Waiting for a nice day

The 308 is back on four wheels. Below is a good shot from the wheelwell opening where you can barely see the front of the alternator. After the alternator, I needed to hook up the coolant line again and refill the cooling system. While the sounds like a pretty simple task, it's actually a bit involved. Because the 308 radiator is in the front and the engine in the back, there is a lot of plumbing. When I filled the system before, I used over 5 gallons of coolant. I only partially drained the system but it still took almost three gallons. Also, because there is so much plumbing, all the air needs to be bled. There is a bleed screw in the thermostat housing and one at the radiator. Both of these need to be opened to make sure all the air is out. It generally takes a few bleed cycles to get all the air out so I'll need to check for air the next few times I run the engine.



The other thing I wanted to work on was the antenna. This car originally had a semi-automatic antenna. This was operated by a separate three-position switch on the console. Not all power antennas are the same. An automatic antenna has two wires. One requires a constant 12 volts and the other is the control; when the control wire gets power, the antenna goes up. When power is switched off, the antenna goes down. A semi-automatic antenna also has two wires, but each wire controls direction. When one wire is powered and the other grounded, the antenna goes up. When the wire is grounded and the other powered, the antenna goes down. The original switch reversed the polarity to make the antenna go up and down. Somewhere in the past, both the original antenna and the original switch were swapped out. However, it was never hooked up correctly and the antenna didn't work.



Apparently, semi-automatic antennas are really hard to find these days. Because of the somewhat complex wiring, nearly everyone uses fully automatic antennas. I bought a pair on eBay a while back, but I found out today that they're trashed and unusable. The original antenna switch is also impossible to find so I decided to just make do with what I've got. I opened up the console to get to the back of the replacement switch. Modifying the wiring ended up being pretty simple. I just split the power lead to feed the antenna as well as the switch. Now the antenna goes up and down so I'll actually get some radio reception.

It's been raining cats and dogs so I'm still grounded for now. I hope it stops soon!