Firstly, warm weather was approaching and keeping this in mind I pulled a rear seat belt from a junked Cadillac the last time I was at Pull-A-Part to weld in the back of the '60 Cadillac (Lucille) so that Rose's car seat can be mounted in the back. It even has a little Cadillac emblem on the seat belt button.
Jacob came over that day so he helped me weld two 1/4" plates in the rear. Before we welded them in we drilled and tapped two holes for the seat belt bolts. This came, of course, after reinstalling the seats and testing to find the right placement. After I welded them in place Jacob prepped them and then covered the area with primer and paint.
Jacob tested out the finished project...
but Rose decided she would rather drive.
Next, one my greatest fears came true. April totaled The Caprice. I have had this car since I was 16 and I honestly didn't realize how much everyone else knew how much this car meant to me until they heard it was wrecked. April and Rose were fine, but the car was totaled. April turned in front of a lady at a red light and was clipped in the very rear. It bent the frame and pushed the body over. The bodyman that sprayed The Clam said that putting The Caprice on a frame straightener should pull it back into shape. I have been searching endlessly for replacement parts but I have come up with nothing to speak of yet. What really hurts is that a while ago there were two '78 Caprices in the Pull-A-Part yard and I actually thought about pulling the taillights out of it, but I decided not to because I had already grabbed other parts that day and was afraid I was spending too much money. If I could only go back in time and tell myself to get them I would save myself a lot of time and money today. I, of course, decided to keep the car and bought it back from the insurance company for the princely sum of $300. The force actually ripped the trunk off of it's latch and buckled the driver side quarter panel. The passenger side quarter will have to be cut and welded back in. This was a bad week to be in The Garrett house.
Thinking I had hit the jackpot, I found the body of a 1978 Caprice coupe in Memphis, Tennessee. The owner assured me that the passenger quarter panel was in good shape and from the pictures he posted it appeared to be the truth. When I finally got to Memphis I found myself in one of the worst parts of the ghetto. In all honestly, I was somewhat worried for my safety. I found that the car was absolutely terrible. Every single panel was covered with dents to the extent that it was unusable. I stripped it of any parts I may find useful in the future and hauled it to the scrapyard.
Jacob was out of school so he stopped by a couple days and helped me strip this nasty piece of garbage of its parts
For his help, I let him cave in the roof in the best way to do so for a car about to meet it's end.
My motorcycle had some issues with the timing chain and has been out of commission, however while in Florida my dad bought another motorcycle, exactly like the one he has now, on ebay. He had never used ebay before and accidentally bought it. Rather than resell it he brought it back when he returned and gave it to me, so now we have almost identical, matching cycles.
The older gentleman down the street that is letting me use his storage building calls from time to time to have me do things to help him out. He called and told me he had a small "wading pool" that he needed moved and that I could have. When I went to inspect it I found that it was actually a 16x8 foot swim spa. It was enormous and two men couldn't even lift one side of it. I finally listed it on the internet and a family actually showed up with a flatbed trailer and a tractor and loaded it up and paid me to let them haul it off.
There were also weddings. Our friends Keela and Nick were married and asked if I would drive them away from the church. My old friend Alvarez's brother was getting married and all of his family and all of his brothers were going to be together again and in town for a weekend as well.
My other friend Nick also got married. For his bachelor party a group of us went on a long, very eventful motorcycle ride. Along the way some bikers in another group lost control and almost took a few of us out but narrowly missed, a car passing over a blind hill narrowly missed killing Nick by a literal second and a storm with tornado winds came and washed out a road and started blowing trees across the road and then a seemingly deranged police officer almost ran over two of us while responding to a call in the middle of the storm . We waited the worst of the storm out under the patio of a church but got hit again with a bad storm before we made it home.
Because April totaled The Caprice I needed to get the four door Caprice in good running order. It had suffered from a transmission leak that had become severe. Before the transmission could be dealt with the fuel pump went bad and was leaking gas. I had to replace it. The transmission turned out to be a front pump seal and so I had to pull the transmission. While at the shop it was determined that the transmission was in dire need of a rebuild, so we had it rebuilt. Each time I pull a transmission on the ground I think to myself that it will be the last time I ever lay on concrete and pull a transmission, yet it seems to continue to happen. With dad's help I finally got the transmission pulled, rebuilt and reinstalled. The car had also developed a terrible bad idle problem. I ended up having to completely rebuild the carburetor. After the rebuild it still had a bad idle problem, but this time it was different than before. I eventually traced the problem down to a broken vacuum tree. When I lowered the transmission I had forgotten to unhook the vacuum line to the modulator valve and the stress had cracked the fitting that several vacuum lines go into causing a bad vacuum leak from the rear of the intake manifold. The very week the transmission was back in and the car was idling properly the water pump went bad and I had to replace it and within a week the radiator went bad and I had to replace it. The old air conditioner is still the original R12 and was not working. I also got that working. I also replaced the long-past-their-prime plug wires and spark plugs. The car finally runs, shifts and cools perfectly and as far as I know everything works properly.
I don't have many pictures because I had so much to do and so little time do it I had to concentrate on getting it done as quickly as possible.
Finally back to The Clam for a little bit. For a second time the fan switch quit working on all speeds. Both times the in-line fuse behind the alternator had melted. Doing some research revealed that the most likely culprit is that the blower motor had gotten old and was causing excessive draw on the electrical system. The shop manual instructions explain that removal of the blower motor requires drilling a hole in the fender well and then the hole is to be patched with a factory replacement panel. I didn't like this idea so I removed the entire fender well to allow access.
This is the second melted inline fuse.
Because all of the air that enters the cabin comes through this squirrel cage I once again put April's toothbrush to use with some soap and water and cleaned all of the age-old dirt away.
It was also time again to wax The Clam. I got some old, large cardboard boxes from where I have been working part time and made some panels to cover the woodgrain while I am using the buffer.
First I made a template using paper and then transferred that to the carboard and then cut it out so that I can tape it to the sides of the car while I am buffing.
The carburetor on The Clam has been leaking fuel and running too rich. Since the blower motor had just been replaced, the only two parts of the car that haven't been rebuilt are the windshield wiper motor and the carburetor and it seemed that now it's only going to be the wiper motor. I took the carb off and I'm going to send this one to a guy in town that is very good at rebuilding carbs. It would take several days for me to soak all the parts that would be necessary to rebuild this carb and I also want to make absolutely sure it is done correctly the first time because I have yet to completely rebuild a 4 barrel carb and since the '78 is totaled I don't have time to learn with this carb. While the carb is off I plan to clean up some of the areas that the fuel leak and some loose valve covers had ruined.
I also took The Clam to Daniel's friend Ed's house. Ed is a mechanic and builds racecars. He has a lift so we put it on the lift and checked the driveline to determine where my driveline vibration is coming from. Up to this point I had believed I didn't have the transmission and pinion angles correct. Using his angle finder we found that the angles appeared to be correct but that the driveshaft was actually 1 inch too short. Unfortunately, because it was too short, this meant that I have to have an entire new driveshaft made. I found another shop in Nashville that came highly recommended by Ed and took the driveshaft to them today. It should be done in a couple of days and hopefully that will be the end of my driveline vibration. After inspecting the tailshaft of the transmission Ed suspects that the bushing in the rear of the transmission has not been ruined by the vibration due to the fact that we haven't driven to car very much since it was finished.
