I have not had much time for my car or the forums lately due to unpleasant circumstances lately which I'll try to go into at the end.
I'll start with the good stuff. When I bought it there was a significant amount of rust below the vinyl roof on the passenger side, and it had been there long enough to stain the paint orange beyond any normal wash's ability to clean.
The paint had become dull and spotty, and an aborted automatic wash, at a gas station who's car wash has a bad reputation, left the paint streaky. I was about to declare the paint dead, but decided to try waxing it as a last ditch effort. I bought a can of Turtle wax and also a can of their pre-wax polishing compound....That polishing compound is AMAZING! It actually removed the rust stains from the paint.
Left is a before showing the stains, right is the polished cleaned surface. I cannot begin to express how happy I was when those horribly obvious rust stains on the paint scrubbed off. And after the wax it looked about as shiny as I'd imagine it did when new. I plan to re-polish some bad areas (tenacious bird crap and bug remains) I did before I give it another wax.
Now for the bad....Technically yesterday (as I write this) The starter motor shorted. I went to a local weekly car show, ran some errands, and took it to a local drive in that I've mentioned before with no problem, but once I finished eating and tried to start it, as soon as the key went to crank position the whole electrical system went dead and did not come back when the key was released. I popped the hood and jiggled the battery cables and it came back so I cranked it again with the hood open and saw sparks. After all trying once or twice more I left the ignition on and used a jumper cable to bridge from the battery to the motor side of the starter relay and was able to get it to crank once, but it needed the gas pressed to start, and I was not in reach of the throttle so that last chance was wasted. Subsequent attempts with help failed and the starter barely wanted to turn and heated the heck out of the stout jumper cable...I had it towed home and before the tow we tried a booster battery and the tow driver reached the same conclusion I did. Tomorrow I'm going to have to do some research into where I can get a motor and see if feasible it will be to do it my self...
I also have been too busy to get to the driver side door power lock failing again (if that new motor failed I'll have to wonder), and the 8-track scraping and running slow...Those have been bugging me for about a month now.
As for me being occupied, well....The company my dad works for which manages nursing homes has been nearly ran out of business by Obamacare. And a Saudi company has purchased it to rip it's real estate resources off and spin the company's objective off into another likely-to-fail orphan business to whom the Saudis will then rent the real estate resources they ripped off back to. This new enterprise is downsizing from what it was, and before the year is out my Dad will no longer be employed by them. His job search locally in the past few months has not been encouraging, and if this continues he will have to look for positions that will require relocation....I've been planing to keep living with my folks until I've saved the money to buy my own home with no or little credit. My basement workshop became a nightmare over the last school year, and I've been trying to dump excess junk, complete MANY half done projects, get it clean enough that I can find screws I drop on the floor, etc. I'm doing great things with my electronics hobby, but am under too much pressure to enjoy it. This has been eating my time along with the folks making me help them remodel the house in preparation for selling it....A situation I've been in before and hate...I'd sooner burn it down for insurance than break my back to see it nice for a short time and have to leave it....My life is becoming a continuous case of get used to where I'm living, waste my life at metaphorical gun point to make my home nice so I can move away against my will (I need a shoots self in head emotacon). To make matters worse I kinda need to look for a job so I can afford to do some things I want to do to my car, save money, build my collection, pay student loans, etc, but I can't since I'd likely have to quit and move in a few months. This whole mess has left me in a chronically angry depressed emotional/psychological state.
....I should probably shut up now I'm half asleep and pissed off which is a bad combo.