deep in the heart of Texas

I packed the car Thursday night. The trunk was an exercise in fitting together irregular objects inside a squarish space, but I got that figured out and the boot lid closed. 5:00 AM Friday morning rolled around, cold and dreary, but dry. I pried myself out of bed, showered, and put on some warm sweats and the pair of blue Dickies coveralls with which I transformed myself into Mario, also which I would wear for the next three days, and they were actually awesome for driving in. I had to wear the wool socks for the next three days too, because I forgot to pack any. I started the car and let it warm up while I finished packing, then zeroed the trip meter (or maybe I had done it the night before) and off I went. 

It took me a little while to remember how the heater controls worked, and I saw the new fog lights were somewhat misaligned, but otherwise all was well. I picked up my brother from his house, and we spent some small amount of time trying to jigsaw all the various things into the back parcel area of the Fiat. He also had the souvenir cookies from my sister-in-law. We finally got it all in (turns out there is a rather large usable space under one's knees in the passenger seat) and made it to San Marcos right about 7 AM in the cold dawn. 

I did not know what to expect. There had been only a few people posting in the Lemons forum about this rally, so I anticipated a rather small turnout. We came up the hill at Harris Hill, turned into the paddock, and after a somewhat confusing exchange with the cone guard, we turned into the back paddock where about 30 cars and a ton of people were all milling about. We joined them, handing out some cookies, receiving loads of stickers and little souvenir things (NB: we brought freaking awesome cookies, but not enough, and need to think of better stuff like car magnets next time), and got judged eventually for a nice little sum of 225 starting points - 100 for a 70s car, 100 for an Italian car, and I guess 25 for the cookie bribe and the costumes (and I had tied the green turtle shell to the luggage rack). There were twin brothers driving identical Volvos (a '59 and a '61, I believe), and they turned out to be absolute maniacs in the points scoring department, but more on that later. 

Drivers' meeting, some hilarity, and we decided it was time to go, so we did, but apparently we were in a little more hurry than most as we heard some grinning comments about it being our first rally. We wondered if we had violated some obscure Lemons tenet, and dawdled at the gas station a little until another team driving a 73 Volvo 144 with a very amusing James Bond theme arrived and assured us we were on the right track. I also laid down the rubber floor mats to keep from being robbed by the rust holes in the floor if we dropped anything.

Then we were off, and the whole weekend started with a long drive out to Old Tunnel State park which took a little time that I used to set up the electronics. I whiled away the rest sewing the sweatband back into an old felt hat that had seen a lot of Fiat wear - mainly just to see if it was a good way to pass the time (it was not). 

We hit the first two checkpoints pretty easily, ate lunch at the second where we watched one of the teams pulling out a wrecked bumper with a tow strap around park rocks and were constantly surrounded by a waddle of ducks who thought they were going to get some of our charcuterie.  

After finding a randomly designated road sign in Harper, nailed to a tree in company with a Buick Regal driven by a couple of guys in banana suits, we drove into the Twisted Sisters toward Leakey. The Twisted Sisters are a pretty fun drive through the hill country, up and down and around, and the Spider was running well and the wheel bearings were holding up. We found the next stop, a fancy ranch sign on the outskirts of Leakey. Collin took the picture, and I made a joking gesture holding up the top of the shifter which is missing the plastic retainer and just sits on top of the shift rod. One of these days I'll fix that, but it works fine, just rattles a little at speed. 

 We pulled out of there, I shifted into third, and the shift rod just uselessly flopped over onto the console. I tried to get it repositioned for a second, but it was obvious it had come unscrewed from the shift selector in the transmissions, and we were stuck in third. I knew what had happened, and was confident I could fix it if I could find a flat spot, so we drove on into Leakey in third gear. I found a nice flat field near a Carquest and we stopped and started unpacking tools, immediately attracting attention of the Lemons cars behind and a few curious locals. I jacked up the car and put the one jackstand I had brought beneath it and got to work. 

The shifter passes through an eye in the shift selector rod, upon which it acts as a lever with its bottom anchored to a cup in the bottom of the assembly by a nut. The nut had fallen off. There is a large spring, a plastic cup and then another metal cup which forms a ball joint for a smooth pivoting action by the shifter. All these were just rolling around on the bottom plate. The complicating factor is that the driveshaft is just under all this and the clearance is very tight.

 

I got the cover plate off and all the pieces, and then spent about 30 minutes in various cramped positions with Collin holding the shifter in place trying to get the stack of cup, plastic cup, spring, bottom cup on and pushed against the spring pressure far enough onto the threaded bottom of the shifter so I could thread the nut on. Everything would just slip and fall out. I finally cottoned on to the idea of reattaching the cover plate by the forward bolt and rotating it around to hold the bottom cup. However, this only barely worked, as I still had to hold it against the pressure of the spring to thread the nut on, and the bad angle meant I couldn't get a thumb in there. I was basically having to balance the nut and washer on the tip of a finger and sneak it into a tiny space and twist it on. But finally after agonizing effort, the nut somehow hung on the tip of a thread, and with Collin holding stock still on pain of death, I got it on enough to dare to wedge the shortest socket I had on an elbow and tighten the whole thing down. This got us back on the road with the sun headed to the horizon, and we hurried on to the next checkpoints. One of these was the giant Matthew McConaughey sign in Uvalde, which loomed up out of the darkness like some kind of grinning troll. 

 

 The LED headlights and the Cibie fog lamps on the car worked wonders. I do not think we would have been as successful without them, as we were in the dark a good portion of the time. We found all but the last remaining checkpoint in this manner, and decided to leave the Market in Laredo until the morning. We pulled into the Doubletree in Laredo about 11 PM, a little shell-shocked but alive. We were processing too much cortisol to sleep straight away, so we made a minimum effort for the Make a Giant Sign challenge using AI to make a funny picture of me playing bongos a la McConaughey, and then hit the hay. 

 

grease deez

 The new alternator arrived yesterday, and I installed it. I subsequently discovered a few things. Firstly, the car still does the zombie run-on thing. Secondly, all my alternators are junk, but the original one with which I started is still the best one. The new one charges at 13-odd volts, where the original one just barely did 12.5, and the other two just lay there gasping. So worn brushes on them all, and the original problem of not shutting off with the headlights off still persists. I think this is a wiring problem, those butt connectors are connecting some things that I don't think are supposed to be connected, but everything works fine with the lights on. So that's how it's going to be. 

I have been through pretty much the whole car at this point, except the front wheel bearings, which I have never examined. I popped off the driver's side dust cap and found grease, but it was pretty old, with a big old cracked cakey pile on the inside of the cap. I pulled off the whole hub and got to cleaning with some doomed rags and acetone. The spindle on the driver's side looks really good.

I do not have new seals, and apparently you also are supposed to use new nuts, which I will explain shortly. 

But working heavily on the old grease with acetone and air disposed of most of it, and then it was time for the fun part. 

Back to the nuts. Fiat uses a "preload for dummies" approach which involves torquing to 14.5 ft lbs to seat everything, backing off to 5 ft lbs, then loosening the nut 30° by scribing a mark on the thrust waster midway between corners of the nut then rotating the right corner of that face of the nut over to the scribe mark. Then using a special tool, the nut is staked down over two grooves on the end of the spindle

 

Usually this involves a slightly more sane approach using a castle nut and a cotter pin, but one works with the engineering with which one has been presented. Lacking new nuts or the special Fiat tool, I commenced to hammering with a ball peen and a punch (which I suspect is all the special tool actually is), and after a long while of hammering and having the nut move, I managed to get it staked down to what appears to be an acceptable level, and added a couple of big divots on each side for good measure. Pondering the troubles here though, I held off on side 2 and I think I'm going to order some new spindle nuts. Poking around on Amazon, they say a set meant for Subarus fit a 78 Spider with a 5-speed, so I guess we'll see.

 

There really isn't time to do anything else. I'll repack the passenger side, use the old nut, then just swap them out when the new nuts arrive, and I'll be driving those nuts and not these nuts.  

 

UPDATE: The new nuts didn't fit, oh well. I did the passenger side after dinner today, and found it to be in not great shape. There was red grease squirted in on top of a residue of old black grease, and precious little of both. The seal is probably not working too well any more. I cleaned it out and found a chip out of a roller in the rear bearing as well, but, other than that, things looked ok, and as a bonus it had a very newish-looking nut on that side. So I cleaned everything thoroughly, repacked it all in fresh grease, then found to my utter annoyance that my little torque wrench only clicks one way, and since this is a left-hand thread, no click. (I realized I don't even know if they make double-sided torque wrenches.) I estimated it by tightening it until it just barely took a click to get it off again, and I hope that's close enough for Fiat work. The hub felt ok after that, similar to the driver's side. Surely, he said hopefully, it will last for 1800 miles more. 

 

This concludes the time I have to fix anything, and the car will henceforth have to fend for itself. I feel pretty good about it though. Next is packing and logistics, then the game is afoot. 

sport mode on

 This is the Spider:

 This is the Spider WITH RALLY LIGHTS!!!!!

 It was totally worth all the work. For years I had a single 5-inch Cibie fog light in a box, and one day it occurred to me I should mount a set on the car, in the style of the old 124 Rally cars (well not exactly in the style, but close enough). I poked around on Ebay and saw a single Cibie light for sale cheap, got excited and bought it, and realized when it arrived that I'd purchased a 7-inch light, instead of a 5-inch to match the lonely one I had. So there I was with a set of mismatched lights and a lot of annoyance, but then I found another more-or-less-matched set and picked those up. I had to make a couple of brackets out of angle iron to mount to the bumper, and ran a new circuit and relay from my new power distribution box. 

I got a few cheap round single-pole switches, one of which happened to fit exactly width-wise into one of the unused holes in the console, which i think was originally where power window switches went, and saved me from drilling holes. 

 

 The lights bolted down just fine on the brackets, I wired up the power and switching circuits, and awesomeness ensued. The new alternator still hasn't shown up yet, which is annoying, but I'm going to see if I can order some brushes for one of these broken ones which I think might fix it (but really at some point I should get an oscilloscope). 

feedback

 This is the last bit of time I have to work on the car, and while it's in pretty good shape, the zombie engine problem persists. It only took me a few minutes with the multimeter to find that there is 4-5V remaining on the ignition run terminal of the switch when the key is off, enough voltage to keep the relay activated on the infamous pink wire. (I found that the wire is actually red, just somewhat faded in its run through the engine compartment. Hence it shall be called The Red Wire.)  

The battery light in the gauge cluster remains on while the engine runs, but I found if I pull that bulb out, problem solved and the engine stops on command. (Or if the headlights are on.)  Some Internet chatter indicates some people solve this by putting a diode in the charging circuit, but I think that is just masking the problem.

I am pretty sure this means the alternator has a blown diode and is feeding low voltage back through the charging light into all the unswitched electricals, which includes the ignition circuit due to another butt connector.  Sure are a lot of these things.

I have a couple of spare alternators, but swapping those out only demonstrated that none of this garbage works at all, so I see some Bosch rebuilding experience in my future. 

By some kind of miracle, Autozone had a single remanufactured unit in stock. This is a chancy thing, but it's the only one anyone in town has, so it's arriving tomorrow, and we'll see what we see.
 

the new on/off switch

 Drove it to work today and all is largely well, except the not-turning-off problem persists. Unplugged the now-prominent pink wire, and plugged it back in to start it up and go home. When I got home, I jiggled some things with no pleasing results until I happened to turn on the headlights while the car ran on its mysteriously-powered coil, and the engine died. I found that it won't quit if the lights are off, but if the lights are turned on, it acts normally. I could almost understand it if it's the other way around, but turning the lights on to kill the engine is pretty bizarre. I only have a barely-half-baked theory that there is a voltage leak through the ignition switch that is enough to keep the relay energized, and turning on the light draws it down enough to de-energize the relay. The weather precludes me working on this much until next week, so we'll see what happens. 

bubbles

 The Fiat twin cam cooling system evolved over the years from a thermostat in the head to a three-way setup external to the engine. I don't know the engineering behind it, but when I put the 1972 engine in this 1978 Spider, I decided to convert it over to the external setup since it was then the same as all the other cars, which is useful at times. Once set up correctly, these cars have excellent cooling capabilities - I've never had any issues with it in the summer heat, not even when racing. 

One oddity is that I am not sure where the radiator in this car was originally from because it doesn't actually fit in this car. It's about an inch too narrow.  Someone had (very kindly) given it to me and I had already recored it before realizing with a good deal of aggravation that it seemed to be from a different car. Since the only real problem was that it didn't quite reach the mounting bolt on the passenger side, I just made a spacer for it to bolt it on. I also converted over to a larger (and lighter) fan than the original Fiat metal-framed stocky yellow 4-bladed unit.  I don't like how those aftermarket fans just ziptie to the radiator so I used some more flat stock to make mounts for it. The mounts are ugly, but they work. I might pretty them up at some point, but I doubt it. 

One of the things to be aware of with Spiders is that the radiator is lower than the engine, which leads to problems if you haven't fully bled all the air out of the system. My simple solution is to have a flushing tee in the top heater hose that is the uppermost point of the cooling system. I fill, burp all the hoses, and then top off through the flushing tee, and that does it. 

 The first problem with this new overheating issue was that I, like a big dummy, had installed the thermostat the wrong way round, and it was not in fact stuck closed. There's an arrow pointing at the nominal outlet tee on this thermostat, but turns out that's not actually how it goes. That was easily fixed, but I still had a problem with overheating, and it did not appear the thermostat was opening to allow coolant flow from the lower radiator hose back into the pump.  After a few rounds of careful bleeding, the problem persisted. I theorized that new thermostats (with which I have little familiarity) perhaps seal far too tightly, causing an air bubble in the lower hose that prevented coolant contact with the thermostat, which in turn does not open as it should. 

There's a trick for this, drilling a tiny hole in the thermostat plate to allow air to escape (some other engines have this by design, some even with tiny little float valves to allow air but prevent liquid).  I commenced to drilling, and on the next round everything worked just fine.  

I also fixed the thermoswitch wiring to the fan that was falling off, tidied away the wiring harness, flushed the whole thing and refilled with the green stuff and distilled water, and that little problem appears to have been solved. 

The car has not repeated the ignition malarkey, but I moved the new ignition relay over behind a brace further away from the exhaust, in case heat was causing it to seize up or something. It is more likely that there is some stray voltage through the pink wire, or the ignition switch is not disconnecting cleanly. The power usage of the relay is so much lower than that of the coil, it might be causing some latent electrical shorting issues to be more apparent.

behavioral problems

 I drove the car to work today, and it ran pretty hot, but performed in a considerably more lively manner than it has in the past, with its new ignition relay and some carb tuning.  I arrived at work pondering the growing temperature problem, parked, and turned the key off which to my utter astonishment had absolutely no effect. The car kept on running, in the manner of my old Mercedes diesel with a vacuum leak. Embarrassed, I opened the hood while curious coworkers looked on and made ribald remarks. I tried the first solution I could think of which was to pop off the pink trigger wire to the relay. The engine died and I went on about my day pondering the significance of this event. I could make no sense of it, as the trigger wire powered off the relay when physically disconnected, just as it should have done with the key off. At the end of the day I went out, reconnected the wire, and drove home with the engine still running too hot. The same thing happened when I arrived, but after disconnecting and reconnecting the pink wire, everything worked normally. 

 Mysterious, but I spent a few minutes troubleshooting the overheating problem and soon found (in addition to some slightly janky fan wiring I had done previously) that the new thermostat is stuck closed. The sensation of the fan blowing hot air at the top and cool air at the bottom was a strange one. I'll have to swap that out and see what's up with it, and at this point I might as well flush the cooling system completely.  

the blue vs the yellow

I spent a few minutes attempting to start the car today with no success. You may notice in the previous post that the picture of the new ignition relay shows the yellow wire connected to the positive terminal of the coil. This turns out to be wrong, and it's actually the blue wire that was supposed to be connected, as yellow is normally closed (NC) on that relay and blue is normally open (NO). Fortunately I had the battery disconnected so the coil didn't bathe itself in a warm glow of fire during the overnight chill. I swapped yellow for blue, and the engine started right up. It sounds considerably better with the exhaust leaks fixed (or at least greatly reduced), and the voltmeter now shows a perfectly normal 13.5V with the headlights on. I expect the ignition switch is really happy not to have all that load through it as well. 

While the car warmed up I took the time to fix the burnt-out starboard-side license plate lamp as well. I didn't drive it, but the clutch feels a whole lot better too - it used to be somewhat graunchy which I imagine was the threaded end of the cable scraping over the edge of the throwout lever. 

I'm pondering how to pack the ever-growing list of tools and supplies I'm generating. The Spider has a decently-sized boot for a 2-seater roadster. It also has a weird little rear bench seat, the provenance of which is completely unknown. No one could actually sit there except sideways, as there's no legroom. With snacks, liquids for car and man, parts, and tools, every little nook will be filled. Possibly some bags may be strapped onto the luggage rack, as is right and proper until it rains. 

There is an additional problem.  According to the specifications, the maximum cargo weight of a wooded and watered 1978 Fiat Spider is around 500 lbs. I like ice cream, and my co-pilot is of the same ancient stock, so just the weight of meatbags in the car is north of 400 lbs. I have therefore abandoned my idea to fit the floor jack into the trunk. There isn't any carpet in the car though, so there's that.  

Clutch, exhaust leak, and electrical forays

 I drove the Spider to work one day last week, and it did fine, except that the clutch was starting to feel odd. The release point was moving further and further down the pedal travel, which indicated the cable was slipping or otherwise needed adjustment. I can't remember if I mentioned this, but we replaced the transmission over the summer with one found in someone's garage, and I got second gear back, which is nice. But I assembled the clutch cable connection to the throwout lever wrongly. There's a little ball nut thing that sits against the lever and holds it all nicely, and I'd just put a nut on it.  

I found a ball nut thing in my boxes of Fiat hardware, and reassembled the whole thing properly. 

 While I was crawling around under there, the small exhaust leak has been a big problem. The car has a set of rusty old headers on it, which came I think actually with the car. They have a slip-on connection to the downpipe, and when the engine went in I managed to save them by carefully cutting a slot in each tip and tapping them off. But they didn't go on quite as well. I tried to weld them but I've realized my little 110v MIG welder must have a worn liner as the feed is extremely jerky, and all I get are boogers. Given the rusty state of the headers, it's probably not all my fault. At any rate there are some pinhole leaks left. I decided to try slathering on some exhaust cement and we'll see if that does anything. 

Also while I was doing that, I noticed that the reverse light harness was disconnected. It was a little bit of a hack job, as I have a philosophy about not cutting into the existing car wiring if possible. I'd made a little harness with spade connectors that fit into the factory plug, which I did not have. 

Upon investigation, it was in fact completely gone - all the way up to the connector under the console. The only thing I can think of is that it got caught in the guibo right there which yanked it out and threw it away like the garbage it was.  

I started making a new one, then suddenly realized I had a factory one sitting right in front of me, on the transmission out of the 1979 Spider we picked up in the spring to scrap. It was the older style with the integrated connector to the switch, but a little soldering fixed that, and now it's as it should be, tucked into its retaining clip. 

As I've mentioned, the wiring in these cars is not exactly high-quality. One of the major problems is that most of the key-switched electrical load goes through the ignition switch directly. The switch as a result tends to wear out faster than it should. This car originally came with points, but someone in the past popped in an electronic ignition system, which is nice and has worked great (so far), but they ran the power to it directly off the keyed hot terminal from the ignition switch with a looooong pink wire screwed onto the coil.  I'm sure that puts a bit of a heavy load on the little contactor in the switch. I have been pondering for a long time the benefits of wiring the pink wire up to a relay instead and powering the coil directly from the alternator charging post.  

As I had also planned to hook up the Cibie fog lamps to a relay, I decided to add a new power distribution box. I had one somewhere but couldn't find it, and ordered another 4-pole one. Wires and solder and connectors later, I have the ignition wired up and the light wiring started. I haven't tested any of this yet (or the clutch adjustment) as the exhaust cement is still drying.

Note the cardboard spacer in the coil bracket. This is PO shenanigans, and I think maybe that coil is a points coil. Hopefully it's up to the task of running with full power. I'll throw an extra one in the trunk just in case, as well as a spare pickup.

I turned my attention to some maintenance items, adjusting the valves and swapping out the thermostat that I think is stuck open. Fiat valves use buckets and shims, and adjustments are a matter of measuring clearances and swapping thicker or thinner shims to get the correct clearance. One small problem is that the factory shims tend to have variances of three or four hundredths of a millimeter, and the spec is +/- 5/100ths, so I like to be as precise as I can and measure the actual shim with a micrometer. My micrometer isn't very good though, so occasionally it's slight trial and error. But as it happened, only two exhaust valves and one intake were out of spec, so it wasn't hard. Properly adjusted valves really do make a big difference in how the engine runs.

 There is still some oil residue in the cooling system from the head gasket incident. After replacing the gasket, I flushed the system like mad and tried all sorts of other things like dishwasher detergent to get the oil out, but there's still a coating of it on the inside of the radiator hoses. I guess there's not much to do about it. It's not new, just residual, so I suppose the worst thing is that it may soften my radiator hoses over time. Hopefully water pumps like a little oil in the coolant.

I've only got just about one Sunday left before the rally, but there really isn't that much left to do, assuming I haven't messed anything up further. I have to make brackets for the fog lamps and finish their wiring, then it's fluids, grease, and air in the tires. Oh, and the radio antenna broke off. Might be a couple of weeknights in there but I don't think there's any panic-inducing thoughts intruding yet.  

Memento mori

 I mentioned previously that the red Spider was obtained under depressing circumstances. As the rally date approaches, I wanted to remember a friend of mine who taught me a few things about cars, and especially the lesson of diligence when a task gets difficult. 

I moved to a new city when I was a teenager, out of a small town into one of the largest cities in the nation. I met a gregarious kid at a gathering to which my parents (hoping to instantly socialize me) had sent me. Really lost, and just standing around, I ran into this guy who became a fast friend. Through our young years, our adventures with cars were pretty legendary in hindsight. I think our skins were only saved by having extremely slow machines - I had a 1980 Toyota Celica with a clogged carb and a three-speed automatic, which would do 70 or 80 wide open and almost redlined. He had a 80 or 81 VW Dasher diesel wagon (which I would absolutely love to have these days) that made a whopping 48 horsepower. We were never in any danger, but by gosh we had fun!

There was a road we were often on which had a nice little hill up to a railroad track and a perfect drop on the other side for launching a car at speed. One evening, up to no good, we spent ten minutes in my Celica jumping the car over the railroad track, at a whopping speed of probably 40 or 50 mph.  I noticed this did not improve my car's handling, but it was still pretty memorable.

Time passed, we grew up. I moved away and we were not in as much contact as we used to be. I visited once in a while, and looked at our cars, but the wild times of our youth were gone, and we commiserated over these facts. 

I bought the Spider from a guy on Craigslist which happened to be not far from my friend's house. I drove up on a rainy Saturday, did the deal, and had the car on the trailer when I realized it was only a few minutes out of my way to go visit, and so I did. We chatted, looked at home improvements, but I had an eye on the weather radar and a big fat thunderstorm was rolling in. There I was with a Fiat on a trailer with no top and no windshield, and the issues of moisture in inconvenient orifices was weighing on my mind. I said goodbye, and drove off into the lowering clouds.

 

This was the last time I saw my friend. He had bought a house about half a mile down the road from where we jumped railroad tracks as kids, and a few months after my drive-by visit as he rolled out his garbage cans to the verge, a driver on their phone speeding along the two-lane road struck him and hurled him into the bushes. He survived as a vegetable for another year or so before his family pulled the plug. I visited him shortly before the end, and, not knowing what else to say, talked to him about our multitudinous automotive adventures, some of which make really excellent stories to this day. 

I am saddened by the nature of his passing, and the red Spider continually reminds me of my last visit to his adult life where we as kids went thrill-seeking by jumping slow cars over railroad tracks. I'll be thinking about him on this rally, the jolly kid with the engineering knack who taught me that just keeping at it is usually all it takes to solve a problem. 

Fiat lux

 I had a go at fixing the stripped rear lug by welding it up, drilling, and retapping. It seems to have worked, we'll see if it holds up if i need to take the wheel off again. 

Fiat wiring is notoriously bad - it's generally undersized and over the 47 years and multiple hardships this car has suffered, the grounds are corroded and things just don't volt up like they were designed to do. Also I realized the battery I remembered just buying is 3 years old now and suffering somewhat. I replaced the clock with a voltmeter, and during the drive yesterday with the headlights on and wipers going, I saw the voltage was not exactly where I would wish. The car has one of the slightly larger 65 amp alternators, but the voltage was sitting at about 11.5-12 V, so I think the battery hasn't held up on the top end, and the lights, radiator fan, wipers, and  battery requirements pretty much kill the spare capacity.

I'll pick up a new battery, but the headlights have always been fairly bad and I found a set of Grote LED round DOT lights for not a particularly reasonable price. I swapped in the LED lights and also did the side markers and taillights.

 They work great. It is a little sad that they're super white and flash instantly on, bam, there is light instead of the timely glow of the halogens. But I'll be able to see where I'm going, and the voltmeter is sitting above 12v volts now. Still need a new battery, but the electrical load should be more suited to the elderly wiring. 

So, at this stage, I really just have the exhaust leak to fix, replace the panhard rod, then it's maintenance items. The passenger mirror is tightened down, the sun visors don't flop down in your face any more, and the turn signal wiring is nicely soldered down. It is still running a little rich but nothing terrible. I want to install the set of Cibie driving lights I found, and maybe get some better speakers working for the radio, but the big stuff on the list is just about done.

Signals, indicators, and wires

 Raining some today so I don't want to pull the other car out of the garage and watch it rust in front of my eyes. So I worked on some easy tasks, mainly getting the dash indicator lights working and fixing the right front turn signal that is weirdly dim and non-cooperative at times. 

The dash lights were easy - the indicator bulbs had just fallen out of their sockets, and they were swapped all around anyway. Of the three indicators (headlights,turn signal indicator (which is two arrows, but one light), and high beam indicator), literally every one was in the wrong socket in the gauge. Easy fix. 

 

    Investigating the front turn signal was more interesting. This one was on the car when I got it, and I realized it was some janky wiring probably at fault. Someone in the past had used some butt connectors to splice wires, and as I think of those things as butt-terrible connectors, that was an obvious place to start. As I was uploading the picture below, I realized it shows the common ground is disconnected. As the side marker and parking light/turn signal still worked, it must have been finding a bad ground someplace else. Probably I could have just plugged that back in and fixed the issue, but I really hate butt connectors.

 

 

There is another little mystery here, which is the disconnected harness that on the wiring diagram goes to the driver's side headlight. But why this is on the passenger side, and disconnected, and the headlights still work is a problem for another distant day. 

I removed the whole harness and put new connectors on, and everything worked much better.  

In the afternoon I drove it across town, about 60 miles round trip on the highway, in a light rain and it did fine. The windshield wipers work but only on one speed (which is fine, RainX solves a lot of problems). I think the thermostat is stuck open. The handling is a little sensitive, and I have a new panhard rod to install to see if that damps it down a little. It's not bad though, and the ride itself is much better after the A-arms and alignment. It's noisy, and there is a small exhaust leak that leaves one smelling like Italian cars - burnt oil and unburned gas, with an an undertone of anxiety - but I feel ok about a long road trip in it once the few remaining small items are cleared up.

 

Tomorrow - see if I can fix the stripped rear lug and install the new LED headlights. 

Through the fire and flames

Went out today to replace the cracked fuel line, which in any sane scenario is about a 90-second job, it's just a 5/16ths rubber fuel hose between a backflow valve and the intake of the fuel pump. Two clamps and boogedy boogedy let's go racing.

Apparently, I had installed the fuel pump before i put the manifold on, and the clamp on the line was facing into a blind corner where I could not get a screwdriver or a wrench or a pair of pliers or anything on it. In restrospect I probably could have applied (considerably) more force to twist it around to where I could get at it, but the fuel pump itself is really easy to remove and I only tried a little until I figured I'd just take ten more minutes to take it off, replace the gaskets, put on the missing lock washers, and otherwise do it right. This I did. 

 

How nice. 

When all was properly and carefully reassembled, I went to start the car. Note "carefully". The fuel pump on this engine is the mechanical one, dead simple except that the pump lever can get stuck off to one side of the cam (run by an auxiliary cog and shaft off the timing belt) and miss out on all the cam action. I knew this and was as careful as I could installing it under the manifold with the hoses attached.

With all the fuel in the line having drained and the pump needing to prime, I got some carb cleaner to use as starting fluid and sprayed it fairly generously into the secondary. I cranked away and it caught and ran for a second, then died, and I sprayed some more and attempted to start it again. This time, it backfired and set the carb on fire, which immediately spread to the air filter pan. 

I'm not a carb expert at all, my other cars are all fuel-injected. But I know enough from episodes of Roadkill and old John Deakin columns on AVWeb that when there is an intake fire, you just keep cranking until it goes out. So I did not let off the starter, and the car didn't start, and the fire just stayed, burning off the extra carb cleaner, and I was starting to get a little anxious when it backfired again and shot burning carb cleaner or fuel out all over and things began to get really exciting. I jumped out and in a panic tried to blow it out, and then realized the whole side of the engine was on fire under the manifold and the oil residue was starting to burn. In the space of two or three seconds the flames began to mount and were now rising to about halfway up the hood. 

I ran back to the trunk to grab the fire extinguisher, and only when I got there did I realize I'd left the keys in the ignition. I darted back and grabbed them, opened the trunk, grabbed the fire extinguisher which is bungeed to the jack mount, and the bungee was tangled around the pin and the extinguisher mount. I managed finally to get it free, yanked the pin while running back to the front where the fire was smoking blackly and gave it a half-second burst which immediately put out the flames.  

All this probably took about 30 seconds. Except for the scorched emergency hood release cable which had been lying across the edge of the air filter pan, there did not appear to be any damage except to my ego. There was cornstarch all over the engine and carburetor  that I washed off with a hose. So the lesson here (which has not yet endeth) is that starting fluid is evil. 

I took the pump off again and tested it, and it pumped fine, so it was pretty obvious that the aforementioned cam bypass problem had occurred. I spent about two hours trying to get that stupid pump positioned correctly, but every time for some reason the lever ended up on the side of the cam. I finally took the hoses back off and tried it that way, put the hoses and clamps on by touch, and that did the trick. I guess some tension from the hoses made it hard to align the pump properly, and I ended up pretty much back where I should have started, getting the intake clamp lined up correctly to tighten down.  In retrospect I ignored a key Law of Fiats - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I could have probably gotten a pair of needlenose on the troublesome clamp and managed to turn it enough to get the screwdriver on it, but I got ambitious. 

I decided to keep the 13" BWAs and got two new tires shipped from online to install at the cheap red place. Yesterday, I waited there a ridiculously long time to mount and balance tires on two loose wheels, with an appointment and all. They also refused to mount one of the existing tires (not old and not worn out, although the other one had suffered from the bad alignment from the old A-arm on that side) on the spare rim. I ended up going to the tire shop down the street and paying them cash to mount and balance the spare, which was not only less than the red place but they did it in about 6 minutes. 

It also turns out that at some point some dolt who owns both Fiats and Mercedes mixed up Fiat and Mercedes lug bolts, which are different thread pitches, and this is likely the cause of my stripped left rear lug threads. I also had a bad one that had suffered abuse, but the threads chased up ok and I was able to torque it down. 

 

 

For the remaining stripped hole I'm going to try welding up the threads then re-drilling and tapping (it uses the same 12 x 1.25 size I got for the A-arm bolts, and the one tiny intellectual triumph to which I can lay claim in this whole debacle is that I got both the tap and the die in that size last weekend).

This weekend was ridiculous and I am fairly annoyed with myself and that tire chain, but all is well that ends well, the car did not burn down, and there was progress. So there it is.