Once purchased, this eyesore sat and sat for nearly 9 months, partly because it was the wettest winter for the area in the last decade and partly because we were expecting and eventually welcomed our beautiful baby girl, Miss Nyla Moon. I had hoped to work from the inside out but over that 3/4 of a year I struggled to remove any of the interior structural aspects. I found that nearly all of the fasteners holding the cabinets and walls in place had been installed from the outside. Instead, I removed all of the cabinet doors, drawers and appliances, demoed what I could and studied, putting the structural remodel aspect on the back burner.
I instead went to work on some of the mechanical aspects of the vehicle. After all, it doesn’t matter how nice it looks if it can’t reliably get you down the road.
After driving this spit-heap a mere 95 miles from where I had purchased and tuned it up to where I am attending university, I realized it handled like a bowling ball on a sheet of ice. So the first thing I did was replace the front and rear shocks upgrading to coilovers in the rear. I thought about adding a leaf spring kit but decided I’ll wait to see how it handles at final weight.
I then took on the daunting task of rebuilding the carburetor. I just watched a handful of Youtube videos, bought the kit, then set up a clean organized work area and dug into it.
Everything went reasonably/surprisingly well, until install when I didn’t get a good enough seal to keep the coolant out of the intake manifold. It ended up being due to my using the wrong pair of gasket set in the kit so when I swapped in the other pair I used a little liquid-gasket around the more critical areas just to be safe.
I then took on the exhaust system. There were numerous holes in the muffler as well as an entire weld separating, a random piece of pipe flanged in where the catalytic converter should be and everything else was just sad and ugly.
I replaced the muffler with a new one for less than $40. I cleaned up the pipes as much as I could and then painted them with silver exhaust paint and it really made a huge cosmetic difference. The catalytic converter was the hardest part, The one for my ’78 Toyota Pickup that had flanges and was up to Golden State (California) standards was about $280, which caused me to grimace the three times I ordered it just to find out after being charged three times that it was no longer available. But all things for a reason, I ended up buying a “weld in” version of the same catalytic converter for only about $120. And it just so happened my job at the college manufacturing lab taught me to weld and allowed me access to top of line machines for the benefit of added practice so I fabricated flanges out of scrap steel, welded them on and bolted it in with standard flange gaskets.
Still more to do, like replace exhaust manifold gasket, inspect/repair/paint exhaust manifold itself, check lash and bushings of valves, replace oil pan gasket and 1970’s points distributor to electronic distributor