So, for the past five or six months or so, I’d been having trouble with my ‘68 fastback Mustang missing. At first it was intermittent and I would dink around a little with the carb or the timing and the problem would fade for a week or so, but it always came back. I drove the car less and less because of it. Running on seven in that car wasn’t too bad, until the miss started to get consistent.

I checked all the plugs and they seemed okay. Not the prettiest, but none were fouled or broken. One was a tiny bit loose. For a week after all that, the car ran great again, but the misfire returned.

I wasted a few more weeks, driving my other cars, scratching my head, trying to figure out what could be causing the problem. Everything looked fine. Nothing was fried.

Then, one night, my best friend, Eddie was over and us three wanted to go out to dinner.

Eddie had the back seat out of his ‘68 Camaro, my ‘68 Mustang convertible is still not done from the engine swap because my husband and I have been too busy and the rest of our cars are 2-seaters. I offered up my seven-cylinder wonder and because Eddie is the ultimate car guy, he popped the hood and started inspecting the car as I had, except he narrowed it down to the #6 cylinder by letting the car run for a little and seeing which header didn’t heat up.

Busting out an old spark plug, he put the wire to that one and grounded it on the intake. It was sparking, but very weakly–which explained the intermittent misfiring. He sighed and happened to look down…at the coil…and said, “Did you spill some oil on the coil recently or is it leaking?”

“Huh?” I looked down, too. “Holy shit. No, I didn’t spill any and that looks more like seepage anyway.” And I started to think about that particular coil. I’d had it forever. It was on the car when this pic was taken in 1998…

Come to think of it, that coil was on the car when I moved in 1996…and then I remembered the very day I bought that coil.

For Christmas in 1993, my mom (of all people!) had bought me a Mallory electronic ignition change over kit which I’d tossed the points and installed in the stock distributor a few days later…which fried three cheap stock coils before I realized that they couldn’t keep up with the Mallory.

So what did I do? Well, I marched on down to SuperShops. Yes, you read that right…SuperShops (remember them?!). I’d never been in there before, but I knew they had the best chance in town of having what I needed.

The scent of fresh tire rubber assailed my nose as I walked through the door. Then, I might as well have put a big target on my forehead and a Kick-Me sign on my back because the jackasses behind the counter not only saw some dumbass chick coming toward them, but she’d also driven up in a Ford.

They tightened their bow-ties and looked at each other in horror. I could hear the silent “No, I don’t wanna help her, you help her. Sucks to be you.” pass between them as I made it to the counter.

I suffered through the obligatory, “Of course it’s broken, you’re driving a Ford” comment and got to the matter at hand. What I’d needed was a new coil.

“Well, how do you know you need a new coil?”

“The old one doesn’t work anymore.”

“But are you sure it’s the coil? You should get someone to look at it for you.”

“Look, I need a coil. Can you help me figure out which one? I don’t have a catalog at home.” (Remember those pre-internet days!?)

“Well, okay, but you can get a stock coil at Kragen or Chief, y’know.”

“I’m running a Mallory changeover and I’ve already fried two coils. I need something better than stock.”

All of a sudden, Mr. Bow-tie’s demeanor changed. He didn’t know what to make of a girl driving a car that wasn’t stock. He seemed almost impressed, or afraid or maybe a little glad I wasn’t just another idiot and whipped out the Mallory catalog from under the counter. At the time, there were three coils.

And Mr. Bow-tie, magically turned into a knowledgeable salesperson trying to sell me the right part for my application. He sold me the ProMaster because it was better than stock, cheaper than a race coil, but still sturdy enough that if I ever wanted to do any upgrades, the coil should be able to handle it.

Fast-forward fifteen years and that coil is the oldest component in that engine compartment with the exception of the wiring. Everything else has been replaced at least once since then. Not a bad life on that old coil and while it had started to fail, it didn’t fry and die, leaving me stranded like the stock ones did. Hat’s off Mallory!

For the time being, I took the later ProMaster Coil out of my convertible. That’s one of the best parts about having two of nearly the same car. And parts have gone in both directions these last six years. Both cars have helped each other out.

I’m back in the saddle of my fastback again and life is very good. Now if I can just scrape together the time to finish off the convertible before summer ends…

After trying to untangle some electrical troubles under the dash of one of my classic Mustangs, I wondered what the under-dash looked like in my new one.

Nice and tidy and clean. Everything’s all wrapped up and there isn’t a whole lot under there except air.

My other cars… Well, the fastback has about 250K on it and the vert has about 150K but somehow underneath, they both look about the same.

Here’s the fastback:

Notice the overspray from when the interior was painted. I could kill the guys at the shop for that. I mean, is it really that hard to mask it even a little so that I’ll be able to see what color the wires are later on? That kind of shit irks me something fierce. I was unable to do the paint job that time (after a big wreck) due to time and space constraints and boy oh boy am I still paying for it all these years later. When I first got the car, yeah, Mickey Mouse had done a lot of electrical work under there, but I’d cleaned it up through the years. I recall one wire changing color three times between the firewall and where it was going. It was amazing.

I’m quite enjoying the 3-pin connector that goes nowhere (I still haven’t traced what it’s supposed to be for!), the cut-off butt connectors, the bare bullet and all the junk hanging out of the fuse box. And you’d think that with all that overspray, perhaps the bottom of the dash would have more paint on it. Nope. This car did, however, have an electrical fire, so that accounts for some of the bits of electrical tape. It’s gonna be an interesting year for this car… During the cowl fix and paint job, I’ll likely be doing a rewire. Could be fun. I like electrical stuff–but only when I’m forced to do it out of necessity!

Here’s the vert… Mind you, it’s got 100K fewer miles on it.

Not much difference between the old cars, huh? There’s questionable spaghetti plus overspray on both.

The convertible ‘68 does have air conditioning, so there’s less room under the dash, but still. What’s with all the electrical tape, bare bullets and butt connectors?

They’ll likely never look like my ‘06, but that’s certainly something to work toward whenever I finally get around to the big rewire. Wish me luck and hope it’s soon!

In June, I went to a Mustang Cruise put together by some of the guys on the boards at mustangforums.com. When I got there, I felt pretty out of place. I had one of maybe 3 or 4 classics. Everyone else had late models.

Don’t get me wrong, I had a great time and talked to some very interesting people, but I could hardly relate. Yeah, I’ve got an ‘06 GT, but not only is it stock, I’d driven my ‘68 fastback that day. To me, it’s way more interesting than the late model. Ah well. I was gonna go to another, but they were having it the same weekend as Comic Con and when they called, I was on the road out of town so I had to miss it.

A few days after this cruise, some of the guys were nice enough to post pictures. I saved a couple that were either of my car or included my car in the background while we were on the road. Unfortunately, I somehow didn’t save who actually took the pics. One has the guy’s info on it. The others said we could snag their pics, so I’m considering that permission for posting ‘em here. There were over 160 cars on the cruise, too. It was awesome.

You can barely see me in the driver seat. Oh boy! And this next one, I was likely yacking with somebody about my jalopy. No surprises there, either.

Even though these last two pics are about the same, I like how the photographer below happened to catch a late model driving by. I don’t know if that was intentional, but I think the pic looks cool because of it.

 Special thanks to everyone who was there. I hope to do another one!

While hunting for something completely unrelated, I stumbled upon a stack of photographs that I’d assumed were lost long ago when I moved. Some of them are worth posting… Like this one:

This was taken on Van Nuys Blvd. during the Millenium Car Show in 2000. I don’t remember who took this photo of me, but I’m glad he gave me a copy. This was taken back when I used to enter my car in shows. I’ve won one trophy and that’s all I need.

I did not win anything at this show, but that’s beside the point. It’s just fun to be there. Plus, mine’s a driver. It’s not always spotlessly perfect. I haven’t put my car in a show since this one because my car got damaged in a small hit and run a few months after this pic was taken and I still haven’t fixed it. Lazy, I know, I know, but it has taken this many years to make it worth redoing the whole car and to finally get over my bad luck from that wreck.

I was thinking this might be the year I redo the car again, but I’m having second thoughts. I need to replace a lot of panels, so I think it might take me another year before I start sanding.

The day my new coveralls arrived, I was thrilled beyond words. Being a whole lot smaller than man-sized, coveralls are a pain in the ass to find in my size. Even the ones I found online were too big, but they were close enough. Plus, my name is Toolwench, I have the tools to make a pair of coveralls smaller. I haven’t yet, but sheesh, they’re coveralls, not a slinky evening gown. They can be a little baggy.Anyway, here’s a shot of my new coveralls…

I finally had a chance to use them when I needed to drop my tranny. This was the first time in about 13 years that I’d opened my Haynes manual because I didn’t know how to do something. I was suspicious of either a cracked flexplate or busted torque converter. Turns out, the flexplate was just loose. And it was my husband’s fault!!!!! If you scroll all the way down to when we did the engine swap, that’s him with the torque wrench.Oh well…At least it wasn’t a busted crankshaft.

I didn’t take a whole lot of pics during this endeavor. It was one of those times when I didn’t really know what I was doing so I needed all my brainwaves focused on the task at hand. I’m little. The tranny’s big…and a big job for me to do. But I did it. Virtually without any help, either. The only things my husband did were because he was kinda bored and I wasn’t goin to turn down free help even if I could do it myself.But I definitely made sure that *I* was the one torquing the flexplate and re-connecting anything that’d be a pain if he’d accidentally screwed it up. This was a project I had zero interest in repeating…at least not for another 13 years!Naw! Actually, now that I’ve done it once, I know what to expect and the next time I have to do it, it’ll be a lot quicker and even more fun.This pic just looks nifty to me. You can see my reflection in the oil pan and, I dunno, that’s just artsy or something to me. I dig it.

Notice how dirty I was? That’s nothin’! My tranny had been leaking and getting steadily worse. On the day I got the car buttoned back up, I kept getting pissed off because it seemed no matter where I grabbed under the car, my hand got filthy and slid off. I’ve since solved the cause of that problem, but she still needs a good steam cleaning.Funny, how I started this post by mentioning my new coveralls and I’ve gotten this far before realizing that in the two pics, I wasn’t wearing them. That day just happened to be a little to warm. Believe me, my new coveralls saved me from puddles of tranny fluid, pounds of scraped-off grime and provided a nice warm layer of protection from the cold concrete on the days that I did wear them.Let me go look for an action shot…Yeah… Here’s one from the early troubleshooting days when I thought I had some kind of engine problem rather than the flexplate/tranny problem it turned out to be.

Special thanks again, to all the people at CarCrazyCentral.com who watched my video and then suggested what might be wrong. This would’ve been so much harder without all that help!

For an experiment (and because I really didn’t know what was wrong and had exhausted my resources), I’d made a little video which I posted at CarCrazyCentral.com in hopes that someone might know what my car was suffering from. Here it is again…

And their advice worked! I felt confident about diving in and dropping the tranny even though I’d never done it before. I knew it’d be a lot of work, but as long as it needed being done in order to fix the problem, I was completely willing to do it. And here’s what happened…

Never again will I trust Jason with a torque wrench. I love him dearly, but unless he’s willing to go through what I did in order to fix the car (he’s not), he is no longer allowed to use a torque wrench on my car. I let him do stuff that isn’t as critical or is easy to get at, but nothing that involves dropping a tranny or pulling a motor. I’ve learned my lesson!!!!

Beyond that, here’s a funny little story that happened during the flexplate fiasco:

I was under the car, trying to line up the tranny on the jack to the engine and I was really having a hard time. I only weigh a hundred pounds, so I don’t have a lot of leverage unless I’m grabbing onto something under the car. Yoga has made me immensely stronger, but come on, I’m too little to effective all the time.

So, there I am, under the car. The tranny pan had been leaking forever and the whole underside was not just grimy, it was slippery, too. Every time I tried to grab something while fighting with the tranny, my hand–or foot–would slip. I sighed in defeat and crawled out from under the car. I was so pissed, I didn’t pay attention to how well I wiped off my shoes or my hands as I went inside to ask for Jason’s help in getting the tranny lined up so I could put a few bolts in.

Well, during that expedition, I made a nice little footprint path from the garage to the living room–on our white carpet. Needless to say, he wasn’t thrilled. At the moment, getting my car back together was way more important than dirt on the carpet, so I mollified him with, “I’ll clean the carpet tomorrow if you help me get the tranny lined up.” He was still pissed, but we got the tranny in and he even stuck around to help bolt up the exhaust and get the starter back in.

Later that day, I called Eddie. He’s got miracle cures for stuff like dirty carpets. He told me to use some OxyClean with a little laundry detergent in order to get the the carpet to come clean…maybe.

The next day, I set about doing that. It worked great! So great, in fact, it left clean spots! Grrrrr…

While Jason wasn’t thrilled about that, either, it did prompt us to go out and buy a carpet cleaner. Ignoring the ‘use only our brand cleaner’ bullshit warning in the owner’s manual, he used Eddie’s recipe of OxyClean and laundry detergent and did the whole house!

We’d been considering getting tile or at least replacing the carpet, but thanks to Eddie, my mishap and Jason, our carpet has never been whiter…

This is one of the many reasons I love cars. That little tranny foray saved us probably ten grand in unnecessary home improvement money!

While sifting through a file of non-car pics, I found one that is totally car-related. One of my favorites from this time period.

I like to think of it as a true portrait of the real me. It says just about everything anyone needs to know about me. (Well, except that I don’t normally wear pink. I just happened to be wearing pink on the day this pic was taken. Just imagine the shirt is blue or something.)

This also demonstrates what I mentioned a few posts earlier… Hand a guy a camera and ask him to get a few shots of me working on my car and there’s always a butt shot in there. And this was taken before I got a digital camera, so you can imagine my surprise when I got the pics back from the developer! Ah well.

Like I said, it’s all me. I’ll work on my car any time, anywhere, while wearing anything.

Hell, when my car caught on fire the first time, I was wearing a skirt. Yeah, on the side of the road, there I was using my fire extinguisher while trying to keep my skirt from flying up and giving even more of a show than my car.

Got the fire out.

Told all the tow truck drivers to get lost. They tried to take advantage of me, thinking that I’m just a dumb girl and I don’t know anything about cars. HA! Once the flames were doused, I was back on the road in ten minutes. No tow required.

Why did I title this entry “It’s Inevitable”?

Here’s exactly why:

Whenever I hand a camera to a guy and say, “Could ya snap a couple of shots of me workin’ on the car?” there’s always at least one of my ass!!!! Oh well… All in good fun, I suppose.

I dunno what it is about me and working on my car, but I really enjoy sitting in the engine compartment while I work. It also seems to cut down on the back strain somehow.

This is my least favorite thing to do. I dunno why, but I hate scraping gaskets off and cleaning the surface. It’s not that I suck at it or anything. And I have lots of patience for it, but I’m thinkin’ maybe I just like to have a tool in my hand rather than a rag.

I figured that while I was there, I might as well retorque the heads. Sadly, I’ve only got a hundred pounds to put behind a torque wrench. Leverage is my best friend.

The next couple shots are the struggle to get the intake back in. Yeah, it’s easier to pull the distributor so it’s out of the way, but as of late, it has been easier to work around the distributor than have to re-stab it. So, here I go, getting the manifold back in without smearing the silicone.

Not too shabby. I’m leaving out the oddyssey of the bolt hole that needed tapping in the head, the metal shavings everywhere, the second oil change and the initial silicone mess during my first failed attempt at getting the intake on. Those aren’t important…*cough, cough* (Yeah, they’re just what working on cars is really all about: adventure!)

The next shot was from when everything went smoothly…

Okay, smoothly except when I accidentally sprayed carb clean on the Band-Aid over my busted knuckle from the day before. Yeah, I hit it so squarely that the pad soaked up the carb clean and transmitted it to my open wound before I could get the darn thing off and quit being grumpy about it. (Hey…it stung…a lot…)

After a few more grumpy faces and a whole lot more cussing, I got back to torquing down the manifold.

And at the end of the adventure, I was one seriously happy little chick. I love my car. I love my car. I love my car!

Jason didn’t think I could pull my intake in 20 minutes. Well, here’s proof. (We didn’t have a stopwatch running, though. It might’ve taken me closer to 25 minutes because I wasn’t actully in a hurry to proove anything. I mostly just wanted to show Jason that I could do it and it really wasn’t that big of a deal.)

There’s really not much involved… I started with the fuel line so that I could get the carburetor out of the way.

I don’t recall how, but I’d already busted a knuckle. Can you believe it? (Okay, yeah, so it’s not hard to bust a knuckle while working on car. At least it wasn’t bad enough to drip blood everywhere… I just kept on workin’.) And it’s not like I’d be sticking my middle finger in puddles of gasoline or carb cleaner or just about every other automotive fluid–’cause they all hurt!

The car was still kind of warm… Luckily I had a few shop rags close by to use as…uh…potholders.

I was trying to beat the clock while not actually rushing. The first socket I’d found happened to be quarter inch, so I ran with that instead of digging out my three-eighths set up. I’m an equal opportunity tool wench.

And here you have it… Me climbin’ in to get better leverage and yanking out my intake manifold. Yippee!!

Putting it back together took more than 20 minutes, but after cleaning everything up, I could’ve easily done it…had my engine been a little more cooperative, that is…

And here we have the final post about the engine swap experience. I only wish I could’ve done an mp3 of starting up the car. 1) I didn’t even think of it. 2) If I had, it would’ve prolonged turning the key. I was so jazzed that my car was finally back together that I simply couldn’t wait a moment longer than necessary.

That final day, Jason and I were putting the last bits on the engine and buttoning everything up. As you can see in the following pic, I was glad that yoga is such a big part of my life now. Not only am I even more impossibly flexible, I’m also a lot stronger and both of those qualities come in handy while working on cars… Well at least they do for me!

The following is Jason’s favorite pic of the adventure. The car is together and we’re just about to start it. Right after this shot, we opened the garage door and I turned the key…and gas promptly leaked out of the fuel rail. Arrrrrrrrrgh! We didn’t get to officially start the car until the next day after I made a parts run. And wouldn’t ya know it? The darn thing started as though I’d just parked the car an hour ago. What an awesome sound that is, too–a new engine starting up. Yeah, there’s smoke and weirdness, but there’s also nothing like the satisfaction of a job well done.

Actually, I think that previous pic might’ve been just after I’d put in the starter. With headers on the car, it’s impossible to get the starter in without cranking the steering wheel. Jason had taken the starter out but then couldn’t figure out how to get it back in. He cranked the wheel while I went under while the car was still jacked up…And discovered that because starters are so heavy and my arms are so wimpy, the only way I’ve been able to wrestle with and install them is because my forearm happens to be the perfect length to tilt my hand back, cradling the starter while shoving it into place. We had to set the car back onto the ground because my arm got too tired holding up the damn starter! I’ve learned the funniest things about myself and how I work on cars…

Anyhow, this last shot (sorry it’s dark, my flash didn’t go off when I needed it), is after the test drive. My valve covers didn’t have baffles in them and too much oil was coming out of the breathers. We used Eddie’s method of tying red shop rags around the bases. Worked brilliantly! (And it’d be months before I solved this problem more permanently!)

There you have it!!!!! I’m a chick who works on cars and you’ve seen the photographic proof!