First of all, I promised I'd put up a link once I had all the photos posted on Flickr. Here it is.
Last Friday evening I was able to get Luna roadworthy again, but not without some frustration. I knew that drilling out the two broken studs from one of the exhaust manifold would be difficult, but I thought that, once drilled, the tapping would be the easier task. It wasn’t. The tap didn’t want to cleanly cut the tough cast iron, so the tapered tool ended up cracking the cast flange ears. I kludged together a fastening scheme that resulted in a nearly sealed joint. The rest of the exhaust system went back together much better and Luna’s a lot quieter than before the adventure.
While lying under the car, I had a good chance to inspect the condition of the sheetmetal and found it in surprisingly better shape than I'd first expected. The bottoms of all the rockers are solid and the floor are only soft on the driver's rear seat footwell. Doing all the metal replacement will be far easier than it was on Ringo, and I can strike the replace floors from her to-do list.
Ariel had been telling me the catch in Ringo’s steering seem to be getting worse, and that his horn had stopped working. Thinking the two were related, I spent a few minutes removing the horn button assembly and then took him for a test drive. I think the neighbors must’ve thought I was drunk as I slowly went down the street turning lock-to-lock first one direction, then the next. Fortunately, all the testing indicated I’d found the problem. It’ll take a few commutes by Ariel to finalize the correctness of my diagnosis.
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