Drive!

We took the car on its longest drive yet this past weekend. A classic car show in Prescott Valley was the destination Saturday morning. There were perhaps 50 or 60 cars of all types, mostly American muscle. We parked our cute little car next to a red Thunderbird. It was fun and we met some interesting people.

Then we headed back to Prescott to do errands and decided to take the car all the way back to our house - about 40 miles one way. We had been keeping it in a garage in town so as not to have to drive it on the 16-mile long dirt road to our place. There are still a lot of details to attend to on the car and it is way easier to work on it at our house than in town.

On the way out I notice that the engine temperature was slowly rising beyond normal which is 180 degrees F. About 10 miles out it hit 190F. About 20 miles out it reached just under 200 degrees and stayed there for the rest of the way home. Although that is 20 degrees above what is supposed to be normal operating temperature it is not in a danger zone. I kept my eye on it, though.

The engine ran great the whole time. In fact the car was awesome! It was smoother on our dirt road than any of our other vehicles. I took it way easy. Don't want to beat it up too much!

On Sunday morning I worked on the car. The fan belt was loose and I though this could be the cause of the higher than normal running temperature. If the belt is slipping the water pump might not be moving as much coolant as it should. It was a serious pain trying to get the belt tighter. The bolts that hold the generator are so hard to reach. I think I got it mostly tight, though. The test drive later in the day will tell whether I did any good or not.

The next project was to get the headlights wired up properly. The first time I tried it, several months ago, I got one of the headlights to work on low beam but the other one worked on high beam. It was weird. I got out the wiring diagram and set to work. Finally I got things wired right. The wires were switched on the left headlight. Somehow fixing that also fixed the right headlight. Good. Headlights work now.

Since I was in electrical mode I decided to try to get the windshield wipers working. I couldn't get the motor to spin, even hooking it directly to the battery wasn't working. I removed the motor and cleaned all four of the wire connections and tried again. Now the motor works. After re-installing it I found that it didn't work with the switch. Messing with that didn't seem to help. Then I tried a different ground. That worked. It is hard to find just the right position on the pull-out switch to make the wipers work so I will probably have to take the switch apart sometime and see if I can make it work better. For now, I have wipers if I need them. There is still no top for the car so I really hope I don't need to use them!

The last project of the day was putting the sun visors on. These are the original visors with the original green, translucent plastic in them. Oh, and I almost forgot, one of the rear brake lights was out so I fixed that, too. The bulb was in the wrong position. Easy fix.



Now for the test drive. We decided to do a photo shoot of the car driving on the dirt road, hopefully kicking up some dust. It was fun. My wife, Nita, was the photographer. We drove to a few scenic bends in the road and set up the shots.

We were out for awhile, plenty of time for the engine to reach its highest temperature and the highest it got was about 185. Tightening the fan belt helped a lot.

It was a good weekend.