“My sun sets to rise again.”

I spent a few hours in the garage today after essentially doing nothing for about a week - a sinus infection sidelined me for a week. I'm still feeling like trash but I'm up and mobile. And I'm tired of watching television. Weather has largely been shit with sporadic rain/blah weather so not much incentive to go outside.

I took down all the dusty bins full of parts and went through them one by one to figure out what's in them and whether I need the parts anymore. Turns out, I'd kept a lot of random shit I didn't need and I threw out about seven bins of random crap I've been hauling around for far too long. I also better organized and cleaned up the parts that I do need.

I started removing the steering column because a couple of weeks ago, I got in the car and couldn't remove the ignition key. I've since sprayed it with lubricant, tried tripping the column lock (it's not locking) - to no avail. So, looks like I have to pull the column to figure out why the key won't come out, then I can clean it up and put it back in the car. 

During the cleaning whirlwind, I found the stash of the iterations of the oil filter mount brackets. The only one that works is the one that's in the car right now. At some point, I'll be adding the remote oil cooler and the bracket will need to be changed. I wound up keeping these although I'm not entirely sure why just yet.

I pulled the five year old battery out - it's entirely dead by now. I will try to charge it before swapping it out but I don't hold much hope for life in it. Good thing is that I can order a battery through work for about half of retail.

I'm going to have to trace all of the accessory gauge wires at this point because I don't have a fucking clue which wires were intended for each gauge. I know it was close to being done when I stopped.

The rubber floor mat is very crunchy and will likely meet its demise this year...meaning I've got to find a carpet solution if I'm keeping the floor pan the way it is right now.

When this fell out from under the dash, I actually did laugh out loud because I realized that this belongs to the accessory gauge pod that I put together several years ago, although I have no idea which wires belong to which gauges. So, I'll get to pull this apart, sort out what goes where and then put it back together.

Still makes me smile when I look at the OG parts of this car - the doors are in great shape and function perfectly.

I can't wait to get the rest of the car in this shape as well!

I'm hoping to be in good enough shape to get back out tomorrow and finish pulling the column out for repair. 

I've got a few more bins to get through before I'm fully reconciled with the sheer amount of parts waiting for this car. 

Spring refresh - ignition column

I bought this ignition column about two months ago from a Samba ad - after a little back and forth with the seller in Germany - and a two week shipping cycle, this is what I received. Overall, an ignition column in good condition with a scripted bezel ignition and all wiring intact. It's a Koln column - so it's a bit more rare than the SWF that's more commonly found.

On a whim, I decided to send this column to Lionel to rebuild right after I received it from Germany. Lionel and I got to discussing ignition switches and I decided to include the H1100 ignition switch that I recently got back after a 12 year absence. The ignition switch was missing too many pieces to be rebuilt. While digging through a lot of forgotten purchases, I found another switch and sent that one to be tested out - it was in good condition and worked as expected - Lionel added some new wiring to it and it's ready to go back into service. The column came back today in amazing condition after being cleaned, powder coated and reassembled/tested. I'm already four months down on the year but I'm going to make a serious effort to get the car back to functional and start working out how I'll get the remaining pieces fixed and restored. It's going to be expensive and time-consuming but it's time.