Safely back in the garage, I topped off the power steering reservior, and added some water to the coolant mix. I haven't really paid too much attention to life underneath the hood thus far, but I knew it was time to start a list of mechanical fixes. So I unscrewed the wingnut on the air filter cap, yanked it off, and was about to set it down when I realized that the cap had been screwed on upside-down! One side has a nice rubber rim to create a vacuum (this was the dusty face-up side), and the other side had the marks of being right-side up in the past.
I'm no mechanic, but I know what a carburetor looks like, and I know it should be clean and needs a steady flow of air to work efficiently. The Riv's had a coating of dust that was all over the air filter housing, and clearly had been pulling air from all sorts of places. So I wiped down both sides of the cap, the carb flaps, and the inside of the air filter housing, and put it all back together, this time with the cap right-side-up. Turned the key, and she lit right up just like the day she was new. Four weeks into this project, and I could have saved myself a ton of angst with a ten minute fix.
To celebrate the cap-flipping, I grabbed some cleaner-wax and gave the front bumper about 20 minutes of TLC. Most of the oxidation and caked-on grime came off, but there's a touch that might be worth going back for later.
And the final Riv task of the weekend was to put a coat of primer on one of the extra body panels that came with the RR7Q shipment from Arizona. They sent four pieces, two for the left, and two for the right, and I only need the left-hand ones. So the right-hand ones are making for good paint-matchers. After two coats of primer, I'm facing the grim reality that the Riv's coat isn't quite as white as spray-paint white, so I'll have to shop for an auto-paint shop and ask them to mix up a batch for the left-side filler panels.
No comments:
Post a Comment