It started with an email.
My 1966 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible had been sitting in the garage doing absolutely nothing for the past 6 months at the very least. I shamelessly blamed the cause of this situation on having a garage jam-packed with a growing inventory consisting every unwanted item in the house, the general busyness of work/family life, and if we're being honest, just an overall mismanagement of time and priorities. But I digress.
Going on 3 months into a world-wide pandemic, I receive an email about renewing the website account and space I created to make this grandiose idea of a Ford Galaxie website, giving the model the kind of treatment it rarely gets on the web. I had this account for three years and did absolutely nothing with it. To be honest, I contemplated cancelling the whole thing and chock it to being a flop before it even started. The world was going down the tubes between a major pandemic, social upheavals, and murder hornets. Seriously, murder hornets are a thing now?
I walked into the garage to grab something out of my old fridge, when I suddenly caught myself longingly looking at my car. It's a feeling any car person who longs to drive or just work on their car knows very well. My car was just sitting there majestically, surrounded by varying piles of household junk. How in the world did I let it get to this? Sure, i could take the sucker’s way out and blame the pandemic. But I knew i would be lying to myself. Something welled up inside of me and in that moment I know it was time to get back in the driver’s seat.
In order to effectively clean out the garage, I need to get my Gal out of there. Went to start the car, nothing. Of course the battery was dead. So I connected it to the battery charger. Bad battery light went off. Went to Costco to swap my Interstate battery (they have a great warranty btw).
Put in the new battery in. Started up surprisingly easily. Decided to live dangerously, not checking fluids or any other responsible precautions, and take it around the neighborhood with the top down. The temperature gauge starting rising very quickly. I made it to the driveway right before it started to spew coolant in the driveway.
While the car cooled down, I proceeded to clean house in the garage. While I had plenty of goodies for a garage sale, I just wanted all this stuff gone, like right now. I chucked everything in my other car, went to Goodwill, and gave my stuff their final farewell.
I got back to the house, pulled the Galaxie back into the garage, and decided that is would be a good time to change the thermostat. It's probably the reason why it's over heating. Spontaneous auto repair projects at it's finest is what's going on here. Fast forward 7 hours later... the thermostat was out. Might as well remove the water pump and do it right. All the belts were coming off, so I might as well do that alternator upgrade I've been meaning to do. Can't get to that water pump until the fan is removed. Cant remove the fan without taking out the radiator for clearance. Removing the radiator means those transmission cooler lines have to come off, which is not usually a problem until a seized line ends up twisting off. This day was shaping out as planned...
Now I needed to buy a transmission cooler line, and radiator hoses while I'm at it. Went to my local auto parts store, got my stuff. Next thing I know, it's 9pm and I have work tomorrow. So I wrapped up what I was doing, cleaned up respectably, and called it a night. I walk by my desk and realize that I still needed to make a decision on that website. I ponder on it for a solid 5 minutes, coming up with all reasons not to do it. Yet, that nagging voice way in the back cut through all the noise. It kept saying, "if you don't try, you've already failed."
So...here we are. Let's see where this takes us :)