The garage still smells a lit­tle from its bath with the stinky old fuel and a lit­tle more clean­ing should fin­ish that up.  The tank is ready so I pick it up today, bring it back to the garage and begin to wire brush and clean up the exte­rior.  I checked the tank sen­sor and it tests Ok so I re-install it, treat the minor rust areas along the seam and leave it to dry prior to paint­ing it. At this stage most of our clean­ing efforts result in very promis­ing results.  The trunk smells heav­ily of mildew and we are try­ing to rem­edy that, but the car­pet itself seems to have a lot of dry rot and will prob­a­bly need replace­ment.  I sus­pect that the trunk seal has some prob­lems and at some point allowed water to intrude into the com­part­ment.  Inspec­tion from the under­side shows no sign of rust and the trunk floor is solid.  I hate to pull out the car­pet just to do a visual and I guess it will just wait until we decide to replace or not.

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     The rear of the car looked in pretty good shape but I decided to remove the rear bumper to make it eas­ier to visu­ally inspect every­thing under and behind it.

    It turns out the cen­ter sec­tion is in very good con­di­tion though the two cor­ners are in rough shape with much inter­nal cor­ro­sion, the vents are in per­fect con­di­tion, most of the dam­age is inter­nal on the bot­tom.   I’ll have to do some leg­work to find out whether they can be restored or will need to be replaced.   My orig­i­nal thoughts were that we would just pull the engine and rebuild it, but with the car being in much bet­ter con­di­tion than we expected, now I want to try and start her and maybe use her a lit­tle this sum­mer before we really get fur­ther into this project.  So today we also decide to begin the process to start the engine.  First order of busi­ness would be to clean the fuel tank and lines before we pro­ceed.  So we begin to dis­con­nect the lines and fill pipe, tap­ping on the tank seems to indi­cate it is empty, but we remove the drain plug just in case and get noth­ing.  We then unbolt the straps and begin to lower the tank when we get show­ered with about 2 gal­lons of some of the foulest smelling 25 year old fuel I have ever known.  Well, the tank is out but now we have a mess to clean up and spend the next hour clean­ing the spill.  The tank looks in great shape but I decide to take it down to Tony’s Radi­a­tor Shop and have it boiled out any­way.  What the heck, it is out and now would be the time.  I take the tank down to the shop and pack it in for the day.

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Happy Birth­day to me, this time for real.….While we have decided not to put a plate on the car at this time, I had my new insur­ance agent write a pol­icy and apply for a Title as the vehi­cle has never had one and we will need it for the reg­is­tra­tion process later on.  Fran and I were a lit­tle con­cerned about the title process because there was so lit­tle paper­work avail­able to us to doc­u­ment the car.  Well, we filled out a spe­cial DMV form for undoc­u­mented vehi­cles, had it inspected by a local police depart­ment to ver­ify the num­bers and sub­mit­ted it all to the Reg­istry Of Motor Vehi­cles.  First, the good news, we now have a shiny new Title issued by the Com­mon­wealth Of Mass­a­chu­setts doc­u­ment­ing our own­er­ship of the car, then the bad news, we were informed that we were being assessed a sales tax based on a value almost three times the amount we actu­ally paid for the vehi­cle.  WOW…I guess I just need to sit back smile and think about what a great deal we got, but did the tax­ing author­i­ties really have to rain on my parade, espe­cially on my birth­day.  The saga will con­tinue, we are going to file an appli­ca­tion for a rebate of part of the sales tax, but I’m not hold­ing my breath.

I just want to take a minute to thank Cary Jubinville of the Jubinville Insur­ance Agency in South Hadley, MA.,  and his whole staff who were extremely help­ful through­out this process.  They researched the vehi­cle ser­ial num­ber for me and inves­ti­gated the process we would need to go through to doc­u­ment and reg­is­ter this car.  They then took all of the paper­work to the DMV, reg­is­tered the Title, and paid the sales tax, with­out col­lect­ing a dime from me, telling me they would just send a bill.  All of this for a new cus­tomer who had never before done busi­ness with their Agency.  To say that I am very impressed would surely be an under­state­ment, it is refresh­ing in today’s world to deal with a local Com­pany with good old fash­ioned cus­tomer ser­vice, some­thing rarely seen any­more.  Cary and his Com­pany will now han­dle all of our insur­ance needs, includ­ing vehi­cles, homes, busi­ness insur­ance and any other issues that arise in the future.  Need insur­ance or ser­vice, see these guys first, you can find them here www.jubinville.com you won’t be disappointed.….

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