After some maintenance details were accomplished, my Pantera was reunited with Earth, after several months in the air. It's ready to test drive, but another problem developed, totally unexpected. There was a funnel cloud in the sky this afternoon and the National Weather Service broke into "Radar Love" on the FM. The dude's voice was cracking and he told everybody who lives in a certain area to evacuate mobile homes and go to shelters, to get inside and stay in the interior middle of the house, so I turned around and went home, the parts store is in the direction of the tornado. I've never seen a tornado before, and it was grey and dark blue, like a long cord, in the shape of a rainbow, coming from the spinning clouds and going to Earth. Amazing. So it got dark and rained really hard for a few hours and early afternoon passed into early darkness. The roads are still wet, so tomorrow I get to test the brakes and maybe get a better photo. This photo doesn't do justice and I'm still learning digital photography, as you can tell.
The receptionist on Friday said "good luck getting those wheels installed on your car, and laughed." The other leagle beagles looked at them stacked on the floor in the hall and said "no way those will ever fit" so you can seee, I have to drive my Pantera to the office Monday, and I'll be the one laughing and smiling. The tires are really wide and fit really close to the vertical fender well vertical line of sight down. I took a body man dolled and pounded the 1/2" inner fender well lip up on all four wheel wellsm then I took those carpenter clamps that slide closed and went around the perimeter of the wheel well with two of them, closing the lip up closer to the wheel wells on the inside of the fender. A little paint cracked off about 2-3" on 3 wheel wells, but my cat is painted Auto-Zone white, I call it. It's actually Dura-Last GMC Truck White #T-110, available anywhere, so that's a very easy thing to fix. Just a little time, sanding, paintings, wet sanding, compounding, waxing and polishing and the touch-ups are nearly invisible. I like that, very forgiving to fix little things, like holes where 5 mph bumpers got deleted.
People just stared at these wheels on Friday, and I could tell they were both a little jealous and looked at me like I'm a little crazy. That makes me laugh. Thinking about getting the new header exhaust gaskets installed stops my laughter. Ah well, maybe they have the right to laugh and I am a little crazy when it comes to my Pantera. My Pantera behavior certainly isn't logical, why work on this thing 100 hours for every 1 hour I drive it? Doesn't make sense, but it does to me.
Need to polish up my camera shooting skills some. I'm happy to be at this stage of progress, and thrilled with what'll basically be the exterior visuals of my Pantera for the next 40 years. It looks like a new car from the future, still, to me. The Pantera was always years ahead of it's time, and I'm into Pantera's a lot lately.
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