I was able to spend a couple hours pecking away at things this afternoon......
First up was swapping out the headlight motor switch. I had to loosen up and scoot out the cluster just enough to slide out the switch - if anyone else knows a better way to do this I'm all ears. Switch is installed and works, but after a couple rounds of testing the noisy passenger side headlight motor sh*t the bed and remains in the open position. Based on the look of the motors they have been restored/repaired at some point as they are pretty clean relative to their surroundings. Two steps forward and one step back seems to be my theme when working on these old cars............
Next were some coolant related issues. After discussions with the seller - he was unsure about the last time the coolant was changed so I wanted to at least drain and refill the radiator. While the radiator was drained I swapped out the temperature sending unit (measured the resistance of the new vs. old units and they were VERY diffrerent) and that solved my temperature gauge problem, then I swapped out the heater control valve hoping that would solve my no heat problem. The repro unit the parts houses sell doesn't look a thing like the original and doesn't even fit in the bracket (I'm assuming the unit on the car was an original). The valve on the car seemed to be stuck shut and this was confirmed after I removed it. I was worried the heater core was either plugged or full of rusty coolant since it seems the valve wasn't allowing flow through the heater core. I flushed the heater core with distilled water and nice clean green coolant came out - no rust. The drained coolant from the radiator appeared really fresh too, so that is good. I put all new distilled water and anti-freeze back in it anyways. While the fluid was out I swapped out an incorrect worm type lower hose clamp at the radiator to a more correct tower clamp too. Still no heat, so thinking the vacuum line that activates the valve might be disconnected somewhere under the dash.......always something - but making progress. Maybe if that is the case and I can loosen up the original heater control valve it will get re-installed. Good news is that when I started the car up the choke/high idle worked and there appears to be no coolant leaks. The temperature guage went up until the thermostat opened and then came down and pretty closely matched the temperature of the heat gun indicated temperature on the themostat housing.
So now to dig into the dash to hopefully find the potential vacuum leak (maybe remove the windshield wiper motor while I'm there) and then maybe get out the headlight motors........next weekend's tasks.
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