I've been wanting to write an article for the newsletter for quite some time now so here goes Driving home from work one day I had a terrible smell emanating from my 68 P1800. My first thought was Clutch or Brakes. I felt the hubcaps to see if they were hot and discovered that the rear wheels were super hot. OK, but what caused the problem? I pulled the wheels and didn't see anything out of ordinary. When I went to put the wheels back on they were a pretty tight fit. I figured that something was causing the brakes to stay on solid. I backed the adjusters off, replaced the wheels, and took the car to my regular shop. They guessed the problem was the equalizer valve which is in-line going to the rear end. When they checked for availability of parts, they had no luck, so I took the car back and brought it to a brake specialist. His thought was that the flexible brake line just in front of the rear axle was probably bad. He checked out the system and Bingo, that was it. The new flexible line was under $40 and the rest of the system was given the OK. The moral of this story is: When you get your brake system redone (which I had done when I took the car out of mothballs ), and the flexible lines are old, ask to have them replaced On another occasion, I experienced slippage with my overdrive unit. I had rebuilt the unit before I put the car in mothballs and it had very few miles of actual use. How could it be failing now? I figured I'd start by adjusting the valve, cleaning the screen and changing the oil as outlined in the shop manual. This did the trick and I haven't had any problems since. The moral of this story is: 

Service your overdrive regularly (including changing the oil) Another thing I ran across was on my Weber DGV6 carb. There's a small plastic piece on the choke rod which wears out from being in contact with the cotter pin. The carb rebuild kits no longer include this piece. I found a place downtown that specializes in Webers. This guy had a box full of these types of plastic choke rod pieces. I found some that would work and replaced the worn piece. I then added a tiny washer between the piece and the cotter pin to prevent it from happening again........... The brake work was performed at Bush Power Brake in Chula Vista, the Overdrive service was done at Kurt's incredibly high tech garage in Tierrasanta and the Weber parts were obtained at Fuel Systems Warehouse downtown.......... I'll see you all at the next monthly meeting at the auto museum. Make it a point to come on out. These meetings are fun and informative. Adios for now.

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