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Well, with my horrible defeat in the election over with, I am doing my best to pick up the pieces and try not to just vomit over and over.
I've just been driving the bird lately, its my number one dd now, taking me to work and college daily. I finally broke down and bought some much needed parts, though, and installed them today, so its time for an update!
I now have a working hatch. I replaced the lift cylinders today with some eBay specials that were much cheaper than the auto parts stores and made in the USA too. I love having a working hatch now. I'll have to get some for the IROC too.
This is a small ray of sunshine in my otherwise rotten day, and rotten days to follow. Maybe I'll paint the car....
It was a basket case when I got it, but its coming along.
The underside was/still is pretty rusty throughout, with the driver's floor board gone. I had to patch it with some tin just to seal it up to drive around in it.
It just rolled over 218k miles yesterday. When I got it back in 2005, it was ready for the junkyard up in Indiana but I saved it by luck. EVERYTHING needs replaced in this car, but for now, I just keep patching it back together. I have put so much effort into saving this car over the years that I cannot bear to start over again with a clean shell.
It would be like turning my back on an old friend.
Well, I lost my lovely 1986 Trans Am wheels with wonderful BFG Sport Comp 2 tires. They are now on my mom's 89 Firebird because she is daily driving to work on the Interstate and got a lump in one of her back tires. I don't have the money to buy tires right now, and I don't mind driving on mismatched stuff. So, now she has my wonderful tires, and I have my old ones back, minus the bad tire, and replaced it with an almost matching tire from the batch of Formula wheels that I got from a swap meet. At least I have the center caps and lug nut covers to match it now.
New tires will come again.
On the upside, I burned in my old set of tires with a high speed 180 mile round trip to Deland to see 386kustoms, and picked up my disk brake calipers for the rear end I bought from him a while back. I also had left one of the disk e-brake cables so I'm happy that I am now ready to rebuild the rear with my 02 SS Camaro posi.
I also got a very nice used all copper radiator for a 5 speed V8 car. It was a good run!!
We are now rolling well over 219k miles now. The car is in full daily driver status and reliable enough to stay there for now. Except...
My last remaining speaker (the LH rear) just blew the other day. I made a command decision and removed two Sony rear speakers from my mom's firebird since she has no radio anyway, and "test" them in my car. While hooking up the RH rear, I found both wires skinned for some reason and touching. After fixing that, I now have two rear speakers. I'm stoked!
Well, I see that Hawks now has a repop 5 speed shifter plate for sale. I'll be saving up for that and I can't wait to have it.
Its also getting to be nice enough weather here to contemplate doing some body work. I've got my two 84 Trans Am front fenders to replace my dented and smashed pieces, but the rest of the body will be grinding out rust and fixing the metal. My subframe connectors still need to be installed as well.
I'm trying to figure out how I can get the window tint off of my back window without ruining the rear window defroster. It looks like it will be tough to do.
I'm only a few parts away from having everything together to rebuild my extra rear axle with the 02 SS take out 3.42/Zexel Torsen posi. I'd like to do that soon. My g-force trans is in a crate ready for me to install it.
Also, did I mention my gas gauge died? Well, I scored another sender from a local wrecking yard, repaired it, and swapped it into my mom's 89 Firebird that also had a dead fuel gauge. Hers is working great now, so now I need to take her old, rusty sender and rehab it so that I can swap it into mine. I know its a pain in the butt to do, but I have done it so much that I am getting good at it. I got my mom's swapped out in a Saturday afternoon/evening by myself with hand tools. Hopefully mine will go as easily again.
I replaced the spring in my combination valve to increase the pressure to the rear brakes. I picked up a 5 pack of the Grainger springs that are talked about on the brake board and it really did make a difference in my IROC, so I figured why not?
Well, it did make a difference. I also noticed under testing that my fronts NEVER lock up. No matter what. So that sucks, but the car stops much better than before, and I guess now I might as well watch the wrecking yards for the 98-02 F body cars. Its time to repair the front brakes, and on my car, when its time to repair something its time to upgrade from rusty crap to something better. An LS brake upgrade should help out.
I scored a Buick Turbo 3.8 long block on Craigslist so I got it. Its not the preferred 109 block from the 86-87 GN but its better than a standard 3.8 and I got the good crank, too.
I already have the GN turbo headers and a multiport fuel injection intake at the ready. I'm going to start the block and crank prep soon.
I'm also running down some adapters so that I can hook this B-O-P engine to my V8 bellhousing that's in my shed. I want to keep the OEM chevy bellhousing so that I can hook up my slave cylinder with no problems and keep the trans tilted.
I'll probably start a new thread in the engine swap forums so that I can keep this all straight. I'll link it to this forum when I'm progressing.
I scored a Buick Turbo 3.8 long block on Craigslist so I got it. Its not the preferred 109 block from the 86-87 GN but its better than a standard 3.8 and I got the good crank, too.
I already have the GN turbo headers and a multiport fuel injection intake at the ready. I'm going to start the block and crank prep soon.
I'm also running down some adapters so that I can hook this B-O-P engine to my V8 bellhousing that's in my shed. I want to keep the OEM chevy bellhousing so that I can hook up my slave cylinder with no problems and keep the trans tilted.
I'll probably start a new thread in the engine swap forums so that I can keep this all straight. I'll link it to this forum when I'm progressing.
Sounds like it will be a fun car once you get the 3.8 in it.
I have to do it in stages because of my tight budget, but first I am gonna get the 3.8 transplanted in to replace the 2.8 and just run it N/A. The turbo stuff will go on after that.
I really need to get my rear end put back together too, so I'm gonna have to carve out some time soon.
My smog pump started locking up so I had to configure a work around. I don't have access to the idler pulley setup that the automatic cars had, and I don't like running a belt with nothing there. Its a horribly long run of belt and it flops too much for my liking.
My remedy was to remove the smog pump, split it apart, and remove all of the seized up parts from the vane pump on the inside. It is now, effectively, a large idler pulley with big bearings. I greased up the bearings and put it back together and I've been back on the road with it for a month now with no more issues there.
The bad thing is, now that the smell and noise from that failure is gone, I can hear the power steering pump banging around. I guess that's next...
I'm getting ready to swap out my trans to my super-duper G-force replacement. In the mean time, I'd like to change the rear main seal while the trans is out:
If anyone can help me with that little dilemma about the rear main seal size I'd appreciate it.
I'm gathering up all the parts to upgrade when I swap the trans, like a new poly trans mount, and poly torque arm mount. I'll take pictures during the swap.
A quick update to my power steering pump "banging" that I was experiencing; in reality, it was moving around in the front while the engine was running. The two flange nuts on the rear mount brace were loose, and ALL the front bolts were sheared off of their mount points.
The fun part was that I had to pull the AC compressor off of the head in order to then get the power steering pump and front bracket off. Once I did that, I found the stud in the head broken off, the bolt in the water pump casing broken off, and a bolt that goes through the AC front bracket and then threads into the power steering pump bracket sheared off too. Yikes!
Anyhow, I got everything apart and got the broken bolt out of the head, but I damaged the threads doing it. The proper tap couldn't remedy my situation so I slightly enlarged that hole and it is now a standard 7/16 thread hole along with a nice long stud and plenty of loctite. I got the broken bolt out of the power steering bracket and put a new one in from the AC to the bracket. The water pump bolt has not been fixed yet. It seems that something else is down in that hole (maybe an easy out from a long time ago) and I'll have to pull the pump to do it right. I have no time for that now, because I may end up with a timing cover issue if I pull that pump off and I don't want to risk it. Ol' Betsy's my daily driver now!
Anyhow, with everything bolted up nice and tight now there is no more belt squealing or knocking sound coming from the power steering pump.
It looks like my power steering hoses have seen better days but they can wait a little bit.
Had some extra time yesterday and my new Alpine SPS-406 speakers came in the mail (thank God for overtime now and then) so I put the two together and installed them in the car.
I left a review in the aftermarket review forum because they made such a wonderful impression on me. They absolutely sound awesome and all I have is an old, garbage JVC head unit that came with one of my cars to drive them. Rear speakers are junker Sony Xplod pieces from a craigslist car I bought a few years ago.
I also did replace the speaker wire with some of that nice, fat blue insulated stuff you buy at the stereo shop, I used 18 awg since that what the speaker pigtails were that came with them and my head unit uses 20 awg off of its harness. I also took the time to remount the stereo as well as possible since the radio pod has all the OE mounts broken off of it (presumable on purpose.) Its nice to have a decent stereo again.
I also took the time to remount my ECM, which had the top peg lying to the side of, instead of in, the round grommeted hole near the speaker. Then while I was there, I fixed my red, leather-looking map pocket on the dash face and even dug up some missing screws and remounted dash parts that were not right.
Last but not least, my left front parking light kept going dead. It seems that my ground wire was coming loose inside the socket. I fixed that, and now we're happy again.
The Firebird has been performing its duties as daily driver reasonably enough. A while back, I did score a replacement AC compressor and lines that is much better than what I have now. About two weeks ago, I swapped the parts over and I'm just waiting for the time off work to go and have the car vacuumed down and charged again. The dye from the last charge up implicated the seal behind the compressor clutch as the guilty party for sure, and its possible that the lines were leaking as well. It was harder to see any leaks on the lines because the compressor was throwing leak detector out in all directions, which did get on the crimped fittings of the AC lines. They are all changed out now and hopefully will be charged this week.
A few days after changing the AC parts, the oil leak increased to an unmanageable level. I bit the bullet and looked up the AC Delco part number for the distributor o-ring and ordered one. I pulled the distributor and changed the o-ring about a week ago, and I just can't believe it. I have no oil leak now, none at all that I can see. I am totally stunned.
I could not believe that this was really my problem due to the amount of oil leaking, but its true. Once I have the AC fixed, the only things left to fix, function wise, will be the rear hatch pull down, the rear defroster on the window, the fuel gauge and the windshield washer pump. None of those are stopping me from daily driving the car, so they will get fixed as I can do them.
I've been finding so many cheap Firebirds on Craigslist lately that I am getting a lot of pressure from friends and family alike to get one with a nice body and then swap all my stuff onto that one. I don't want to do it, but in the end, it is starting to make sense.
Economic realities have been rearing their ugly heads, so not much money to invest.
I bought an 85 Trans Am for parts and it has been transformed into my daily driver. This 88 Firebird has now been taken off the road while repairs are being made. It donated its K&N air filter and Flowmaster exhaust permanently to the Trans Am so now it has a new paper filter to keep it working, but exhaust missing from the cat-back.
The A/C compressor is locked up but the lines are good, so now I am one compressor away from working A/C. I have a good, stock, 88 IROC cat-back to put on it to make it legal. I still have not gotten my replacement tires back, so its just going back and forth to the shop for the time being. Oh, it also lost the cigarette lighter power port so that I could put it in my Trans Am (to power the Garmin.)
The Buick engine is completely disassembled and being cleaned and prepped for re-assembly.
This car ALMOST got scrapped in order to salvage my other two. However, gas prices being what they are, the situation dictates that this gem be put back on the road. Both front calipers and one rear wheel cylinder are shot. One tire is flat and the gas gauge doesn't work. It will come back online soon and pics are going with it. It is on track to be my daily commuter very soon.
I used to run a high speed route between Tampa and Orlando some years back with this car. I got a tic over 30mpg most of the time and always above 28mpg. The paint job was not super expensive I guess, because it actually started to blow off the car when I was doing those over 85mph runs. I bought the car back in 2005, and it seemed ok enough until about 2012 when it saw a lot of highway time. Its funny, because you can see all over the car where the wind hits, just like it came from a wind tunnel. There are spots near the spoiler and back bumper that have paint that is still untouched.
09-26-2012, 10:09 PM
