March 2022. At this point there is a lot of miscellaneous work happening with Emmett. Since January, I've finished the doors (aside from the locks), installed the windshield and I've proceeded to work on the electrical, brakes, wipers and clutch and pedal box. It's very satisfying to get these systems back in place.
The windshield was a beast to get back in. I forgot to take pictures of this, but I actually removed all the riveted on pieces, such as the centre rod, mirror mount and sun visors. They were all rusted anyhow.... As you can see in the pictures below, I used a couple of ratchet straps to push the windshield into place so I could insert the bolts. The new seal is was very annoying. So annoying in fact that on my first attempted I managed to somehow pop the rivets holding in the centre rod. I had to take the whole thing back out to fix it again!
The horns were kinda fun to work with. I have six of them (I think I said eight in the video), and I got most of them working again with some effort. For all there is an adjustment bolt that can be turned to tune the sensitivity. Very easy fix. I cleaned the best high and low note up with a wire brush and gave them a paint.
The brake booster below is part of a larger effort to get the brakes, clutch and accelerator back together. These all live in the same area and include the pedal box. At this point I'm deviating from a pure 1974 1/2 model. I'm stealing Lucy's 1977 pedal box and brake booster. Prior to 1975 there was no booster which required more foot work for braking. After having driving Lucy, I definitely prefer boosted brakes... Much more like a modern car, albeit without ABS of course. I figure this is probably safer than the original braking system on Rusty. I'll keep the old system in case I ever decide to go back I think.
Lucy's pedal box was actually in fairly rough shape. It took quite a bit of work to get this back together. I've cleaned up the original brake and clutch lines which are in pretty good condition. Those are all back in as of today as well!
