Unfortunately this weekend wasn’t quite as productive as I hoped, but I did manage to get some work done on the car between having to shop for parts, the crappy weather, seeing Iron Man, and a visit to the ER last night.
Yeah, the ER. Read on for pictures of what I did get done, as well as THAT story.
So, first things first. The ER.
So I was under the car yesterday afternoon doing some plumbing work on the clutch slave cylinder. I slid out on the creeper and sat up. Unfortunately the particle board I’m using for a work surface on the sawhorses was the scrap left over from making the body buck. The end near the front of the car sticks out a good bit. I sat up and blindly cracked my skull into it with quite a bit of force. Now, I hit my head pretty often working on the car, but this was right at the soft spot of the temple which is a fairly dangerous place to take a hard blow.
I got up, continues working on the car for a bit but the side of my head was really swelling up and bizarrely my teeth were hurting, and it was hurting my jaw to open my mouth.
I went inside and after about a half hour I texted Jen to come on over and go with me to the ER because I was really swollen and I basically couldn’t open my mouth anymore.
We went up to a local hospital, which was nice because it was quiet and quick to get into. The PA who looked at me didn’t think I had any symptoms suggesting any neurological issues warranting a CAT scan or an MRI, but though I’d managed to pretty brutally hit a nerve bundle that runs close to the surface there. She thought the nerve irritation was probably causing what amounted to a muscle cramp in my jaw.
A shot of an anti-inflammatory, a Valium as a muscle relaxer and a (admittedly VERY long overdue) tetanus shot (with an added benefit of a vaccine for Whooping Cough) and I was out of there, rather… um… buzzed on the Valium. I don’t drink or anything, so I was pretty messed up. Not fun.
Anyway, its still pretty tender today. I have a prescription for more Valium but that stuff just screwed me up, so I’d rather be sore. My jaw still hurts.
So, thats the ER story.
What else did I do? Well first off I installed the drive shaft. I had to unbolt the tail of the transmission and jack it up a few inches to get clearance but I got it in.
I also took a drive down to Indy Auto Parts in Beverly, MA. Its a long drive, but for some reason I just plain can’t find a store in NH that sells race parts. I needed some -3AN fittings to get a flex line run from the bulkhead down to the slave cylinder for the clutch. It took a bit of work but I got that line all in just before I brained my damage.
Today I’d hoped to get some miscellaneous work done — mount the radiator, move the lines from the brake reservoirs to the master cylinders and I really wanted to swap the left and right brake/hub/rotor assemblies in the rear to try to improve the brake line routing.
As you can see here, I moved the three lines from the larger of the footbox openings to the smaller. I believe the smaller one is meant for a wiring harness, but I’m wiring things very differently and don’t need it. This meant going and buying another 3/8″ line, though, as the clutch line was too short to reroute.
I have a 4″ rubber grommet from Seals-It that I’m going to use to cover that opening. Its flexible and I can poke/cut holes in it to feed things through while keeping the footbox a bit more airtight.
I also started to take apart the rear end to swap them left and right. I hadn’t torqued anything down in the rear so it was easy to take it all apart. While doing that I noticed/remembered that I had the wrong spacer washers from Factory Five to shim the shocks, and they’ve had problems with the shock shafts breaking without them. I’ll have to call Factory Five to try to get ones in the hope they’ll fit. Only two of the ones they sent before actually fit.
Because of that, I left the rear end disassembled. Once I get those washers, I’ll get it back together and torque things down this time. I did start installing rod end seals, as well, which will help keep dirt out of the mechanism.
The differential also got filled with Royal Purple gear oil.
Unfortunately, with the exception of getting the lower radiator mount painted, I didn’t get any radiator work done this weekend.