Bob pulled the pan from under the guacamole green SportsRoof and looked up at me. "See, that's just from it sitting here overnight." I looked from the pan to Bob's very serious face and back at the pan. "The C6 is leaking and needs to be repaired; maybe we can just reseal it," he said with a sigh. I wasn't sure at the time whether it was a question in the form of a statement or a point of fact, so I said the only thing that made sense.
"It all starts here, you know." I leaned over and stuck my finger in the brown automatic transmission fluid and rubbed it between my index finger and my thumb. Bob's only reply was a slight cock of the head and a scrunching of his features. I wiped my fingers on my pants leg and smiled. "The downhill spiral-it all starts here with this pan." We had already been through the power steering, from pump to box. It had new and new old stock hoses as well as a rebuilt and concours-detailed pump. It also had a new steering box that was detailed as well; all of this on a Mach 1 that was less than concours everywhere but on the outside. All those parts did, when reapplied to the Mach 1, was point out how gnarly the rest of engine bay was. I remember thinking at that point how we should spruce up the bay, detail the engine, and clean the undercarriage. But I stopped myself right at the ragged precipice of action. I had been here with my '72 Mach 1 some nine years and untold dollars (Carla reads this so, no, I'm not going to put a dollar amount) before. The only caveat in my stopping was that Bob was behind me running at full tilt-and he's a big ol' boy.
Three weeks later, I sat in a bug-infested yard using Must For Rust and a nylon brush on the Mach 1's 9-inch housing. At the outset, Bob had assumed that there were no markings on the big, black housing-I found four squiggles and letters. In the garage, the Mach is up on jackstands sans transmission, springs, and diff. You see, Bob figured, "While we have the tranny out, we might as well detail the centersection on the differential." Of course, the centersection now looks new and will stick out like a sore thumb on the gunk-encrusted housing, so we need to clean the housing. And since the housing will look so nice with new brake lines and hoses, we'll need to detail the springs. Since the springs, housing, and differential are all so stock-looking, we need to paint the KYB shocks semigloss black. As we view the undercarriage in the glow of a fluorescent work light, Bob looks at the rear sway bar and asks, "What color should the mounts and end links be?" He looks at me with that goofy infectious grin of his, "After all, that sway bar is gonna look stupid next to all those clean parts."
You want to know what really worried me? He started wiping the undercarriage and said "Man, I think this is the original undercoating." Help me...