After another week of driving I've got an additional 40 miles on the car. My manual skills are improving each time I take out the car and I've had to remind myself to take it easy on the clutch as far as acceleration is concerned. I've done a few half to 3/4 throttle pulls on the highway during which I discovered the tach is reading way off. As previously noted the RPM's were rather high at highway speeds, 60-70 mph, and I cross referenced the tach and my Aeroforce gauge to see if they matched. They didn't. At 70 mph the tach is about 800 rpm's too high, quite significant. At idle it ranges from 200-300 rpm's difference between the two. I'll swap in a backup tach to see if the current one is just messed up, hopefully it's that simple.
I got the exhaust clamps and attached the tips, look the same as the previous pic. I had to cut up an old motor mount heat shield to fill in the gap between the clamps and the tips. Without them the tips moved around a bit still and would likely work themselves loose.
After putting more miles on the car I started to notice some significant and annoying rattles over bumps. Doing some research I found the door stricker bolts tend to wear just enough to allow the door to move around a bit. I found that if you use the Ford striker bolts from the Help! brand they fit perfectly and take up the extra slack. Just remove the plastic cover and swap the washer bolts and voila, no more door rattles!
You can see on the old striker the part where it wore down causing the movement.
Did this on both sides and the difference is night and day. There are still some rattles from the door window guides being loose but I'll address those later, kind of a pain to get to.
The brakes still remain a bit squishy so I'll try bleeding them once more and hopefully that'll take care of it. The master cylinder did get rather low on a previous brake bleed so I'm hoping it's not the master with air in it. There's a whine noise at higher speeds in the front end, hoping it's just the tires. For good measure I'll regrease the wheel bearings to ensure they are good to go. I did check the outer bearing last time I had the wheels off, popped the dust cover off, and there was still grease there. To be safe I'll just re grease them anyway.There's still a coolant leak on the passenger side that will puddle after driving at times but not always.
I'm still ironing out the details but I'm getting more and more confident in the car each day. I've even started using the radio now (now that I know the right noises the car makes) and got an aux audio cord to hookup my iPhone/iPod too. Sound system isn't too bad and it just adds to the enjoyment of driving.
