September 18, 2021 UPDATE

 I'll bet everyone thinks I've died or something since it's been about 6 months since my last update! Still alive and still kicking but the progress on the Tomato has been reduced to a snails pace, but let me bring things up to date...

Nick stopped by my place of employment back in May to drop off my tail lights so I can get them changed over to the NOS lenses and trim and picked up the door latching mechanisms so he could start working the door alignment and gaps, but on Saturday September 4th, '21, he was in a pretty serious motorcycle accident and fractured 8 vertebrae and cracked 2 ribs swerving to avoid a deer in the road. As soon as he's able to move around a bit better, we plan on getting together and putting together a punch list of thing remaining to be done prior to putting the final prime coat on the car and deciding where we g from there.

I too have been a bit neglectful on doing the things I need to be getting done on the Torino that I can only attribute to being bummed out because of the lack of progress on the body shop front, but I have gotten a few things almost done....

After letting the turn signal housings cure out for a good while, I finally did the final paint clean-up and then cleaned the lenses really well...

Once they were finished, I reinstalled them into the refinished grille along with the NOS grille emblem and touched up a few areas that needed some attention....

I still need to polish the vertical chrome strips and get some new stamped steel clips to install them back onto the grille and then all that remains is getting the restored grille surround back from my buddy Joe Wright and putting them back on to complete the grille assembly.

This weekend, I set about prepping the "burp tube" I got from another Torinoite, John Steady, to install in my new Spectrum fuel tank....

I drug out my old fuel tank and located the spot welds to insure the locations were the same as on the new one and they were, so after taking a few pics,

I removed the tank vent and gasket, the filler tube gasket and the sending unit. WOW, the sending unit looks like it has seen better days...

so I’ll look into having it rebuilt since they aren’t available new any longer. I’ll reuse the tank vent since I replaced it along with the rubber gaskets back when I first had my tank cleaned and sealed after getting the car years ago.

I drilled out the spot welds holding the tube to the remnants of the old tank and then dressed down the spot welds so it will be ready to reinstall.

Need to determine what to put on the tube flanges to prevent future rust but still allow the bracket to be spot welded into my new tank.

I'll also use the remnant of the old tank as a template to locate and drill the holes in my new tank to weld the burp tube in side.

With everything out of the way and about ready for reinstallation, I looked down into the old tank and was surprised how crusty it was since it was supposedly “sealed” years ago when I had it cleaned.

Perhaps it’s the alcohol in the modern gasoline? JEEZE

Until next time....

ZEBRA 3 OUT