I’ve been meaning to post this update earlier, however, a couple demanding choices needed to be made and thought through, which I’ll get into momentarily. I devoted my attention last Sunday to, shall you say, further simplification. This included ridding a few nonessentials, which included the rear trunk’s interior, rear half of the interior, windshield washer reservoir, wiper arms and motor, and the carbon canister.

Who needs an interior in a trunk? Cleaned out all this stuff from the car and stored them away.

Then I moved to the front and decided that the washer reservoir was far too bulky in the engine bay – and had to go, along with the wiper arms and motor. When I took off the windshield cowl, I found this long screwdriver under there by the wipers. Weird.

I also ripped out the carbon canister.

The junk pile.

I kept the momentum going by removing the interior from the rear half, behind the seats, to get a head start on the roll bar install.

Also took off the door panels and gave the window rails a spray down of white lithium grease.

Now let’s talk about the more crux side of this project. While I may have shown enthusiasm when I first bought this car, because it did look solid initially, I soon discovered that things were far from ideal. As I was working on the car, more and more negatives became unveiled. I took a peek down the front side of the engine, and saw that it was covered with a patina of oil. This is most likely the source of the oil found on the oil pan and transmission. It could be from the valve cover leaking over time. Regardless, a major seal overhaul job will need to be done, which means a full timing belt service…

In addition, returning the car’s body back into shape was not going to be as easy as I hoped. There are dings, which are all very minor, but the fact that they are spread around the car makes repair difficult. Both the front and rear bumpers needed work. The front had 2 dents in it from the license plate bracket, and the rear bumper looked like it was bumped into before on the driver’s side corner. The only real solution is a full repaint. It was a hard, yet necessary decision to make.

I certainly felt disappointed when problems kept accumulating, but there’s no turning back. The car is currently at the body shop, and in the meantime I can only wait and hope for the best.

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