The occasional horn honks and thumbs up from a few motorists punctuated the rest of the trip to the home garage. About halfway down the road, the gas gauge had begun to work, or so I thought. Once the group arrived at the garage and the first blush of success began to pale, we took a closer look at the El Camino and found that it was a long way from being ready as a daily driver.
The drivetrain, brakes, and lights all mostly worked, but when I pulled the light switch to the on position, the needle on the gas gauge went to "E." The original ‘67 headlights didn't offer much illumination either, that or I was going blind. The first order of business was to the replace the stock lamps with some aftermarket halogen units. It was while performing this task that I discovered that most of the dash lights were also in-op. While looking under the dash for the fuse box I discovered that the last owner had apparently severed most of the wiring with a chainsaw. There were cut wires going nowhere and everywhere. That was also why there was no power to the wiper motor. As it turned out, the wiper motor also was full of water and rusted solid. A new AutoZone unit and some new wiring fixed that problem (above photo).
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Midwest winter weather constantly violates the group's 90-degree rule (see El Camino Nitrouso, Part 3), so I decided to see if the heater could be made functional. Without it, the El Camino is just an expensive refrigerator to store the team's beer in. (While not a bad thing, it was not the purpose of this series of articles, as my wife keeps reminding me.) I checked the dash controls and they all moved--that was the good news. The bad news was that the control cables and rods didn't. They were all rusted solid, and a gorilla had broken all of the controls trying to make them do something.
I was unable to find fresh recruits, so I had to figure a way to rehab the originals. My neighbor Dennis Sutton came up with the answer. We’d put them in a pan with a solution of penetrating oil, WD-40, Marvel Mystery Oil and transmission fluid and let them sit for a long time.(below) Besides, the next thing we had to find was a control console for a '67 El Camino.
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