[Pinballer]

Maybe not part of this build just yet but somewhat related to the cause: a junkyard 10 miles away from me, and by junkyard I'm talking a really "out in the boondocks" rural salvage yard operation with even some 50's cars still out in the back sitting quietly in the weeds, hauls in of all things--a black and gold 1978 AMX V8 car that is not wrecked, but rusted down bad and kind of generally torn up. The '78 model was based on the Concord hatchback car, not the Spirit I'm running, but most of the pieces interchange. I don't know where this car has been sitting at for all these years, because I thought I knew them all around these parts, but at least I found out about it getting to the junkyard from my vast network of spies who alert me to such things.

Being the last living guy in our whole area who would care anything about it, of course I have to go and pick it clean of any useful AMX stuff it still has on it before some other vulture gets to it. This has yielded up amongst other rare goodies, a whole complete set of much nicer fender flares for a later repaint and installation on the race car. A couple of the flares currently on the race car are extremely brittle from sun torture and weathering, one had to be fiberglassed back together even, so this was an important score for me.

The latest work on the race car has been to figure out why the neutral safety switch won't work, and that was solved when I took the top panel off the shifter and saw where a wire had fallen off a switch lug. I recently buttoned up the driveshaft loop and put some new tubes and a used set of 28" slicks on the car, along with checking out the line-loc operation. All appears well there. I've also got a non-computer Carter BBD carburetor off a 1975 258 engine soaking in cleaner to rebuild. Only a couple more minor things to do getting the car ready for testing, hopefully this weekend if the weather stays good.
Session #1's goal will just be a few easy passes to check out all systems. Towards the final run or two, I'll mainly be looking to see what 60' and 330' times it will be doing at full throttle if the computer carb doesn't act up too bad. Not expecting too much on the other end just yet because everything in the motor/trans is OEM bone stock right now. I do however, have some old time slips back from 2002 of the blue 80 Spirit in full factory trim I can compare to to see what the weight changing and 4.56 gearing differences have done for it so far. Baby steps...