Work Resumes, Briefly

So after what seems like ages, Ange and I drove out to Boiling Springs early Saturday morning to visit with Derrick and Sarah and get a little Lancia labor under our belts. The main focus of our efforts was to get the pedal box rebuild completed and then reinstalled.

Step 1: We needed to repair the threads on the stud which extends off the clutch pedal. Somehow during disassembly, these threads had become mangled and we weren't able to get the retaining nut to catch and thread. This would basically have left the pedals free to work themselves out of the pedal box if not corrected. Luckily I managed to get the proper die to take and we re-threaded the bolt in somewhat short order.

Score: +1

Shiny New Distraction Step: I purchased some nice Magnecor plug wires from Jon at Midwest 124 while at the FLU National Convention (which reminds me, I've got pics to post...). These are really lovely and we wanted to install them so that, once the pedalbox, steering column and related wiring was complete, we'd have a nicely running Scorpion.

Well, things rarely go 'according to plan' when you're working on a vintage Italian car. The old plug wires were seemingly welded into the distributor cap as the corrosion was so great. Attempting to extract these distributor ends resulted in ripping the contacts off a few of the plug wires. This left us with new plug wires and a distributor that looked like hell, and the functionality of which both Derrick and I questioned.

Our first option was to use a distributor off one of the oooh.... 5 other Scorpion we have littering the garage floor. We soon realized that the dizzy on Black is different from the others. While annoying in the heat of the moment, it's actually an 'upgrade' from the points system used as OEM from Lancia. But that forced us into trying to clean up the old dizzy. This process went less than 'well'. Eventually we got frustrated and had a good laugh over the proposed "we should just go get a new one at AutoZone" joke. Turns out that the joke is on us. We were able to use the AutoZone parts counter computer to correctly identify the distributor cap used in the upgrade as one off a 1980 Fiat Brava 2.0L. Then, in a shocking turn of good luck, the parts counter guy said some magical words: "Huh, it looks like we have one in stock." I'm sure I shed a tear of joy.

The rest of the plug wire install went fairly well. The only other SNAFU was that, in addition to the upgraded distributor on Black, the location was also changed from being powered by the intake cam to being powered by the exhaust cam. This meant that the coil-to-distributor wire in our new Magnecor set was too short. Blast! Luckily the original wire was in OK shape, so we reused that for the time being.

Score: +2

Step 2: I added new connection ends to some of the wiring we'd been forced to cut when removing the steering column. Seemed to go well...

Score: +3

Step 3: Reinstalling the completed pedal box. Ugh. This was a bear. First, getting the input lines reconnected was going poorly. Luckily we give up on things quickly and this had us questioning our materials (along the lines of "There's something wrong with these nails!"). When realized that the new brake master cylinder input ports were larger than the old ones and this was causing the original input lines to be too tight. We swapped the input ports and away we went! The pedal box went in pretty smoothly after that. The steering rack was next, and that went in somewhat easily.

Score: +4

We then tested out our work by firing her up. All seemed really well until we attempted to use demonstrate the brake lights and the turn signals. Seems something in the electrical system isn't quite right. I'm fairly confident in my steering column work, so I'm not sure where we should be looking. Perhaps a relay?

Final Score: +3

(Sorry for all this verbiage and no photos. We'll do better with the photography in the future.)