While I’ve been driving around I keep hearing a sloshing sound from the rear of the car. I presumed it to be a rear washer fluid jug at first but it turns out that the Roadmaster wagon doesn’t have a rear fluid jug. I started nosing around in the back and ultimately started tearing out trim pieces. Since some of the rear trim pieces are ill-fitting, I was starting to wonder if the car had been used for smuggling or something and some booty was left behind in the back of the car. Once I dug deep enough I found the drivers side rear fender was full of water. I checked the spare tire well on the passenger side when I bought it and it wasn’t wet at all but I could hardly start tearing apart the interior so I accepted that there would be some secrets. It looks like the water has been there for some time. The inside of the fender has started to rust and scale a bit and, of course, there’s no drain hole in there. The bottom of the fender well was pretty caked with silt and whatnot so I’m assuming that it’s rainwater. I tore out all of the rear trim on the drivers side in the cargo area and I can see a water stain where water has trickled down the inside of the D-Pillar. I’ve soaked up all of the water, scooped out the silt, scraped off the scaling and poured some leftover EvapORust into the fender well. Fortunately my driveway has a fair slope to it so I parked the wagon nose-up to let the EvapORust sit back there in the fender well. That stuff is magic and should clean it up pretty good.
I’m guessing that my rainwater issue is the typical roof-rack leakage problem but there’s a lot of screws up there and I’m not too keen on tearing those out and possibly making it worse until the warm weather comes back again.
I was planning on keeping my Parisienne until next year when I could replace the carburetor and install my HHO catalyzer to find out for myself just how well that works on a non-EFI engine. Now I’m not too keen on letting the wagon sit outside all winter if the roof is leaking even a little but to get it into the garage, my Parisienne needs to go. I hate to do it before I’m ready but I’m putting her up for sale tomorrow to see if I can let her go to a new home. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of ’83-’86 Parisiennes for sale but I’ve yet to see another ’81 Brougham around here. ’81 was the last year for the original Pontiac body style and they seem to be a little uncommon.
