'68 Barracuda Notch

So, I finally got the car back to my house today - a full five weeks after I dropped it off at the shop. They never found the correct drum. They just cleaned up the one I had and sent me on my way. The shop owner is convinced that its a Ford 9" and not a 8 3/4. I don't know enough about either to argue with him, but I know that the 8 Ford drums he tried didn't work.

He told me that he adjusted the ride height when he did my alignment. I measured when I got home and the driver side is a full 1" lower than the passenger side. I have no idea how you can be that off.

I tried to tackle some little things today. The first project was to try and fix my temp gauge. We put a jumper on the plug to ground and it moved to the first ticked and stopped - wouldn't go back down either. I know that the wire is pretty brittle and hard, so it could be that or the gauge.

Next project - I decided to adjust the doors to get them to close a little better. When I pulled the driver door striker out, I heard a clunk (sigh). I pulled the back seat and the interior panel to fish the "nut" out and this is what I found:



As you can see, there is no longer a captured nut and absolutely no adjustment possible. Not sure what I'm going to do long term, but for now, I'll probably just open that hole up a little more for adjustment.

When I have the quarter panel fixed from the wheel coming off, I think I'm going to have my body guy fix all my visible paint flaking/rust/bare metal spots - hood, trunk, header etc. The goal is to get it down to two major colors - faded blue and primer gray.