The Thunderbird Chronicles: "And This Time...It's Legal"

Welcome back. The last few weeks I was in search for the Jedi Temple, I mean Thunderbird parts, and ran into a few snags. Perhaps I should have asked Rey to find them given her experience scavenging Imperial Class Star Destroyers. Ultimately, success was had and all the parts necessary to be road legal were obtained, installed and on the second attempt for state inspection, the Bird passed. So, I picked it up on Saturday and drove it for a little bit to make sure nothing was going to fall off, then parked it as I was going to meet my brother to do brotherly type things.

Totals for parts and labor were not too pricey. I will not say exactly how much all of it cost because the wife reads these posts and would have a mild heart attack, but not before giving me a tongue lashing on par with Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (ma'am, yes ma'am!!!). Seriously, it was very reasonable for full front end rebuild, brake lines, cables, belts and all the parts. The biggest expense was time. Given the nature of this purchase one of the several parts needed will be money. 

Two items that were not done by this mechanic were "fluid maintenance" and 4 wheel alignment. So, this morning, I went for a drive in the Bird to see how it drove and to get the radiator flushed and coolant changed out. I went to the local Valvoline shop and as the shop tech was completing it, he turned to me and said, what did you do to it? because it looked really nasty in the coolant expansion tank. I told him I recently bought it and the car had been sitting. The tech replied say no more.  With that done, I drove it through Dorchester and Roslindale getting it acquainted to city life and cursing all the potholes, manhole covers and general shittyness of some of the roads.

The alignment definitely needs to be done, but the mechanic did a good job in getting the wheel pretty straight. Also, as I have noted before (HERE) the shifting is not nice. You get used to it without missing gears or searching for gears, but it is certainly not ideal. Also, there are rattles and a clunk in the rear when going over the cavernous potholes in the road and I do want to get newer seat beats. However even with tattered interior, it is a nice place to sit and very comfortable. I got to test the heat this morning and that works very well.

Next step is to really sort out a working space and getting it really Sunday drive worthy. Maybe in the near future I can tell Joe I completed his cross country trip to California.