DeTomaso Mailing List: May 99, Message #13

An excerpt from the private diaries of 5171:

April 24th, 1999

My new friend, Bill, is paying some attention to me!  I'm hoping he knows
what he's doing.  I have *so* many things that need attention but so do
most of my sisters and brothers when they get to be my age.  The first thing
he does is attempt to take down my headliner.  Is this a typical guy thing
or what?  Always wanting to see whats under the covers.  In this case, I
don't mind.  The padding I had in there has turned to a fine dust with age and
tends to be really itchy as well as kind of dirty for the rest of me.  As
he had the headliner halfway off, I couldn't resist and dumped a whole pile
of that itchy dust on his face.  He didn't get too irriated.  I *think* he
might have expected this.  He brought in a huge vacuum and just cleaned it up.
Ahh, no more itching.  I saw his friend Jan, cleaning my headliner and making
it look all pretty again.  I wonder what he'll put in place of the foam that
was up there?  He seems unsure and has left me "undressed" so to say.  At
least its not itchy.

Then he decides to take off my front instrument panel.  I admit that with
age, my rocker switches that work my window motors don't function very well
anymore. (ok, not at all on the drivers side).  On of my sisters, 5780, the
one with a Windsor powerplant and the big hair look (a wing ) happened to
have a spare set of rocker switches made by Bosch.   It took a small amount
of fileing to make them fit, but it didn't really hurt and the new switches
fit just fine.  I look as good as ever.  Bill also seemed to know which wires
to change when the window went down and the switch was in the "up" position.  :)
Maybe he was too lazy to physically flip the switch around.
He even used a meter to figure out which wires belonged to which when changing
switches, since my old switchs don't look exactly the same as the new from a
physical perspective.   

After that he lubed my squeaky clutch pedal bushings.  Then he looked at
my door latch (which does happen to squeak, I will admit)  Unfortunately, my
new home doesn't seem to have all the metric hardware it needs.  The problem with
my door latch was a missing nut on the inside.  (You know, the one you have to
reach thru those holes on the inside, the ones normally mostly covered by the
bulkhead cover)  I guess he'll have have to find replacements for these.   I heard
him muttering about someplace called Pantera Performance in Colorado.

Then, just to round things out, he went looking for the reason my backup lights didn't
work anymore.  He found out my switch on the ZF wasn't being activated any more and
after testing my switch (ewhhhhhh) just tightened it up and things worked ok again. 
I *like* all my parts to work right.  Apparently, Bill does too.  :)

I wonder when he'll get to my real problems.  My rear wheel bearings hurt something awful
and I'll admit to an occasional miss on one of my cylinders and a miss/stutter on all of
them above 4000 RPMS.