This post covers a wide span of time. Back in the summer The Caprice's A/C wasn't working great. It was very hot and humid and sometimes on the highway, but especially when idling in traffic, the air front the vents would begin to get warm. After a lot of testing with gauges attached to the high and low ports, that issue turned out to be the tuning. As it turns out, the tune was setup as though it had a mechanical fan, which was causing the A/C pressures to turn the electric fans on and off at the wrong times. While the A/C system was taken down resolving that issue I went and ahead and had a new A/C line made because the old one was too short. It was supposed to wrap around the coolant overflow, which has a small indentation in the top for clearance, but the hose was just a little bit too short and was causing it to wedge between the hood and coolant tank, which was causing the hood to not close all the way.
When I took the A/C hose off of the evaporator I found that the threads were destroyed. It turns out the metal threads had not re-cut the aluminum threads properly. The problem is that I'm using the original evaporator from a 1978 Caprice, but a newer style A/C line from a early 2000's Chevrolet S-10 4 cylinder. This is because the 4 cylinder S-10s used a variable compressor instead of a fixed compressor which means that the A/C line has the sensor that is necessary to allow the computer to control the electric fans. The threads on the '78 evaporator are standard size and the S-10 threads are metric. You would think finding the thread and pitch for these fittings would be easy, but I actually found it very hard. The evaporator and A/C line are typically only listed as a whole as their part # and specifications for the fittings on each end is not usually given. I finally was able to find an verify the correct fitting sizes and order two hard lines, cut the ends off, and have them welded together to make an adapter. The reason I made this adapter is for ease of future maintenance. I could have made a custom A/C line or made a custom evaporator, but then if anything ever happened to one of those components I would then have to have another custom one made. With this adapter if I ever need to replace a part I can order the stock part # at any parts house and it will fit with no modification.
I also cleaned the taillight buckets, which took quite a bit of time to remove all of the nasty sealant from not only the taillight holes, but also the washers around the mounting bolts. Fortunately the old rubber gaskets were in decent shape and I coated both sides of them, as well as the mounting bolts, with a new tube of the same sealant I used for the heater box. When I got everything reinstalled I still had a small leak on the passenger side so I had to remove that entire side again and start all over, making sure to add a sufficiently liberal amount of sealant to do the job. Messy and tedious, but it completely stopped the leak.
Another issue I had was that on the driver side there was a leak coming from an area that was hard to determine. One of the times while locked in the trunk, Dad was spraying water and then couldn't get me out. The trunk key takes a special touch to get open. Fortunately I've taught April how to do it and she was home so he finally went inside and got her and she was able to get me out. The problem ended up being that the old seam sealer had cracked during the impact of the wreck. It wasn't visible, but it was leaking. In the picture below there is a visible seam inside the trunk lip. The picture below is after I removed all of the old seam sealer.
And here the picture below is after adding new seam sealer. The seam sealer I had wasn't brand new and so I had to cut the tube in half with a hacksaw and apply it with my finger instead of with a caulk gun. As a result, it didn't turn out as smooth as I would like, but it won't really make a big difference after I paint it back to body color.
After this I had one more mystery leak still coming from the top right corner of the passenger side of the windshield. This baffled me because I had just had a new windshield installed right after the car was repaired from the wreck and the car had been stored since then. I had thought perhaps the roof had holes in it and the old vinyl top was letting water through, but I'd since had the top repaired and a new vinyl top installed. I was pretty confounded. While helping me search for the leak my dad had the idea of using compressed air to look for the leak instead of running water. By using compressed air, and spraying water with a mix of dish soap from a spray bottle onto the area we were able to find that it was in fact the windshield that was leaking. I ordered some Windo-Weld from 3M and we attempted to seal the area, but it didn't work. I took the car to the body shop and had the guy there remove the window and he found that the company that installed the new windshield didn't do it properly and the top right side had never actually sealed correctly. Since this was back sometime around 2016 or so when I had this done it was way past warranty, even though the car had been stored all that time. After replacing the windshield correctly that took care of that leak as well.
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