I generally buy Craftsman tools. They're really just OK quality, but the warranty is iron-clad: you can walk into a Sears store anywhere, hand the man your broken socket (or whatever), and he'll give you a new one on the spot, no questions asked. I try not to put this to the test more than once every five years or so, but I don't hesitate to take them up on the offer, even if I broke the tool doing something stupid.

Bilstein also warrants its shocks for life, but that's not why I like them -- they just happen to be great shocks. Now that I had one that wasn't so great anymore, I wondered what to do about it. Problem was, as is common policy amongst manufacturers of auto parts, the warranty only applies to the original purchaser, and these shocks were already on the car when we bought it.

Well, I had bought a set of Bilsteins from ipd for the 122S three years ago. These have the same part numbers, and I probably had a receipt somewhere. How would anyone know the failed shock wasn't one of that set? I could probably zip across the bridge to Portland and get a new replacement on the spot...

After a few days of mulling this around in the back of my mind for fun (making cross-members hot isn't really all that entertaining), I couldn't do it. Fair is fair. Anyway, I figured the karmic load from such a deception would cost me at least several seconds a lap at PIR, all by itself. Heck, if I could cheat people, I'd have the bucks to buy a new set of Bils and I wouldn't even have to think about such problems. Anyway, I knew what I wasn't going to do.

Virtue was not rewarded by smooth sailing on the steering box problem. On a 122, removing the bolts through the steering coupler is an obvious process. On our 1800's coupler, the nuts are in plain sight, but there are no visible bolt heads. I figured they were studs molded into the rubber, but as soon as I began loosening the nuts, the studs turned with them. Fishing around holes in the rubber with various angled screwdrivers did nothing for me. Well, I had no time to waste on that now; the main thing was to get the box on the bench, take it apart and put whatever it needed on order. I'd simply loosen the coupler yoke from the box's shaft and worry about how to get the nuts tight again later.

Having one hand too few for the job, this took several hours with a hammer and drift, but the box eventually did come out. Step one in disassembly was to remove the Pitman arm from the box. To my surprise, the big nut came off easily (well, it had been soaking in oil for months), but none of my pullers was an obvious choice for extracting the arm. After a few more hours proving that I didn't actually own a puller that would do the job, I quit. Another whole day had been spent accomplishing nothing but taking the steering box out of the car.

I think it was about at this point that I realized doing an engine swap was the least of my problems. I still hoped to get to it in time for Track Day, but I'd better not spend any time on it until everything else was ready to go. This was the first smart thought I'd had in weeks, and I knew it.

The next day, I schlepped the lower control arms, the new bushings and the steering box over to Lou's Machine Shop. The guy there put a little puller on the stuck arm, grabbed an air tool, went "BRRRRRT" for three seconds, and handed me the separated box and arm -- I really must get one of those rigs someday. He also charged me $10. I left the control arms and bushings without attempting to give instructions or warnings -- Lou's guys simply don't take in work they're not confident about doing right.

The steering box came apart without any further shenanigans, and the "leaking yet full" mystery was made clear in an instant: instead of replacing the leaky seals, someone had packed the box with axle grease! The grease was now old and hard (I don't recommend doing this, by any means), but it had apparently done its job -- after a lot of really messy cleaning, there was no discernable wear to the bearing races or gears themselves.

I called the Volvo dealer in Portland. After a good while waiting on hold and listening to music (of a sort), I finally got to ask my question: "What are the odds that you folks can get oil seals for a '67 1800 steering box?"

"Oh, 'bout a million to one." He didn't even have to look it up -- let no one say those guys don't know their business.

There's nothing special about the oil seals, of course. I was sure they were standard sizes; all I had to do was find a local industrial seal supply house, trot in with the old ones and walk out with the new ones. Some searching through the phone book later, I'd located the only listed seal place in thirty miles around, way on the other side of Vancouver. I'd just run right over.

After driving around a maze of an industrial area (where none of the streets go through to each other) for quite some time, I walked into the seal company's office and plunked my two old seals on the receptionist's desk. "Can you folks match these up for me?"

"Well, maybe I can get one of our engineers to come out. Who are you with?"

"Uh, just me."

"How many will you be wanting?"

"I guess this is not what you people do, is it?"

"No, we manufacture custom seals for Boeing, or Lockheed, or..." The list was long and impressive.

"Sorry, my mistake. You wouldn't happen to know... no, you wouldn't. Thanks anyway."

And so passed another day of Not Much Progress.

Obvious ideas are only obvious once you've thought of them. The next morning, I had one -- bearing houses usually stock oil seals. I looked under a different category in the phone book, and made a call.

"Sure, we've got all kinds of seals. Minimum order is $20, though..."

Not a problem! This time, I found the place readily. The guy behind the counter took a quick glance at my old seals and knew right away what the part numbers were. He didn't have them in stock, but could get them by the following day. How many did I want? I'd take $20-worth.

During the snail-like course of the project, many other things hadn't gotten done -- stuff like editing magazines, stuff like looking for paying work, stuff like mowing the lawn. We'd been paying the neighbor's kid to do that, but they'd moved away six weeks ago. Marsha finally insisted I take our new lawnmower out of its box, which had been sitting on the back porch for a month or more. Personally, I sort of liked the idea of having "meadow" around the house instead of "lawn," but she had a point. I found my old steel-toed flight deck boots and was soon put-putting away.

After all the frustration of having trouble doing simple work on the car, mowing the lawn was therapeutic. I got into it. I don't know how much acreage we have here, but I ran several tanks of gas through the machine and almost got finished by nightfall -- must have been mowing through tall grass for five hours or more. The place looked a lot better, but I discovered my right hand (which has a bit of carpal tunnel problems anyway) had simply gone out of business. When it came time to eat dinner, I could hardly hold a fork. You new subscribers who got magazines with scribbly labels: now you know why.

I had my second good idea of the day (mowing the whole property at one go hadn't been one of them). I went through our own classified ads and e-mailed a number of people, "Would you happen to have a used-but-good Bilstein shock for...?" As an afterthought, I sent one to Duane at Foreign Autotech -- after fifteen years of 122 ownership and only one of playing with an 1800, it's still not instinctive to me to try him first.

In the morning, I'd pick up the steering box seals and retrieve the forgotten control arms from Lou's. It was time for the project to take an upturn.