A little bit of progress on the car this week.

I can't honestly remember the last time I blogged about the car project. I had big plans to really make the most of the summer days to work work work.
Alas, the summer heat, inside my grungy carport with little room to move, proved less than motivational.

Then the mishap with the wrong sized front rotors threw me for a loop...

Then the ol' gal passing away...

It was a rough month, August.

But now here we are in September. And I am able to go about my daily business, not grieving for our lost pet, but fondly remembering her silliness and love.

So, I should be out there working, right!?

Well, those glorious cooler days (I say cooler, but I just mean less humid) are over for another week! It's so yucky to me that I can't move. I can barely blink my eyes.
And after Saturday, my in-laws will be here and expect every minute of the following 2 weeks to be for them.

I must say, here, that I love my in-laws. They are wonderful people but of a different generation. It is mostly funny how they still treat my Hubs (at age 48) as if he was still 12, but sometimes it is frustrating and it gets exhausting.
Luckily, I have a camping weekend to look forward to on the very day they are leaving!

However...there has been work done on the car, despite all set backs and nonsense.
The new tank is finally in!

That is, it's finally in AGAIN.

Hubs & I had it in weeks ago, but then I remembered that the pipe that actually gets the gas into the tank still needed to be put back in. That caused all sorts of trouble for me, and I abandoned the project until I had time and the right frame of mind.
That was Saturday.

This is how we left it the first time we attempted it...

You can see, at the top left, that the end of the pipe does not meet up with the hole on the body of the car.
And to get that lined up, the pipe needs to get into the tank gasket at the other end so that everything can go back in it's place.
The trouble is that the gasket was too tight for the pipe. My arms were bruised from shoulder to wrist from the pushing and using my body against the car as leverage.

this is actually the gasket I ended up using, but an illustration of how far the pipe would go in the old gasket

It was no use, the gasket simply did not fit the pipe. I was pretty sure I had the wrong sized gasket.

Wrong sized parts are not new to me, with this car.

So when Hubs went to work Saturday, I was determined to fix this. Many people on the car forums I read were saying to use a jack with the tank at the proper angle to slip the pipe into the hole, and as you slowly jack up the tank, it will go into place.
I even got out my shop lamp that throws off a lot of heat and set that up in the trunk to try to warm up the rubber.
It was not working and I nearly crushed my tank, as I jacked it up against the frame rail...luckily, I realized my error before too late.

Brilliant girl that I am, I thought I'd check my old gas tank to see if the old gasket was there and I could compare sizes...it was not. However, I did then remember that I had accidentally purchased this current gasket because I had forgotten one I'd bought back when I bought the gas tank!

So I had the idea to put the other new gasket on the filler neck to stretch it a bit...
It was then that I said to myself, 'why not just take that one out of the tank now since this stretched one will be the one you end up using'...

That was when I saw for sure that the gasket I was attempting to use was just too big and rigid, compared to the other one I had.

In the above photo, the orange line represents how far the pipe must go into the tank...the pink line indicates the very end of the pipe, minus the little luge part that extends into the tank.
The purple is the gasket I ended up using, while the blue is the one I struggled with for hours the first day and then another hour this weekend.
I honestly struggled to put the gasket on the pipe without the tank, so you can imagine how pointless it was when the gasket was made more rigid by the metal tank restricting it.

I decided then that I was just gonna try the other gasket...I stuck it in the tank hole and it slipped right in (the other one was even hard just at that stage!)...and I sighed as I thought this one was TOO loose!

Figuring the pipe would go in and stretch the gasket and tighten the seal, I went back to the set up of the tank hanging at an angel with a jack at the end to slowly slide it up into position, causing the pipe to just slip right in.

And it worked!

It took about 20 minutes!!
After multiple days of several hours of pain and sweat and desperation...it was a 20 minute project!

All the new screws are in on the new neck collar (I forget what it's actually called but it's the black rubber collar to keep the vent tube in place and road dirt from inside the trunk).
I had one other little moment of anxiety when the new screws for the gas cap didn't seem to want to go in, but I just used the old screws and moved on.

So now that that's in, and I got the new smaller rotors, I don't really have any excuse to not get working on that front brake nonsense. I'm anxious to deal with the torsion bars again, as they are an important and annoying part of the suspension, but also know to snap unexpectedly. And since this car is old, has been sitting, and knowing my track record here, I am just hoping I can get through this next stage and get to the engine.

Now I'm off to make some lists...car, house, 'diet' (the more I do, the less I eat!)...
Enjoy whatever it is you are up to on this Labor Day Monday!