Headers Refinished

Since its the last day of 2010 and Lauren had to work, I went over to my parents house to work on the Mustang for about half of the day. Petey hasn't had any seizures since the last blog and seems to be doing great now. He did a little tanning while I worked on the car.

Today I started off by pulled Calvin's old Hedmann headers off the shelf of the garage and gave them a little TLC. They were covered in rust and as you can see, they were in dire need of some attention:

At first I just used a green scouring pad to clean them up, but figured that it would take a long time to clean up both headers so I switched to using an air tool that my dad has scouring pads for. I cleaned up both headers and they got pretty clean:

I had stopped by Autozone on my way to my parents house this morning so that I could pick up a can of high temp flat black paint for the headers. Fortunately it was only about $9.18 with tax. I also stopped by Vons to pick up some pre-made guacamole for the bean dip that we plan on taking to Mama Gail's house for the new years eve bunko bash. Once I had the surface rust cleaned off of the shorty's, I used some ether and a rag to clean off all grease to create a clean surface ready to accept the new paint (2,000 degree):

Once I was finished painting and allowing them to hand dry, I started working with my dad in seeing if the 1967 Mustang drive shaft would fit in my car with the T5 conversion yoke. Unfortunately the car only had 1/4" of free play which is far too little. According to all the sources I've found, there needs to be between 3/4" - 1" of free play. We only tested the driveshaft while the car was in the air with no weight on the rear suspension, so we'll probably need to try it again with a jack under the differential allowing the car's weight to rest on the leaf springs.

Since we werent' going to get anything done with the driveline today, I decided to clean up the power steering pump and put the rebuild kit in it. I didn't get any "before" pictures of the pump, but I had cleaned it up about 5 months ago only to let it rust again. We used a pulley puller to get the pulley off and I cleaned off all the new rust. We pulled apart the pump and put in some new seals and then put it all back together. It was a fairly quick process since we only had to replace seals and o-rings. I put a coat of black paint on it and its now ready to mount on the motor. All we have to do now is find a power steering pump bracket!