I'm still trying to survive working extra hours during the week and on the weekends. I guess I should consider myself lucky to be gainfully employed. There's still plenty of work to be done on the '68. All I need now is some free time in which to do it. In the meantime, I had an unusual problem with a headlight (1 always seem to get the good ones!). One of my headlights burned out, so I took it off and put in a new one. I then started having a problem with the light not coming on. Sometimes it would come on and sometimes it wouldn't. When it wouldn't come on, I could tap it with the palm of my hand and it would come on. The first thing I did was check and clean the 3-prong plug that goes directly into the headlight -no help there. I then checked and cleaned the connections into the wiring harness -no help there either. I then checked and cleaned the ground connection to the car body -still no help. I'm thinking to myself, what the heck's going on here! I've checked everything. The only thing left was the headlight itself I swapped the headlights and 10 and behold, the same problem occurred on the other side. The new headlight was bad. Naturally, that's the last thing you would think of after putting a new one on the car .

I took the car in to have it smogged this week. I was dreading the possibility of having to do SMOGII. Luckily, my notice was for the standard smog check. Two years ago, I took it to a place recommended by my mechanic. This guy was a stickler for detail. He told me I had to change the vacuum hoses around to match a drawing from a book that he had. I took the car home, changed the hoses around and brought the car back. He then told me that my carburetor was not legal. I then told him "Good-bye". Technically, the single downdraft Weber DGV6 carburetor with manual choke is illegal while the automatic choke version is OK. The car has always passed the emissions test -so what's the big deal? So 00, I took the car to a gas station and the guy there wasn't overly concerned with the vacuum hoses and carburetor. He messed with the mixture and idle adjustments on the carb a bit and it passed just fine. This time around I simply went back to the same gas station. They had me on file from the last time, so things went a little faster. I asked for a pre check and the guy who wrote up the invoice said that they would be able to stop the test before it got sent to Sacramento if there were a problem. I said OK and we got started. After the first test, the car didn't pass. The mechanic showed me the screen and my heart sank. Three out of four categories had failed. After adjusting the mixture and idle the second pass also failed, but this time on only one category -and it was real close. After a minor adjustment the car passed easily (1 guess you could say the third time was a charm). The recommendation, of course, is to get the car prechecked. You want to make sure that a failed test does not get sent up to Sacramento.

The authorization number for the automatic choke version of the DGV6 Weber carburetor is "D145". I gave this number to the mechanic just in case he needed to enter it someplace.