deal. I didn’t do a good job when I reinstalled the water pump as I didn’t seal it well enough and as such, it has had a slow, annoying leak that I finally decided to tackle today.
Nice warm day for a change so it was nice to have the garage door open to work on the GT.

Got it warmed up enough to back it out yesterday and get it turned around to dig into it this afternoon with the front end facing the garage door. Lots of light and room to work makes a big difference.
Kind of regretting the fact that I didn’t braze in a drain petcock before I put everything back together before the holidays as I now had to remove the lower hose to catch the antifreeze but I managed to collect most of it.
Wishing I had kept my old rad to practice on as I don’t want to attempt it on this one as it’s almost brand new. Hopefully there will be no need to drain it again for awhile so I’ll leave it alone.

All the mating surfaces of the block and water pump are all cleaned up now and hopefully the Toyota FIPG 103 liquid gasket will show up soon and I can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I’ve got a few things to do while I’m waiting and the front is up on jackstands. I need to get a grease cartridge for my gun and hit all of the zerks with some grease and the metal lock tabs on the calipers need to be peened over. I used threadlocker but a belt and braces approach can’t hurt. Also, I need to go around the new exhaust flanges and recheck them as well now that it’s had a few heat cycles. I noticed the rear clamp was loose when I backed it out as it sounded a little louder.

I’m more motivated when the weather is more Spring like. I need more of the warm weather before I tackle the finish work on the front valance. It won’t be perfect but it’s missing all of the obvious dents and I’m pleased that it’s relatively smooth. Some sanding, filler, more sanding, more filler, more sanding and then hopefully primer with a little finish sanding and then paint.

I also need to see if I can get some kinks out of the front bumper and I’m working out a plan in my head to accomplish that without making the chrome any worse. The problem is that in a couple places, the metal has been pushed in and I need to spread them back out. My idea is to use some bar clamps that use iron pipe and the ends of the clamps are threaded on. I’m hoping to reverse the ends so that it acts as a spreader so that I can apply a slow, steady pressure and maybe even use a little heat to massage the bumper back into a reasonable shape. We’ll see how that goes…

Hopefully no more steps backwards.