Drove Lucille over to Eddings with '49er parts but the place was locked up. We headed home and at one point I mashed on the gas harder than usual and was greeted with stumbling and a nice backfire up the carb! Eased off the gas, and she continued as if nothing had happened. I tried again and yes, I could repeat the symptom at will. We got home just fine, of course, and I checked the carb mounting bolts and tested vacuum levels. It was a bit low: leak in the setup that goes to the wipers. Capped that and adjusted the timing. Setting it a bit higher than spec. A test drive revealed the stumbling and backfires were cured but now I had ping. I backed off the timing again and the backfires returned, though not as bad. So now I've tweaked the timing so that the backfires are gone but there is still a tad of ping under certain conditions.

Gassed up the tank and did NOT have a repeat of the last time I went to the gas station with this car, thankfully! Put half-dozen miles on just to see how the new tires are. Results? Amazing! Like night and day. No more pulling and wandering. I would never have believed how different it could be.

Installed the missing exhaust clamp tonight and added a set of chrome tips. I am not happy that one resonator on the right side is a bit out of position and cocked funny. That whole right side was a pain and didn't fit as well as the left. Still, I am ready to let it down off the jacks.

Exhaust!

Installed the new exhaust that arrived on 5/23. Everything came apart very easily and I had no problems with stuck or broken bolts. I think I might have spent about eight hours on the whole thing. I ran short one clamp so technically it isn't "finished" yet, but I fired up the engine and oh my! How nice and quiet she is now!

Metal valve extenders installed and "tire minder" caps on the extenders show green unless the pressure drops below 32 PSI... then shows red.

Tires

New Diamondback Classic whitewall mounted by Western Tire. Stems a bit too short. They are ordering longer ones, but meanwhile I will get extenders.

I wired up the rear speaker and the XM tuner stuff and got the glove box back together. The rear speaker will need to come back out at some point since the rear parcel shelf has been recovered and there are no perforations for the speaker. Even so, the sound quality is not bad. The front speaker can be adjusted to provide more highs to compensate for the muffled rear. Still, I'll want to fix it. Took her out for a quick spin to sample the stereo on the road. Very, very nice. I like that it looks and operates like original and sounds great.