[north]

This Wuhan virus has had a silver lining, more time for the cars! In the last month I got both the gold Bonnie wagon and the Expresso 4 dr brougham on the road after mechanically going through them. This week I finished off things on the Executive, rebuilt the original carb to address a weak accelerator pump. Also dealt with two pesky problems... a gas tank that would leak from the top, turned out to be that it had the wrong O-ring for the sending unit. A $10 NOS o-ring fixed things just right. While I had the tank out I spent a few hours with a jug of lacquer thinner and some gasoline to remove voodoo green from an old respray of the valence. Two hours in the hot sun breathing those fumes is my excuse for any typos you may find here, amazing how nice the tank looks now, that paint kept the factory zinc coating like new!

Next was a drivers door that wouldn't unlock sometimes. If you locked the door and tried to open it with either the door handles (inside or out) it wouldn't open (which it shouldn't) but then if you tried you couldn't unlock it either by pulling the knob or using the key. It wouldn't do it all the time but the first time it happened I couldn't get the door open, visions of cutting a hole in the minty original inner door panels gave me a nightmare! I managed to get it open by getting a tube through the window run weatherstrip and saturate the door latch with brake cleaner. I then pulled the panel and greased it up. It fixed it 90% but it still happened every now and then. So opened it up again and found the problem, there was a tiny little spring that had broken that normally pushes the latch plate back down after you release either door handle. Luckily I had an old latch in my junk bin that had the same spring. Back in business! While in there I installed a nice set of power door locks I've had floating around for years.