A Set Back
Today, I wanted to focus on getting the car safe for driving. Given the work that we did on the tailgate last week resulted in the paint cracking, I don’t want to complete the interior until the paint is repaired. There is not much left on the car to do to make it safe, only the wiper washers, lining up the headlights and a front wheel alignment.
Before we got onto that though, I wanted to fix up the door locks. I could lock the passenger side, but not unlock it and I could unlock the driver side, but not lock it. A bit of a pain to lock up when out on the streets. Luckily, all that was needed was a slight adjustment on the linkages and a slight bend and the drivers side door was operating as expected. The passenger side was a little more tricky. The tumbler mechanism that moves the linkage had rounded out over time (suspect that it was a driver door tumbler as I cannot believe that the passenger tumbler would see that much action). A previous owner had fixed the problem by adding on an extra link to the tumbler. When I put the door together, I did not put it back together correctly and hence the malfunctioning tumbler. When I slipped the extra linkage onto the tumbler, and again a slight bend of the linkage, it started to work again.
We then moved onto getting the wiper washers installed and connected to the washer bottle. This was a pretty straight forward job and with a quick clean of the nozzles and connecting new pipes (the old ones were quite brittle) all was done. We connected a battery to the car to give it a quick test and all was well.
But then, the set back. As Dad was closing the inspection panel from filling up the washer tank, I noticed that the rear reservoir on the brake master cylinder was at MIN. When we parked the car a few months ago, it was at MAX. We hadn’t seen any leaks, but took a closer inspection of each wheel. The rear driver side wheel had brake fluid on it. We jacked up the car, took off the wheel and got the drum off. The shoes were covered in brake fluid as was the slave cylinder. We took it off the car and Dad will take it back to BGT to get them to fix it up. Not what I wanted to see, but at least we found the problem in the garage and not on a corner of some mountain!