Parklife

Glad to help! 🙂

If you're referring to the brass hexagonal block that the master cylinder and all the brake lines attach to, it's mounted on the inside of the frame rail, slightly behind the front suspension crossmember, and it's held in place with a 5/16-18 bolt, and there should be threads cut into the frame. If you're missing it, there's about a 3/16" thick washer between the block and the frame to space it off slightly.

The uppers were a much tighter fit - just large enough for the tip of the caps to pilot in, but they required cranking them in the rest of the way with some determination. The bores on those were 0.020" to 0.030" smaller diameter than the lower control arms. The lowers, well, that's a story. The first set - the originals on the car - were slightly bent. The second set were NOS replacements, that FedEx managed to lose somewhere as they transited through Portland. This is the third set. But now needing a fourth set? I'm getting a real black-cat, Friday the 13th kind of feeling from this. The universe wants this car off the road and is prepared to do everything in its power to make it happen. At any rate, thank you everyone for reassuring me that I haven't lost my mind. Perhaps about other things, but definitely not about this, at least.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the purpose of coarsely-threaded caps that retain the lower pin into the control arm is that they're supposed to thread themselves into the steel of the lower control arms, so that when they're tightened up the caps have torqued up to the control arm, thus allowing the center pin to turn freely inside. If I have my understanding correct, then there's no way this - on a set of NOS control arms with no threading in them whatsoever - should happen? The ID of the bore on the control arms is 1.140" using my $8 Amazon digital caliper, while the OD of the threads ~1.136", giving me a nice four-thousandths slip-fit.

New York

It's an early '63 - it looks like the car was last restored in '93 so that makes sense that the later trim pieces may still have been available NOS at the time.

Thanks, @Dunkin and @Kodjo. From what I can tell, this car was last restored in the 90s, back when the standards for 'restored' were a lot more, shall we say, freewheeling than they are now, so that makes sense.

A part of me knows the answer to this already and is afraid to ask, but: While attempting to replace the outer window weather seals, I'm noticing that the trim on my car is one molded piece — just a thin strip of metal with some flocked rubber molded on top of it. All the instructions say to remove the old weatherstrip rubber from a stainless-steel channel and slide in the new ones, but there's the rub: With the pieces on the car, there are no channels for the replacement weatherstrips to slide into, nor clips that were holding the trim in place. The replacement rubber piece is on the left, the trim that was installed on my car on the right. They're not even the same width: This suspicion I have — that I'm not dealing with the correct pieces on my car — is doubly borne out by the way the trim is attached to the door. There appear to be four large, perhaps 8mm or so, holes in the door. From my understanding, there should be four push-in clips that retain the stainless weatherstrip frame to the door using these holes, and one screw holding it in place at the end. As you can see in the next picture, none of those were used on my car. Instead, it has tiny holes drilled into the door frame where teeny self-tapping flathead screws were used instead: Correct me if I'm wrong, but it does appear that what I ended up with on my car are something entirely different that the previous owner just kind of slapdash adapted to fit an Avanti door, right? It appears that I'll need a pair of the original Avanti weatherstrip channels. Which leads me to my next question, then: Does anyone have a pair of the original weatherstrip channels they would like to sell, or suggestions as to what could be substituted as an assembly to replace them? The rubber, as you can see above, has cracked and torn off in several places so I can't even feign ignorance and put the old ones back in.

Hi @Kodjo, unfortunately I already sent out the extras I had.

All spoken for. Thanks, folks!

One left.

You got it, Jim. I'm stopping by the post office this evening so I'll message you with the tracking number once it gets issued. Wes

Whoever pulled the single NAPA 660-1000 heater valve repair kit that I'd ordered managed to pull a box of 10 and ship that to me instead. I have seven left that I have no need for, as I already have one problem-child Avanti. So if anybody wants one, please send me a message and I'll drop one in the mail, gratis. Thanks! Wes