open world boundary

 We popped energetically out of bed (not really), packed up our stuff, and rescued the Spider from where it had been parked in the nice garage out of the weather that had rolled in overnight. The green turtle shell tied to the luggage rack had now been hanging out in the wind for 528 miles, but seemed ok, as did the rest of the car. I checked fluids and the oil was down a little but not much, still sitting at about 3/4 the way up.  The 53-year-old engine lit off just fine (twin cams go brrrrr) and we finished solving the packing jigsaw puzzle while it warmed up. It was still fairly cold and sprinkling some, so we left the top up and started out on the second leg of our journey, only to hit a looooong slow train at just about our first intersection. Laredo really moves at a different pace, and we were there a while, during which time the copilot expressed a mighty need for breakfast tacos.  We hit the remaining checkpoint from the day before, and then a somewhat lengthy stop at Los Jacales occurred, but it was worth it as they provided some good tacos and filled my thermos flask with hot chocolate. 

We reached the first real checkpoint of the day, the Jesús Treviño Rancho in San Ignacio, where we saw the biggest saguaro cactus I've probably ever seen in my life.

 I had been worrying about the state of the shifter ever since it lost touch with reality the day before, and I saw a nice flat empty parking lot near the rancho and decided it was much easier to stop and check than to have to cram all those silly pieces back together a second time. Instead of cranking away with the hand ratchet on the jack, we used the impact on it to raise the car, which was noisy but satisfyingly fast. After bracing up with a jackstand (actually the jackstand, since only one would fit in the trunk), I got the lower cover plate off, retorqued the offending nut (which appeared to be just fine), screwed the plate back on, and we repacked while talking to another team who had stopped their 90s Corvette near us to check on us and eat their own tacos. 

 

This was really the last time I had the tools out, and the only remaining maintenance I did on the car for the rest of the weekend was adding a little oil just for peace of mind. (One might think this is a spoiler, but it really is not.) As we hit checkpoints throughout the day, the car really seemed to improve in the way of power. At some point it started developing passing torque available in 5th gear, which was a novelty. It idles a little too high and there is a slight bog on acceleration, not to mention I smell a little oil burning on deceleration from worn valve seals. But it really ran astonishingly well. I theorized that the rubber plugs in all the unused vacuum ports on the 1979-ish peak-of-the-malaise-era carburetor were just vulcanizing themselves into place and sealing all the vacuum leaks. It's also possible there was a dead rat or something in a pipe somewhere that got blown out. This is not unprecedented  but I did not ask myself too many questions about it.

We hit the checkpoints in Zapata and Roma, saw the border wall and Mexico across the fields and the Rio Grande south, and stopped for tacos at La Barquita in Roma. We accidentally ordered four taco meals instead of two, and tacos were thusly breakfast, lunch, and dinner this day. The bartender at La Barquita was squeezing limes for margaritas, of which she invited us to partake, but we recalled Rally Master Jeff's admonition about drinking and driving and politely declined. 

Carrying the large load of tacos in the space under the passenger's knees, we headed on to the big detour for extra points, from Roma to the beach at South Padre. This was a ~135 mile leg through a lot of border towns, many of which I had never visited. We passed a customs and border patrol checkpoint headed south. 

We arrived at South Padre and drove onto the beach (after being charged twelve bucks for the privilege of making my car rust faster). The challenge here was to build a sand castle, and there were more points for building it off the beach, but we did both by building one on the boot lid and driving off with it. The castle stayed in form for a surprisingly long time as we drove off down the beach road, and the sand never would blow off. I had to take it off in heaping handfuls and contribute it to a gas station lawn in Port Isabel. Sand remains on the boot lid to this day, which says something about the poor aerodynamic design choices. 

We were running into the late afternoon by this time. We decided to skip the checkpoint in Falfurrias, and headed another ~135 miles back up to Kingsville to find a jet mounted on a pole. On the way we hit another border patrol checkpoint, where this time the agent was obviously somewhat new and completely confounded by not only the car but the sand on the trunk and our statements of our origin and recent destinations. But they let is through sand and all and we continued on to Kingsville. 

The sun was well set by the time we arrived, and we were in a hurry, but Kingsville turned out to be a hard nut to crack. We came in on the north side of a big expo center and drove around the rough roads in the dark, looking for the landmark, but in spite of driving as slowly and looking as suspicious as possible, we neither found the pole nor attracted police who may have directed us (or not). We finally found the plane on the Google satellite view, but it was in the back of a park, adjacent to the expo center, so we drove back out of the expo grounds and west on Escondido Road till we found the park entrance. 

It was by now pitch black, and the park was not well-lit - in fact, the only light came from about four streetlights placed along the main park road that looked like they'd had the same bulbs since LBJ. We drove along the badly maintained road, trying to make our way east to the back of the park in the darkness, when the headlights picked out the figure of a man walking along the verge through the park, wearing a hoodie. He was uninterested in our shenanigans however and we felt the same, so we gave him a wide berth and continued on into the impenetrable darkness.  I was quite grateful for the big Cibies I had installed to augment the headlights. 

We passed the soccer fields and I found another rocky road that appeared to go further west, and took it. It led around past what looked like ball fields and then curved south, right to the jet mounted on a pole. We lit it up with the headlamps and got our picture.

The road we came in on remained a two-rut track past the airplane and I assumed it connected back to the slightly larger road we had come in on past the ball fields just west of the plane. So we continued on, and the track got smaller and smaller and petered out completely a hundred yards or so past the plane, except for what looked like a mown swathe of slightly shorter grass. I kept on, but the woods were approaching and I thought I saw where the mown area ran along their edge, still going more or less the right direction. Not giving up, I followed the short grass until it disappeared too and we were driving through tall grass. The ball fields were still there to our north, and I knew the track past them was still ahead. We kept on, drove across some kind of rocks or concrete rubble that felt suspiciously like a drainage area, and found ourselves back on the actual track upon which we had come in with all four tires still holding air. 

This search consumed a pretty solid 45 minutes, and we still had five checkpoints to go. These turned out to be a little easier to find, being an old mercantile in Alice, a church in Robstown, and then three close together in Corpus Christi ending with the Lexington, with the trip meter turning over to zero about a mile short of the ship. It was by now after 10 PM. I realized I had made a strategic error and booked the hotel that was on the beach about 30 minutes south of the Lexington, so we had to suffer through 26 miles of Saturday night Corpus Christi traffic. But we made it, with the odometer reading 1,028 miles from my garage Friday morning. Some of the other teams had arrived well before us and were being raucous in the beach bar. We joined them for a short period but then retired. I had to return to the Spider for my toothbrush, where I found the party continuing in the parking lot where they were drawing rude pictures on the Lemons cars' windows in the mist forming from the heavy drizzle moving in. 

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 1973 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 entire shifter including the loose top 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 transmission, 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.