[IronCanine]

Since I always take The Facts of Life approach with this thread and post the Good with the Bad...I thought you'd get a kick out of this pic. We were topping off the transmission...literally minutes from putting her in gear for the first time and pulling her out under her own power when we sprang a leak in that brand new radiator core, that had taken two attempts to get rebuilt right. After staring in disbelief for a while and doing the math, considering the mess we were going to have to manage...we bit the bullet and pulled her out. Amazingly, they were able to get it neatly repaired today and the radiator was getting re-prepped and re-painted by 4pm. This is after a late call last night when the brake situation finally got solved. We went through about 5 unions, hand to bend and flare a new hard line (the main long one on the frame), and bought a new rear flex line before we got her dry and bled. In the end I am happy the frame got powder coated. It weathered that unnecessarily arduous and frustrating episode unscathed.

Even though the old girl doesn't seem to want this party to end...there is a silver lining. We needed to clean and detail the engine bay anyway, she'd gotten a little dusty of late...and I had ordered a replacement crank pulley set earlier in the week. I realized a while ago that the set I had powdered coated was from a later model and didn't allow us to run the A/C off the crank and water pump....only the water pump, which wasn't going to be a good long term solution. I just wasn't looking forward to biting that bullet either. Well there's no better time than now to make that swap too.

Maybe she drives tomorrow...maybe not. I'll keep you posted.