The tags

I found my car's buck tag! Now I need to decipher it :-)

I also found the valve cover tag, which was covered under oil and dirt. What's this mean?!

And these things are cracking but I don't know their english name...

Another day at the office

My new drip-plate has been under my Mustang for a week so I was curious to see how much it would've leaked. I was rather shocked by the amount of transmission oil that had come out. I might have to look into that. Crap!

I wanted to clean under the driver's side valve cover in preparation of the oil change.

It looked OK but there are a few issues.

In the red circle there is some sort of splash screen, I think oil squirts against it from the little hole in the push rod and then drips on to the rocker. In the second rocker that little splash screen is missing, it lies at the bottom... The 6th or 7th rocker is missing the splash screen as well.

This is the inside of the valve cover. I want to clean that before I put new oil in my engine.

Installing the new turn signal switch

Yes! Finally time to install the new turn signal hardware! So far I had taken off the wheel. Now I had to take out the old hardware. Let's start with a pretty picture from Haynes:

The first thing to do is disconnect the turn signal-wire. It's described as the "Quick coupler".

The guys at Ford or Haynes or wherever they came up with this name must've been from another planet where time goes reeeaaalllly slow because there is absolutely NOTHING quick about it!

It took me nearly TWO hours to get it disconnected. Maybe because I didn't remove my seat or something else but still! Bloody hell it was a royal PITA!

Initially I wanted to try and remove the old hardware intact but after looking at this.... You can see how the wires run through the bracket where it was nice and stuck.

Since I don't know what happens when I un-bolt everything I wasn't up for that much excitement and I decided to cut off the "quick coupler"and yank everything out.

So I unscrewed the three screws that hold down the turn signal hardware...

Don't forget this thing, whatever it is for.

And there it goes!

After I cleaned the inside I installed the new turn signal. Funny how there's an opening made to fit the quick coupler. So I figure in the factory they installed like this as well.

Screwing the new switch in place was easy. Now I had to run the cable through the column, not so easy...

Here's another photo from Haynes showing the steering column for a '73.

This is where the cable needs to go through. You can't do it without loosening up the steering column.

To get some wiggle room unscrew all these bolts and nuts. Nuts 'A' only need to come down a bit. Same with 'C' and 'B' can come out or leave in as long as the column can be moved.

Now there's enough room to squeeze the connector through. It's gonna take a lot of squeezing to get it in the same position as the original was. But you need it to be there again to get enough length to reach the connector.

Once hooked up I was able to test and they worked beautifully!

All that's left now is to screw everything back together again :-)

EDIT:

After several unsuccessful attempts to ˜click~the connectors together I have given up and now a tie-wrap is holding them together. I didn't want to force them into eachother any more because I was scared that I might break one of the metal parts inside. It was holding without the tie-wrap but I don't want them to come undone while driving so there.