Got to Drive It to Find More Problems

Vince drove the car home, about 15 miles.  Good news - engine ran fine and stayed cool.  Bad news - front brakes got super hot and made awful noise when pushing on pedal.  We've seen this before - the pistons in the calipers have corrosion on them, making them stick and apply pressure on the pads while driving.  We got new calipers and brake pads from Autozone at a very competitive price, no shipping.  Also found the clutch slave didn't have the flexible line installed on the correct port, putting the line in a bind (saw same problem on our club project car, line starts leaking in about 2 years).  So Vince was able to install brake calipers/pads, then bleed clutch and brake systems.

The seats were still not right.  We had bent the frames to remove some of the excessive backward leaning from the rear end collision.  But it was not enough, esp on the driver's seat.  Here's what it looks like now:

This looks and feels normal.  The driver's seat back was simply not hitting the lower seat frame correctly.  Normally there are two 5/16 inch bolts that screw into the bottom of the seat back and their heads engage with the lower seat to allow adjustment of the rear seat angle.  Where the bolts thread into the seat back was out of position enough that the bolts did not hit the seat bottom frame.  So we fabricated a bracket which bolted to the bottom of the seat back using the original mounting nuts, then installed new 5/16 inch bolts in the bracket at a new angle so they hit the seat bottom.  Lot cheaper than new seat frame, and seems to work very well:

Ray's been out of town, Vince has had a lot of small trips, need to drive the car some more and see what else we need to address.  We know the speedometer doesn't work, root cause is a 90 degree drive that is stripped (we got a used replacement, it was stripped too).  Steering system seems to have too much slop - might be wear in the U joint in the steering column, need two people to diagnose this correctly.

Summer heat and travels make this a slow time of year for progress, but we feel confident it will be ready by our local club's annual car show in September!