Lots of updates

Even though I've not had a chance to post, I have been making steady progress on the car. The first thing was to clean up the license plate light lenses and get new bulbs. The lenses are held into the housings with rivets, and I had to remove them (which basically destroyed them). I used pop rivets to put them back together. Not original, but who's going to care?



Next was to to try out the Colortune system. I pulled out one of the plugs on the rear bank and as you can see, it's pretty dark indicating running rich.



I put in the glass-top Colortune plug and started the engine. It's amazing to be able to look into the plug tunnel and see the actual ignition flame. Please excuse the bad photos as I wasn't able to hold the camera still. It seems I was pretty close in my initial tuning as there is a nice bluish flame indicating a correct mixture.



As an experiment, I adjusted the mixture to see what would happen. As I made the mixture more rich, I could see the flame go from blue to orange. I then adjusted the mixture back down to my starting point at blue. As another experiment, I slowly revved the engine, and it really was amazing to see the color change through the RPMs. In the end, I basically left the mixture where it was when I started. I think it's still a little rich, but the engine seems to run well that way. I think the plugs are so dark because all I've really done so far is idle the engine. When I'm able to drive the car, I'll plug the plugs to re-assess.



Next were the mirrors. The car originally had a single Vitaloni Californian mirror on the driver's side. At some point, the previous owner installed Vitaloni Baby Turbos on both sides. These are smaller more "euro" looking mirrors, but I didn't like them. I decided to return to the Californians for both sides. I think they look a lot better on the car than the Baby Turbos.



I'm really close to being done on the interior. All the remaining pieces have been recovered and installed, and I also installed the door thresholds. It's looking really sharp now. I still need to do more cleaning inside and re-install some of the carpet. I also need to have a look a the underside of the passenger's seat as the sliding mechanism doesn't latch correctly.



Next in line is to fix the rear license plate attachment points so I can reattach the plate. I also need to re-attach the carpet in the "trunk" (if you can call it that). After that's done, I'm going to clean the car, touch up some chips and buff out the paint.

The weather seems to finally be getting nicer. I think tomorrow I'm going to call my insurance company and have the car removed from "lay up" status to full coverage. My maiden voyage is approaching fast!