At long last I was able to work on a car again. Unfortunately, there has been no progress on The Clam because finding a suitable parts car has proven to be difficult. 1971 was a one year only design and yet more specific to the B-body Pontiac lineup, only the Catalina and Safari share front sheet metal. Despite appearing identical at first glance, the similar Grand Ville and Bonneville models are actually 3 inches longer, which completely and totally any use of common parts that would be suitable to my purpose.
Along with having two kids taking up most of my time, the wall in our house rotting out because the geniuses that built it built the roof to be about 2 inches short of reaching the wall and then decided to fix that problem by laying shingles over the gap and a litany of other "mid-30s-life-as-usual" obstacles, I haven't had much time to devote towards working on or fixing any vehicles. The entire wall in the kitchen had to come out, along with a good portion of the floor and I had to tear it all out and put it all back, which I'm still in the process of finishing.
The '31. After about three years of saving up birthday and Christmas gift money I was finally able to order a new radiator for the '31 to, hopefully, cure it's continual overheating woes. I won't go into the long, drawn out story of the company having to remake the radiator three times before it was correct, but I will just say that it is complete, installed, and so far, functioning well. I also got a new head gasket due to a leak at the back of the head. I also had to get rid of my motometer (the temp gauge that sits on top of the radiator cap) because, apparently, the radiator in my car wasn't an original '31, it was a '30, which meant that the radiator cap mounted differently. Since there isn't a motometer made for the type of cap that mounts to a '31 that I'm aware of, I had to get a regular radiator cap, which meant I then had to fix the broken temperature gauge in the car. Done and done. Finally, I thought I would be able to drive around without the constant anxiety of overheating, something I have yet to do since I bought this car in 2009, but alas, I was wrong again. I pulled back in the garage and noticed gear oil leaking from the rear axles onto the rear brakes and wheels, just like it had done a while back which caused me to replace the rear axles seals. I found out that because the old seals were felt, the rear axles were able to breath, allowing the pressure from the differential to vent. The new bearings I installed do not allow the differential to breath and thus caused pressure building inside the differential housing, which cause the gear oil to take the path of least resistance - out the rear axle seals. This problem has been fixed by several by adding a vent to the rear differential housing, as all cars would have later as a standard feature.
I found this vent online for $5.00.
While I was drilling the hole I continually kept the area as clean as a surgical incision to prevent the savings from falling into the axle housing.
After sticking a magnet down in the hole and cleaning out anything that may have possible fallen in the hole I taped it using a 1/8 pipe thread tap.
And here it is in place, in it's final location. This installation was very simple and didn't take very long. I'll have to remember if I cross a creek to not let the water get above the vent. Only time will tell if this fixes the problem, but for now I feel confident it will.
After a considerable amount of testing, Rose and I found the rear end to no longer produce any amount of grease seepage from the rear axles. The heat index this day was 104 degrees and we capitalized on this misery by testing the new radiator and we are glad to report that there was not even a slight hint of an attempt to overheat. I was very please by this, perhaps equally as much as Rose was by her new bicycle she received on her 3rd birthday.
