All is well. Gas tank is no longer leaking, and she is deemed roadworthy.

Trunk carpet is in, hood prop is fabricated and installed (though I still need to pull it out to paint it… pics forthcoming when that’s done), drivers door is aligned (passenger side is still giving me fits), and I’ve put about 100 miles on her over the past week just because, well, that’s why I worked so hard on her, to enjoy driving her!

Now that the new exhaust is in, on the to-do list is to fix a leaking exhaust manifold issue (you can hear it much better now that the rest of the exhaust is good). After reading through the forum posts on that job, I may just see if I can live with it for now and deal with it next winter, because I don’t know if I have enough vino to cover the job.

Otherwise, at this point, all I have left is to try colorsanding and buffing her new paint to see if I can knock some of the orange peel down. I am probably going to have to reshoot the hood and the taillight surround at some point since I didn’t do a good enough job of prepping (I didn’t block at all) and some of the grinder marks are still apparent through the paint. Lesson learned… block sand EVERYTHING and have lots of light on the subject.

Ready for the Jensen East meet next week!

New Delta exhaust system is installed and she sounds FABULOUS! Went pretty uneventfully except that they had to weld one of the leaky front connections on the Y pipe (I still have the stock headers). Told them to go ahead since if I ever decide to do anything with it from that point forward, I’ll probably go with a replacement header anyway.

Then, the fun began. Had a little time last night, so I thought I would knock a couple more things off of my “to do” list. If you remember, when I got my fuel tank back from the radiator shop, the fuel sender float was taped to the top (apparently they must have knocked it off as part of the reconditioning process and didn’t bother to put it back in). So I decided to pull the fuel sender out of the tank so I could put the float back on and see if it made the fuel gauge work right.

The good news: her fuel gauge works now.

The bad news: along the way I had a bit of an ummm… mishap.

So, I pulled the gas tank out, took about 10 minutes. Getting pretty good at it (for future reference, I think I could pull the sender out without pulling the tank). Anyway, got the tank out, took it to the driveway. Undid the locking ring, pulled the sender out, pulled the sealing gasket out, snapped the float into the sender, put the gasket back in, put the sender back in, and put the ring on and tightened it up. Whole process took about 5 minutes.

Then, put the tank back in. Grabbed a 5 gallon gas can and went to the gas station across the street to get a couple gallons of gas (since I had to drain the tank before I did any of this, and I didn’t want to put that gas back in because the tub I drained it into wasn’t exactly clean). Got the gas, came back, put it in her tank… started her up… watched the gauge rise a little…YAY!

Then, I figured I would take her across the street to put more gas in. Did so, filled her up, and when I got done…

(here’s where it gets fun)

as I was hanging up the hose, I got a nagging feeling… “I probably should have checked for leaks before I filled her all the way up…”

So I looked under, and gas is streaming from under the trunk at a fair rate. Opened up the trunk and it’s basically filling up… eek! So… best I could come up with was to rush her back home (it’s just across the street), pull her into the driveway, go grab a couple of containers, and get underneath and pull the drain plug. Drained out what I estimated to be at least half, to get the level below the sender, and then put the plug back in.

Now I’m wearing more than a little of the gas, but at least it’s not leaking any more. Since the crisis was mostly averted at that point, I mopped out the trunk, hung the gassy towels outside to dry, went inside, showered, and had supper.

Afterwards, I went back out. By this time, things had dried out pretty well, so I pulled her back in the garage, got a flashlight, inspected, and as I suspected (and actually hoped), only 2 of the locking ring tabs were engaged. The third had… missed for lack of a better word. The whole ring was in at kind of an angle, so it wasn’t compressing the fitting against the gasket all the way around. I could see it wasn’t straight just looking at it. How I missed this the first time, I don’t know. So, popped it back off, straightened it out and spun it back on being much more careful this time to make sure it was engaged properly.

Whew. Crisis averted, though I think I lost about 2 gallons of gas during all of this. The remaining fuel that was drained out went into two gas cans, which means I probably won’t have to buy gas for the lawn tractor for quite a while.

I think it’s all good now, I didn’t fill it back up to find out yet. I want it to all dry up first. At least I hadn’t installed the new trunk carpeting yet.

Moral of the story: after working on a gas tank, check for leaks before reinstalling the tank, and definitely BEFORE you fill it up.

Even took her to the office today since my Expedition is off getting the air conditioning fixed.

On Wednesday, she goes to the exhaust shop to get her Delta performance exhaust system installed. Looking forward to hearing her growl instead of whatever the cheapy and rusted muffler she has now sounds like.

Otherwise, all assembled with just a few minor points to resolve yet:

– still need to reinstall the fuel sender float
– still need to replace the trunk/boot carpeting (the old stinks of gas)
– still need to work on getting the doors properly aligned
– still need to make my custom hood prop

Otherwise she is good to go! The last step yesterday was to run a half can of Seafoam through the engine oil and then change her oil and install a new oil filter.

Now if it would just stop raining…

Almost ready to go! Got the bumpers painted last night, and reinstalled all of the interior trim panels, handles, etc. (along with the left front stoneguard which I forgot to install when I did the others for some reason).

Tonight: put the bumpers back together and mount them, bolt the top back on, and she’s roadworthy other than all the stainless trim and JH badges, etc.

Also going to fabricate and install my custom hood prop tonight (came up with an interesting approach using something that will fit under the hood but still allow lots of headroom for working on the engine). About $6 worth of raw materials and an hour or so to make it. I’ll have pictures after it’s installed.

Gas tank is installed and NOT leaking (yay!) though the radiator shop managed to knock the float off the sender, so my fuel gauge isn’t working. Fished the float out of the tank and set it aside… I’ll deal with that presently. For now, I just want to get her driveable.

She’s basically together other than the bumpers, the inside trim (no door or window handles) the top, and all the trim. Going to hit her hard this week and hope to be more or less done by the weekend.

Gas tank cleaned, rust removed, leaks repaired, recoated inside and out, and verified leak free. Finally!