I must have cursed myself putting the license plate on the car before it was ready for a road test. Let me explain.......I came across a set of 4 stainless steel license plate bolts in one of my many parts bins and decided I would put them with the plates so when I was ready to put them on I would have everything in the same area. Open the drawer where the license plates are (I have several, don't ask) I decided what the heck, just put the rear plate on now. Which is what did. BAM. Almost everything that happened the rest of the evening went badly.
Installed the rear chrome tail pipe to make sure the clearance was right and I liked the location. Looks great (in my opinion).
Then went about the task of unbolting the front steering rack and the steering column in order to install the u-joint that attaches the steering column to the rack. Disassembly went easily. For those of you that haven't done this yet, you need to attach the u-joint to the end of the steering column and then lower it into place in front of the steering rack that has been removed from its brackets that hold it to the chassis. There is just enough room to insert and tighten the bolt on the rack side. Once that is done you can push the entire rack assembly back onto the brackets.
Now comes the hard part. The only place to access the top bolts on the two brackets to install lock nuts is through the access hole in the front box of the chassis. This sounds easy but you are encumbered by the steering rack, water cooling hose and sway bar. All in the way of getting inside the hole on the chassis to fit a small wrench to hold the lock nut in place to tighten the bolt on the bracket. To make matter worse, the location of the nut is right above another piece of metal inside the box which means you can only get a wrench on the nut at a weird angle. None of which can be accomplished because you cant get your hand into the opening.
I wont bore you with all the details but just know that I finally quit at 2am and 3 beers and STILL did not have everything installed. The secret of getting the lock nuts in place was to use an odd surgical tool (I have a box of them from the flea market, they always come in handy) to hold the nut and get it threaded (blindly and only by feel). Then you can just barely get a small open end wrench in the hole to hold the nut while using a socket wrench on the outside of the bracket to tighten.
The highlite of the evening was getting my lovely wife to hold the steering column while I lined up the u-joint at the rack location. She says when she completed her task "it doesn't look like you have gotten very far since the last time I was out here. You're not going to get this done in two weeks......... Thanks dear. Double curse.
Later that morning (10am) I finished the steering rack & Column installation and started back on the wiring. I made a new harness of 4 wires to run from the engine bay to the dash for future needs. The electronic tach needs a wire and the electric fuel pump needs a switch plus I'm sure Ill need something else later down the road. Easy to do it now and run with the rest of the harness under the carpeting.
Before I quit at the end of the day (had friends coming over for dinner) I made a template for the heat shield I was making for the bottom of the rear engine bay storage box (I had already cleaned off the grease and grime from the bottom of the fiberglass box). The OEM metal plate was all rusty and the asbestos cloth was a bit ratty so I decided to remove and use fiberglass heat shield instead. The template went quickly so I cut out the heat shield and installed on the bottom of the box. I will trim with silver heat tape to insure it doesn't peel off at some point down the road.
