For the last couple of weeks, I've been driving Betty around town at least a couple of times a week with no real problems. Most of the small leaks seem to have dried up. The coolant leak on the lower right corner of the radiator still seaps just enough to wet the surface but not enough to actually drip.
I have noticed on a couple random starts, usually the first start after a few days of sitting, the starter will "clunk" but not spin. The second attempt always works. On a couple of other times, the starter seems to only partially engage the fly-wheel? No grinding noises and no free spinning, but a wierd shudder or shake that just doesn't feel right. Thta's probably not the starter itself. Again, on the second attempt it works just fine. At this point I'm just keeping an eye on it to see if it gets worse.
I've been trying to get the old steering wheel off for several days and I finally had success last night about 7:00. I did a bunch of reading of the various posts here from others about it, and I finally drilled and tapped the steering wheel hub and pulled it off with a standard steering wheel puller. It still took a few days of soaking it with pentrating oil, cranking on a bunch of pressure, and tapping it with a hammer to get it loose. I bent both of the 5/16" bolts for the puller and bent two quarters into little cups in the process. I used the quarters to cover the top of the steering shaft by centering them up on the steering wheel nut to prevent (further) damage to the steering shaft threads. I cleaned up the threads and splines, applied a dab of anti-sieze compound and put the new wheel on.
I need to repair/replace the horn wire now as I managed to pull the little bead off of the end. I had a devil of a time figuring out where the end of the wire came out of the steering column. Thanks to a text from Clinto, I found it coming out of the steering box. Now that I understand how that works, I'll have to pull a bit of slack toward the steering wheel and fix the end so I can install my new horn button kit.
I'm still working on the air-powered windshield wipers. I swear I can catch lightening in a bottle but I can't for the life of me get those wipers working reliably!! My problem is at this point, limited to getting the wiper arms attached to the wiper motor shaft. I tried the ANCO 4101 wiper arms with 3113 wiper blades which at first worked. However, within an hour or so of use, the plastic in the blade where it connects to the arm failed and it simply flung the blades off of the arms.
As a second/revised solution, I ordered the upgrade kits from Saturn. Now I'm having trouble getting the arms to stay attached to the motor shaft. The shaft keeps breaking loose from the arm, leaving the wiper moving back and forth with about an inch of total range, even though the motor is working through its full range. The knurled pieces are just so soft that the set screws strip the holes out.
I took the good, unmodified shaft out of a dead wiper motor and put that shaft into my good wiper motor last night. I should have a new wiper motor arriving today from Erik's. That will give me two good motors. I'm going to try the attachment option #2 in the directions where a hole is drilled through the wiper arm and the shaft nut goes on the outside of the arm. I'm also going to mill a couple of flats on the shaft for the set screws. I might drill a hole through the shaft and tap it and use a longer set screw to really get a solid connection between the two parts.
I know I could just dump the air-powered wipers in favor of the electric upgrade, but I really want to maintain the air-powered wipers for now. Ah, the things we do for authenticity!
