Since I’ve had the car, I’ve put on new tires in a better size. Now the car doesn’t sit as high and the front tires no longer rub the inner fenders - the steering effort is now very nice - it was a workout before. Also replaced the rotors, calipers, pads, and associated brake lines and hoses. Now the car stops with a lot less pedal effort and doesn’t try to turn when braking. The drivers side caliper was frozen. Now I can even spin that wheel when the car is jacked up. Tracked down and fixed one of the electrical gremlins - the engine ground strap was not making a good connection to the engine block - this manifested itself in an intermittent starting problem - figured it out after removing the starter (getting the starter back in was way harder than it should be - I learned to curse in German that day). Fixing that also fixed the dancing temperature gage problem - now it provides a nice steady reading.
Next thing to tackle is the small coolant leak where the lower radiator hose goes into the thermostat. A very fun car to drive around - it has a much smoother ride on rough roads than either my Miata or my Mini (no surprsise there I know). There isn’t a whole of power - I haven’t checked the timing or the point gap/dwell and only played around with the Weber downdraft enough to unstick the fast idle so now the car will start up just fine when cold.
