Saving Granddad's Falcon

[dhbfaster]

Hi Guys,
Those of you that have seen my car may remember that except for my windshield, which is relatively new, my glass is all cloudy and somewhat sand blasted from when the car lived in the desert. The rear windshield was especially bad. Phil, the guy who I was lucky to have paint my car did a little work on it with the Eastwood glass kit I bought, but it still had a long way to go (he was afraid to damage the glass.) So, my wife wanted me to polish the water spots off the showers and bought some stuff called "Glasstastic" that we had used before. ... it was REALLY slow going. The shower looked great, but it took forever. (One down and two to go!) For the second go at the shower, I tried the Eastwood polish...thinking that it would work better. It did NOT work better...the Glasstastic was more aggressive. I just had to get used to letting the drill (with 3" felt pad) and the Glasstastic do the work. So since that shower looked better than new, I decided to take a "falcon day" today and try the glasstastic on the falcon. So, here's how it went.
1) First after taking a nice drive, it gave it a full wipe down with the Griot's stuff to make sure there was no dirt under the plastic, then i covered the whole car in plastic because this stuff makes a mess, and I taped off the windows edges very carefully. I also cleaned the inside as well as I could so I would know if I was cleaning the outside. Here's how the glass looked before I started on the outside.
Before1.jpg
Before2.jpg
That cloudy stuff is the outside surface.
I went a section at a time, and found I had to do the each section twice.
IMG_5359.jpg
In order to tell if it was working, I used a water spray bottle and wiped it off until clear, then sometimes also cleaned it with window cleaner. If I missed some, then I did that section again...
And...here's the result. It's almost unbelievable. Frankly I almost couldn't believe my eyes. It is so clear it's almost like the glass isn't there. Look at the reflection.
After1.jpg
After2.jpg
That took a full DeWalt battery to do with my drill...I knew from the shower that when I've used a battery up...it means I'm going to be sore the next day. So, I kept going and did the rear door windows on one side...
Side.jpg
I think it came out well...as you can see, it was starting to get dark already. For the little corner window I used the drill for 85% of it, then used a red scrub pad for the corners.
After that I had to take a break...After dinner I'll probably see if I can go tape off the other windows so that I can polish them tomorrow.

[dhbfaster]

Appreciate the offer on the wire Roger. Before I take you up on that, let me stick my head under the dash and see what I’m dealing with.

Back on the carb front...I disconnected the cable and when not connected to the carb the cable itself is smooth as silk. It seems the leverage and alignment between the banana shaped arm and the screw on the lower right with the spring on it is part of the problem. See pic.278E8D3B-858D-4B22-BEB2-BA06BCB7188F.jpgE369AF38-1739-458D-9263-0E086474FE0C.jpg
not sure why the second pic is up side down, but I was trying to show how the alignment at both extremes, which is worse with the screw loose.
I took the loose screw out and cleaned the threads. The hole is not much longer than the screw, but lots of width. Hardly any threads at all left on the female side.

[Luva65wagon]

OK, just let me know. It will be no sweat since I have so much original wire, with bullet connectors, to make it from. Will be a simple plug and play.

That screw will need to get tightened some how to make things work right. Can't tell if it's an 8-32 or a 10-32 screw, but if it's an 8-32 it would be pretty simple to open the hole to a #21 drill and tap it with a 10-32 bottom tap to increase the screw size. The opening of the bracket would need to be increased a little too, but that's hopefully the resolve to this. If it's 10-32 already... a 10-32 helicoil would be my recommendation.

[dhbfaster]

Yes...the tires I had were about 3/4 inch too small...which doesn't seem like much but felt like a lot to me!
I did plenty of comparisons and fretting a lot about it...I ended up with the Milestar P175/80R13 86S M&S. Love them. Rides great, and looks much better too.
Of course you can also go with Coker... the Milestars are actually about 1/4 inch bigger than the 6.0 tires that came with the car. They are closer to the 6.5 tires that came on some of the wagons, etc. They're about 1" taller than the tires that were on there when I got the car.
I bought the Milestars at Walmart for about $50 each.

By the way, I have a bunch of other threads...
I think if you use this link it will take you to all the threads for my car:

https://www.rainierfalcons.com/forum...searchid=30012

There is one just about tire size somewhere...