I seem to remember myself saying that I had the whole month of March to tackle the replacement of the old exhaust manifold. Ummm… March kind of went by without me noticing. Well, most of it anyway.

Regardless, on Friday I did go ahead and order (1) Delta 4 into 1 header, (1) gasket set, (1) set of new manifold nuts, (12) new exhaust studs, and (2) front motor mounts. Once I get confirmation from Greg that the parts will be shipping and arrive here on or before next Friday, next weekend is set aside for the R and R of the manifold.

Figuring that (again once I know the parts are on the way) I can spend an hour or two a day this week preparing… lots of PB Blaster, and a sharp new Sawzall blade or two. I’m pretty sure I have duplicates of all the wrenches needed, so if I have to modify one or two on the fly, I don’t have to wreck my “good ones”. If it all goes well, maybe I’ll have the old header out before the weekend and ready to install the new one. I figured I’d replace the motor mounts at the same time since I have to remove the old ones anyway (or at least undo them) and it seemed to make sense.

Wish me luck. I’m assuming I’m going to need it.

The last two weekends were productive (should have been just one weekend but I ran into a snag). Regardless, Ms. Jenavieve is now once again roadworthy, took her for her first drive of the year today. Not a terribly long drive since it only hit 49 degrees F today, which is really nice for early March in Wisconsin but not warm enough to be driving a convertible around 🙂

Finished up the removal of the painters plastic last weekend. It was actually fused around the water pump shaft. Ended up taking my Dremel tool with a little router bit on it to kind of drill into it and break through enough to peel it off, it was melted into what basically looked like a hard plastic washer. Anyway, that’s done and her fan is all cleaned up and put back on, alternator and belt are reinstalled, and ran her a little bit to be sure there weren’t any other gotchas. All good there.

Then, I tackled the master cylinder/booster replacement. This didn’t go quite like I planned since for whatever reason (as detailed in another post) the booster rod and clevis were not the right length, needing to be at least a half inch longer. I actually pulled the pedal box, took off the old booster, cleaned up the pedal box since I had it out, and then reinstalled it with the new booster. It went in but I noticed that the pedal was somewhat “sunk” to the floor, and the shortness of the rod wasn’t even letting the pedal come back far enough to contact the brake light switch.

So, this weekend, I took it all apart again, determined that there was no way to adjust the length of the rod and clevis, and decided to just put the old booster back in since it appeared to be working fine before removal. I did have to dump about a pint of brake fluid out of it, so I’m hoping that the internals aren’t too damaged, but it seems to be working fine after reinstalling everything and mounting the new TR6 master cylinder. Brakes are nice and responsive again, and this should have solved my disappearing brake fluid issue.

We had our annual meeting of the local British car club today, so I brought the replacement booster along and the guy we call our “resident MacGyver” took it from me… he thinks he will be able to retrofit a longer clevis on it so that I can drill the pin point in the proper place. No hurry on it as long as the old one is working… chances are I’ll just stick it on the shelf and look at it again next winter.

On to the exhaust manifold… just have to force myself to make the commitment to order it and actually go through the pain of replacing the old one. Still a little on the fence, but I think I will end up doing it over the next couple of weeks.