Little Red Corvette - I Make Plans The Corvette Laughs

 

Instead of storing our Corvette this winter, my plan was to keep it in our garage and use the money we would have spent on storage on parts for it. What's more, I'd do the very time consuming projects when the car was off line anyway during the winter instead of during prime nice weather weekends. As infrequent as they are up here. Love ya, Cleveland, but your weather sucks all year long. As inconvenient as this will probably be, I'd rather have the car off line and on "jack stands" when we couldn't use it in the first place.

 

My primary project for the winter was going to be replacing this dash board top or pad. It's cracked and falling apart and needs to go but it's much more complicated process to get it off than it looks and requires my near complete dismantling of the lower dashboard to gain access to the hardware that holds it in place. Time consuming. I figured as long as I'm in there I'd rewire everything in back of the firewall replacing the dash speakers and upgrading the radio to one of those new retro modern set ups. Such a plan.

 

 

  

You make plans and God laughs. So do Corvettes. No sooner had I made this executive decision that I noticed that there were more drips than usual on the garage floor. What's more, the usually very stiff steering on the Old Girl was getting even more stiff. Sure enough, what had been dripping occasionally, the power steering valve body assembly, was all but gushing power steering fluid. Great.

 

 

The kicker was about a month during that miserable Thanksgiving snow and ice storm, I needed to move it out of the garage and she slid uncontrollably on an ice patch. Not unusual for a Corvette to be bad on ice but I felt the rear tires still rotating when I floored the brake pedal. Something was very wrong. Quick check of the master cylinder and there was no brake fluid in the reservoir that was closest to the booster. Great.

 

 

After trouble shooting I found that this rear brake line cross over to have a nasty leak right there in the middle of the line. The rear brakes don't have a chance. Chalk up yet another problem with this car that I have no idea how to fix. Again, not knowing how to do something has never stopped me before so let's have at it.

 

 

It's going to be a fun winter. Happy New Year!