I know its been a month and a half since I updated anything on here, so I wanted to give a real quick update as to what’s been going on. For the most part, this month has been a total write-off. Not just car-wise, but in general. My job has changed to some extent, and between a vacation and work travel, I’ve been gone 3 out of 4 weeks this month on travel. I spent this last week sick. It’s been a long month … I had debated trying to find a shop this month to get it painted, knowing I wouldn’t be driving it, but that plan just didn’t come together.

I haven’t even fired the car up in July. I drove it a half dozen times since the Open House, though, and am rapidly approaching 1000 miles (a milestone at which I’ll drain and replace all the fluids in the car, and give it a thorough once-over again). I have two things I’ve been focused on, related to the car: getting carpet installed in the car, and fixing a coolant leak.

Leaks have turned into my El Guapo on this damn car. I still have a slight oil leak on my passenger-side valve cover, which has shown up since Fortes replaced them in an attempt to fix my old oil leak. The old one dripped a lot of oil on my floor, the new one drips a small amount on the headers. I’m not sure which I find more annoying.

This coolant leak is REALLY driving me nuts, though. Basically, the overflow setup on the car will pull coolant from my recovery tank just fine, but when pressure rises and the radiator cap opens, instead of pushing the coolant back into the recovery tank, it just sprays it out from the Fortes degas tank. Avid readers may remember when I replaced the radiator cap last fall for that problem, thinking it was a defective cap. Well now I’ve had it happen with three caps. At this point I think its one of two problems — either the degas tank itself is defective (probably via the fill neck on it being slightly “off” and causing the radiator cap not to seal properly), or there’s something with the overflow setup that is making it easier to draw fluid from the tank than to push fluid back into the tank, and the seal on the radiator cap is the point of weakness.

My first test is going to be to mount a temporary overflow bottle in the car nearer to the tank and see if the cap still fails to seal. The theory on this is that there is something defective with either the hose or the nipple on the other tank that is causing the opening to the tank to close up under pressure. If it continues to leak, then the degas tank is likely defective. I’m not sure what I’d do at that point. I’m sure Mike would replace it, but I may just replace the entire upper radiator hose assembly and not use it at all.

Carpet is another area I’ve been slowly working on. I have decided I don’t like the looks of the plush black carpet from Factory Five. My old ’68 911 had a traditional felt carpet set that was commonly used in production versions of race cars in the 1960’s and 70’s. It is basically just thin gray synthetic felt. I’ve bought some felt and will end up creating a new carpet set for the car, using the felt and black edging. I was hoping to get the whole setup done this week, but being sick kept me from starting it. I’ll get lots of photos of that process taken in August when I start working on it.