re: #42 A Cranky One

I do my own maintenance on all our cars, at least, as best I can. In fact, I am slowly building up my confidence (and inebriation) to drop the fuel tank in Mrs. Fish’s ‘79 beastie. However, easily the most aggravating and time-consuming job I have done to date has been dropping the dashboard in her ‘97 Lincoln Town Car to replace the heater core. For the non-mechanically-inclined, a heater core is a device that warms the air coming through your vents by using engine coolant, kind of like a mini-radiator. But if it leaks, you get engine coolant spraying onto your windshield, which is … unpleasant. The process of dropping the dash and gaining access to the core (“the demon core”, I called it, after the fatal plutonium device that claimed the lives of two Manhattan Project scientists back in the late 1940’s) took me a solid week to accomplish from beginning to end.