It's time for another update, this one being a big one.
Firstly, I got the freeze plugs in, I ended up having to take the odd one to a machine shop and got it matched up with a metric one. After that was done, I got the exhaust manifolds on and booked it in for safety. Two nights before it was scheduled, I started hearing a rattling sound coming from inside the manifold, the emissions valve thing had broke, so off the manifold came. I got the shaft and butterfly valve out, then tapped the holes and blocked them off with some bolts. The manifolds went on again, this time with a massive leak. Turns out the manifold-downpipes gaskets Napa sells don't fit, so I used up my remaining gasket maker on that.
It went in for safety, and failed. But the only place to go from failure, is to win.
The safety man said that I needed a new idler arm (hence the previous postings), a new upper ball joint, a new rear seatbelt, and a small hole patched in the rear wheel well. That all sounded pretty straight forward, oh boy was I wrong. I got a seatbelt for a '75 Impala from "Retrobelt", and it fit perfectly. The hole in the wheel well was a very easy fix.
The idler arm (once I got a good one) was also pretty decent, but the journey to get it wasn't. I had originally ordered my Moog one from Autozone, which doesn't ship to Canada, so a ~6 hour drive to the States happened. When I found out that one was bad, I looked on Autozones's website once again and found a different looking one, one from "Rare Parts Manufacturing", ordered that in, and drove to the States again only to find out that it's the exact same part. So after some fiddling with my existing idler arm, I found out that I had to order another, so I went to P-S-T's website, ordered one, and somehow, unbeknownst to me, the order got denied. I found that out on a Friday evening so had to wait until Monday to call to order over the phone. Phoning to order was a breeze too, super easy, and it got delivered far ahead of schedule, it also went on without any difficulties.
The ball joint was a whole different story. I already had a new ball joint lying around, but I didn't have the socket to remove it, so I made my own, and it worked like a champ. While getting the old ball joint out, I stripped the threads on the control arm, so I had to source a new one of those. Turns out, "National Moparts" had one and they're not too far from where I live. So after a trip there, I walked away with a used control arm and some new bushings. The control arm still had a bushing and a half in it as well as its old ball joint. That quickly became one of my least favourite jobs to do on the car. Drilling out the old bushings wasn't very much fun, and taking the ball joint out was even less fun. I soaked it in penetrant for two days, heated and shock-cooled it at least 6 times, sprayed it with more penetrant, and the breaker bar wouldn't get it to budge. I used probably a total of 6' of cheater bars and set it up in the bench vise so I would do basically a squat to loosen it. I can squat a decent amount and that thing still didn't move. I ended up beating it really hard with a hammer for 10 minutes straight, then I could finally loosen it. The new one went in without really any drama.
With that all done I booked it in again and just had to wait, until the morning it was supposed to get picked up of course. That was the same day I headed back off to college so I was on a time crunch. The horn decided to stop working, it blew the fuse. I scrambled around looking for my spare fuses for the last 5 minutes I had until I had to leave, in the final minute I found it and got it replaced. Right down to the wire.
The big news came this morning, on my way to class, the mechanic's shop called to tell me that it passed. I'm headed back home on the 20th for my first real drive in i. It's going to be a long wait. I also got them to do an alignment and they lowered the front end back to factory spec, which is something I've been wanting to do since I bought the car
