Slow boat to somewhere

Yeah, I wouldn't say I've been 'busy' with the car... but I lean on it and look at the engine every once in a while.  ;-)

Seriously, though, I drained the transmission fluid and cleaned up the trans cover.  I know it doesn't sound like much but it looks better with that clean pan under there.  I had hopes of painting it to practice my painting 'skills' but didn't.  I've been trying to locate a car wash with the manual wands and whatnot that I can take parts to for degreasing rather than in my sink, haven't found one yet.  I have a line on one, though.  If I want to paint the transmission after I have it out and cleaned up, we'll see about it then.

I kind of attacked the exhaust manifolds with a wire attachment on the drill, ostensibly as prep to paint it silver.  I read further and I'm going to hold off until I can degrease them in a car wash instead.  No rush.

I finally caved and just cut the wire to the oil pressure sending unit so I could have the wiring harness totally disconnected from the engine.  Then I found where the last wire was going, it was connected to the transmission, so I got that disconnected too, wiring harness totally off.

I ground out some rust on the interior, pulled off another seat belt and attacked the foam holding one of the rear seat belts in place... turns out that's about all that was holding it in, it's totally rusted solid and just came out.  I'll need to weld in a nut to the sheet metal I fabricate for those corners in order to have something to bolt the rear seat belts into... and added the rear belts to the 'need new parts' list.

I was going to disconnect the shift linkage from the tranny but... I can't see how to do it.  Where it looks like it would be convenient to disconnect it, there are no bolts or nuts or screws, it's just what looks like a sealed ball joint kinda thing.  So I laid on my back, cigar smoke wafting through the rusted hole in the floor, gazing at the shift linkage and then up through the floor at the underside of the dashboard.

Back topside, I took the ignition coil and choke off of the intake manifold.  The coil has a crack on it... another 'replace this' item.  The choke has a bimetallic coil in it that's all rusted.  I wonder how much that costs... if it's like ten bucks, I'll replace it.

Now that so much is taken off, I look at it and think 'what was there?'  I have great faith that when I'm putting everything back together (hopefully next spring), I'll either remember or figure out what order to go in... ;-)