New tools!  I bought a Snap-on TRLL72 extra long, quick-release ratchet.  This was a total impulse buy, I got off of the highway to avoid traffic and happened upon Snap-on Dan.  Oops!

Here is a comparison against a standard T72 ratchet and a TX72 locking flex ratchet, which I already had.

Now, will it fit...

Back to work.  A few months ago, I spent some time reconstructing the shift linkage to remove all of the rubber bushings and replace them with spherical bearings.  I took a break to work on some other things, but now I'm back on the finish work in preparation for primer.

Here is the weighted link, I had new tabs welded in place and I have decided to clean it up.

After some grinding.  It's not perfect, but I'll add a bit of putty to get everything perfectly symmetric.

The tab itself was a bit asymmetric, so I blued it up and traced out a circle concentric with the hole.

After a bit of trimming I was happy with the radius.

After reworking the edges tangent to the new radius, I was happy with the look considering this tab was hand-cut.

Here was the input linkage just after welding by Bill Lewis.  Not too bad!  Since I'm smoothing all of the other welds, I decided to smooth this one too.

Almost good enough without putty.

This piece got a little more work as well.  The original stampings were really rough, so I smoothed them out.  I also ground out the stock weld, re-welded some portions, and smoothed it into a nice radius.

Mud.

New tools!

I bought my first big-boy set of dial calipers after using junkers for many years.  These are Mitutoyo 6" dial calipers, I prefer dial calipers over the more popular digital option.  I also picked up a cheap deburring tool and a Mitutoyo center gauge.

I finally got a chance to make progress on my fan shroud.  I finished the putty work and got it sprayed with epoxy primer tonight.

I normally try to do better than this, but sometimes you have to spray primer outside.  At night.

PPG DP40LF epoxy primer.  It's not perfect, but most of the imperfections are fine enough to sand out in the primer layer.

I have a break from school coming up, so hopefully I can make some decent progress on the Jetta.  Until then, back to less interesting things.