Paint’s On

Tuesday evening quite the cavalcade of Corvairs required attention. First, Glinda was pinging, so I checked the timing which had bumped up from 14 to around 16 deg BTDC. I then checked the dwell and found it had moved down to 27 degrees from its set 32 degree. Once I re-set the dwell to 32, the timing came back down to where it belonged.

Next, I was able to knock a few more items off Lucy's to-do list: five-point harness installation, passenger kick panel installation, and clutch cable lubrication. The last Lucy task was wet sanding the primer I'd applied that morning.

Once Ariel got home, I pulled Ringo into the driveway since I'd seen he'd deposited quite a prodigious puddle on the pavement during his few day sit at our front curb. While there was still some ATF on the dipstick, it was down a pint, so I topped it off. Ariel had told me about the steering feeling like it had a catch in it. We spent some time trying to figure out where the catch was occurring and decided it was in the area of the blinker actuator. I'll have to pull the steering wheel to get to the root of that problem.

Yesterday morning I got up early and spent a cooler couple of hours in the garage. Then I wiped down the areas to be painted with wax and grease remover. Next I masked off newly sanded area again using the technique of the keeping the facing edge of the masking tape rolled up. This results in a less abrupt paint line by letting the paint haze into the area under the rolled up portion (easier to blend-sand afterwards). Finally, three coats of red Rustoleum were rattle-canned onto the affected spots. I'm finally getting the hang of this since there were no runs (and that's a first for me).

I've given up swapping the short steering arms before the convention due to a lack of time, but it'll be okay since the National Autocross will be a more flowing course set up at Stafford Motor Speedway. It's been promised that cone memorization will not rule the day. That's a huge relief to my recall-challenged brain. Still left to do before Saturday morning's departure is swapping the one race carburetor off Heidi and onto Lucy, checking Lucy's brakes and transmission oil level, cleaning the engine compartment, remove the lower shrouds, and wet sand, buff, and polish the new paint into the old.