Lots o’ new parts

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Got some painting done on the brackets and other bits I unbolted from the back of the Jeep.  This is all ready to go back in the car.

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The new power brake booster showed up as well.  This one is much larger than the one in the car.  I will have to take the master cylinder out and tweak the brake lines to make it fit.  More on that later.

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This is the gasket the goes around the fuel filler hole in the floor.

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I decided to put in new fuel gauge sender.  Looks nice.

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So here is the first problem.  The pickup tube uses a different size hose bib than the one off the old tank.  I will have to do some hose size adapting to make this work.

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So here is the next problem.  The sender is just a hair to large to fit in the hole.  I thought about trimming the return tube a bit shorter but that seemed stupid. After all it is a plastic tank…

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This little notch is all it took to make the sender fit.  I did it with a razor blade and yes, I did catch the little bit of plastic so it did not fall in the tank.

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Obviously with a plastic tank we will need a ground wire.  Anyway it got late and I am tired.  Enough for tonight.

 

Frustrating day…

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This morning I decided to get the Jeepster running right.  I hooked up a vacuum gauge and time light and started the engine.  It fired right up.  I warmed up the engine then tried to get the low idle right.  The engine ran like crap at low RPM but I got the timing nailed and went to adjust the mixture.  As soon as I tried to turn one of the mixture knobs the engine died and would not run at all.  I was just about to rip the carb apart then I decided to try spraying some carb cleaner in there.  Surprisingly that worked.  I was just starting on tweaking the idle mixture when I realized the inductive pickup from the timing light had fallen on the exhaust manifold.

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Dammit!  I have had this timing light since I was a teenager and have never damaged it on an engine.  It still works but I am using a bit of twist-tie to hold it on the spark plug wire.  At this point it was getting really hot in the garage and I was tired for fighting with this engine so I just shut it down.

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I also saw that a bunch of crap was in the fuel filter.  I flushed everything out except the fuel pump and the stupid little gas tank I am using.  I cleaned out the filter.  All I need is more crap in the carb.

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Rachael and I have been making progress on cleaning up the fuel tank area.  The undercoating did its job well and the rust is pretty minimal in the undercoated areas.  But they did not do a good job getting undercoating in a lot of areas like the reinforcement bits that run across the body.

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More clean and unclean areas.  We have found the secret to getting the undercoating off is heat.  We warm the area for 5-10 seconds with a propane torch then peel the undercoating off with a putty knife.

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There are a lot of blind and hard to get to areas too.  This one is on either side of the rear crossmember and the rear bumper bolts go in the shinier hole down there.

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Here Rachael is using a rust converter product on all the gas tank and bumper brackets.  After they dry we will paint them.

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Just in time too.  The new gas tank showed up today.  It looks a hell of a lot better than the old one.