When I repaired the seat transmission of my 67 Eldorado I drove the car out of the garage to have more room. When I wanted to drive it back into the garage, suddenly the radiator boiled over and the temperature gage showed full heat. I immediately shut down the engine. The car never had an overheating problem before and the radiator is new as well.

There are only very few possibilities why this could have happened.

• The thermostat did no longer open
• The waterpump failed
• Air was trapped somewhere in the cooling system

So I removed the thermostat housing first to check the thermostat. This is when disaster struck. The two bolts in the thermostat housing snapped off immediately when I tried to unscrew them. *Cr*p”
I then removed the thermostat and put it into boiling water and it worked perfectly. So I think I can rule out the thermostat.
As the upper radiator hose stayed pretty cool and it did not feel like there is any coolant circulating through it, I suspected the water pump. Maybe the impeller does no longer work. I will have to remove the pump to check it.
My friend Richard came over to help me to try removing the broken bolts which got stuck in the cylinder head water outlet pipe. As all methods we tried to remove the broken bolts failed, we began drilling the remains out. This did not turn out very successful either... The threads also got damaged with this method. Of course one could now rethread this part, but I decided to order a good used one.

Once again Arizona Vintage Parts is the company where I ordered all the spare parts. They are really a great company! They are reasonably priced and so far they had everything I ever needed and inquired for. They are a pleasure to deal with and I can highly recommend them. I´m looking forward for the parts to arrive, as the car in its current state is immobile and blocking the garage...

UPDATE 03/09: The parts from Arizona Vintage parts already arrived within a couple of days after ordering! Wow thats fast! Now I need some time and warmer temperatures to install them...

my friend Richard drilling out the snapped off bolts...


Normally the thermostat is in there. You can see the mounting holes from where we drilled out the bolts. Unfortunately the threads did not survive this treatment...

Tags:1967, Eldorado, Water Pump, Restoration, Thermostat

When I got my Eldorado one function of the 6 way power seat did not work. The rear tilt function did not work at all and was stuck. When I pushed the according switch I could hear the motor spin but nothing happened. So I crawled under the seat and saw that the according transmission wire was disconnected from the actuator. I reconnected it but this did not change anything. I then checked all the connectors for current. Everything was o.k. there, so it could have only been the seat transmission itself.
I removed it from under the seat, what was a little tricky and involved getting in some strange positions to access all the screws. It would be easier if one removes the seat from the car, but thats a rather unpleasant work as well...
Eventually it came out of the car. I disassembled it and at first everything looked pretty good, but it soon showed that the old grease became rather hard and sticky and one of the three solenoids was no longer able to push the gear into a locked position.
I thoroughly removed all of the old grease and re-greased everything with white lithium grease. I then reassembled everything, reconnected the gear cables, reinstalled the transmission under the seat (thats a very tricky part...) and everything worked like new!
I now have perfectly working power seats again!

the seat transmission disassembled - you can see the brownish old grease everywhere

part of the gear and the solenoids

the transmission part

the three solenoids

the cleaned and re-greased transmission

Tags:1967, Eldorado, Restoration, Seat Transmission, Solenoid, 6 way power seat