Attabiy! Your winter heap may turn out to be even uglier than mine.
Now its bordering on the 190Dc I drove around for 4 or 5 winters in
the 80s.
I finally got a chance, post-adjustor visit, to get out and work on
the car with an eye toward patching it up enough to get it back on the
road. (Snow tires would be _really_ nice to have right about now!) I
waited until the car was in the sun, and above 20 degF, under which
conditions it's actually fairly pleasant to work. (Just about noon.)
I started by removing all the broken crap from the front, I'd already
removed all the grille and the radiator and fan. I completed the
removal by taking off the grille surround, and all the damaged
headlights. With easy access to the radiator support area I got out a
nice array of BFH's in the 5#-20# spectrum and a big crowbar. Is
there _nothing_ a BFH cannot do? I used the crowbar as a hook and
drove the pushed-in parts forward using a BFH, and did the best I
could to straighten the radiator support channels. I pushed in the
crease on the hood with a rubber mallet, and drove the front edge
forward with a BFH. I moved the radiator support forwards until the
hood latch again went into the hole in the hood, and generally did a
lot of prying and hammering until the front part of the car looked
kind of normal again. This was none too good for the paint, but we're
long past caring about that now. I went to the back of the car and
drove the trunk wall rearwards until the trunk latched normally again.
That was actually fairly easy.
With the metalwork all 'done' I then moved on to putting things back
together. I checked the damaged radiator, and it could not even begin
to hold mouth-applied air pressure. I looked in my spares pile and
found a brass 115 radiator that seemed to hold pressure. (At least
some, anyway, no guarantee that it doesn't have a slow leak.) I used
the propane torch to remove the soldered-on side guides, which were
for a narrower channel than my car has. I had some wider guides that
I had been using to shim the (now-destroyed) 123 radiator in there,
with them press-fit onto the radiator, much like the situation with
the 123 radiator, the assembly slipped down into the newly-restored
channels; it fit perfectly, I used the rubber donuts to tie the
radiator to the radiator frame. I looked around and found the
original small plastic four-bladed fixed fan, and put that back in
place of the chipped viscous-clutch fan. (That had never really
worked out for me, there was little point in putting it back.) I left
off the shroud, the last thing we need in a winter car is more
efficient cooling! I found that the lower radiator hose had been
sliced into by something, so it was no good. I had another one,
though, in the spares pile. The upper hose, which is in fact the
wrong hose entirely, did not fit the radiator, it was too large. The
same was true of the other end, and I'd made a folded 2-layer sock of
bicycle inner-tube to shim the diameter there, so I did the same for
the radiator end. The system seemed to hold air pressure when I blew
into the radiator. I tightened up the alternator, it had been
slipping a bit lately.
All this took about three hours. The sun went behind the trees, so I
wrapped it up for the day. All that's left is to put some coolant
into the system, and get some kind of headlight on the right side.
And maybe some kind of screen rigged to protect the radiator in the
absence of a grille. Assuming no engine damage from the lost coolant,
it should again be driveable, if not beautiful.
-- Jim
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