Motoblag's '71 Duster

It's been a while! We moved houses and now have a three car garage, it's great. Been installing shelves and whatnot, getting it situated for work.

Actually folded the workbench down:

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To install shelving and a whiteboard:

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Garage computer installed, mounted on the wall, along with the Makita battery charger. More workbench space! Monitor tilts around just enough to be able to watch Finnegan's Garage from the corner of the garage:

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Last bits of shelving installed above the side of the garage door. Tied the headers down in case they try to make a break for it.

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Had a bit of a scare as I was drilling into the studs: the bit came out with metal on the end, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. Some exploratory surgery later:

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Driving in nails straight is hard, let's go shopping.

Back to the Duster, I crimped the wiper motor connection on the bulkhead connector since that came off when I pulled the engine bay side off. Did some practice crimps with the Packard 56 style male terminals, got a couple decent ones then did a mediocre job on the actual wiring harness. Bah.

Broke out the DMM and started prodding at electrical again. The switched portion of the fusebox was iffy even after scraping off some rust to ensure the probes made good contact. Time to go upstream to the ignition switch.

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That's suboptimal. Goes up the column, let's get to it.

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After having it for years and years I got to use my steering wheel puller for its intended purpose!

Looks fine to me:

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When taking off one of the sections of the steering wheel I found a staple embedded in the rubber grommet:

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Also found one of the turn signal cancellation cams in the column. The other one snapped off long ago and probably made its way to freedom.

Currently working on reassembling the column. The upper bearing is supposed to be retained between two circlips. Instead I have one circlip and a bearing that press fits onto some super fine splines on the shaft. Being a bit of a challenger to get that back on since the column likes to move. I'm trying not to bang on it too hard, every page in the factory service manual says DON'T HIT THE ******* COLUMN WITH A HAMMER YOU IDIOT which of course I did a few times.

Once that's back in I'll probably disassemble and clean that wiring connector and hope that's where the problem is.