Went up to the garage this morning. Dad and I had originally planned on taking the old Corvette out for a drive, hoping that our random workings on the speedometer cable would get the gauge working again. We weren't even out of the driveway, though, before we knew that whatever had been done wasn't enough. The gauge sat still, and never did move for the entire trip.
This wasn't really so bad, though, as we really weren't any worse off than we had been. True, I was disappointed that climbing on my head a few times both under the car and under its dash had yielded nothing, but that's okay. It wasn't until we started going up the highway, though, that something went wrong.
More noise had been coming from the transmission since we didn't have the shifter boot on, so it was different hearing all the road noise that you wouldn't normally encounter. After a while, though, I realized that something was amiss. A conspicuous grinding noise could be heard, and this got much louder when we shifted into third gear from first. By the time we had gone another mile and a half, the grinding had gotten quite troubling, so we turned around and headed home. The car seemed to shift fine throughout, and the only thing that we have really changed is taking the speedo gear out of the side of the transmission. This leads me to believe that either the little plastic gear (which isn't designed well in the first place) is out of place by a tooth or two, or its not spinning the wire inside of the speedo cable (the one that leads to the gauge under the dash). I don't know why it would be the latter, but if it were the former I can only hope that I can easily take that gear out, and that it is not completely worn down.
My father is still convinced that we're dumping too much money into a "worthless" thing like a speedometer, and for some reason that I cannot fathom, he is convinced that we'll never need a working speedometer. Ever. Period.
...
Well, even if this is true, I don't think working on that is such a terrible thing. I'm willing to keep contorting myself to fit under the big steering wheel and crawling under the car to get it to work. Then in the meantime I'll keep sanding on that hard top since at this point if we're going to make Goodguys, we won't be able to have a working soft top by then. Hmm...at this pint, though, I'm more inclined to say that the creeping feeling that the car won't make it to Des Moines and back has returned along with---potentially---the curse.
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