metaruss

I got the rear brakes put back together, finally.  I originally took them apart to try to fix a squealing problem back there.  I believe it was due to a broken spring on one of the brake shoes.  I also wanted to bleed the brake system and flush it out with new fluid.  Even though the brakes and lines are suprisingly unrusty, the bleeder on the left side snapped off.  After breaking an extractor trying to get it out, I just replaced the cylinders on both sides (less than $10 each :).  Of course, the flare nuts were frozen to the brake lines (which weren’t even rusty), but I was able to spin the cylinder off the nut.  On the right side, the grease around outer bearing was contaminated with water and grit and the spindle nut was even rusty.  The dust cap seems OK, so I just flushed out all the grease with gasoline and repacked the bearings.  The races looked fine, so I didn’t bother replacing anything.  Some new brake hardware and grease seals later, it was all back together.

I always like to get into everything on a new (ha!) car to get a handle on where things are.  The shoes themselves seemed new and I know the front pads are new, so I should be good in the brake department.  Another thing that I thought was odd was that the emergency brake cables are NOT frozen!  The car is an automatic, so I doubt they were ever used.  For whatever reason, these cables are plastic-coated.  All of the ’87 Daytonas and Shadows I’ve seen were just steel and would rust within a year or two, while my ’88 had the coating.  This car gets weirder and weirder.

I think I have decided what paints I am going to use.  In the interest of not having to worry about rusting under the primer, I will take the body down to metal, spray with POR-15 clear, POR-15 tie-coat primer, and PPG color and clear coats.  The underbody and fenders will get the POR-15 underbody treatment in semigloss black.  That should intomb the metal for all eternity.  I also need to think about how I am going to weld in the plates to patch up the underbody and straighten-out the front end.  At the moment, the driver’s side door is partially stripped and the rear end is in the air so that I can investigate the squeaky brakes and bleed the lines.  As usual, the bleeders snapped off when I tried to remove them, so hopefully I will be able to extract them.  If not, new cylinders are only $15.

Haven’t done much work to the car lately, but I have stopped driving it.  I went to take care of some rust that was forming just above the bumper strip on the passenger-side door.  What I uncovered was that the strip was attached to the door with silicone rubber and under it was all rust.  In a few places it did rust through, but since it is under the strip, I’m not concerned.  It appears that the door had been hit at some point, as there are holes drilled in random places, probably from a dent pull-out tool.  Whoever straightened the metal did a good job, but they didn’t bother painting it!  So, it looks like I am going to have to DA the whole door and repaint it.  The paint is cracking in several places anyway, probably due to rust forming.  I see the same thing happening on the passenger-side front fender as well as the hood, but nowhere else.  Hopefully I’ll have a compressor soon, so I will be able to do a proper painting job.  This will be the practice I need to repaint the Shelby.

I’ve been driving the Shelby daily now for several weeks while I addressed some issues with the Daytona.  All and all it has been reliable, though still has some cold startup issues, uses oil, and sounds like a Mack truck.  I may drop the old Shadow engine in if looks like the Daytona project is going to take a long time.  Eventually I put the Daytona wheels on because they actually have tread and they are also round.  There are various things that need fixing on the CSX as well, but much of the work is the body.  If all goes as planned, I will have a compressor fairly soon and will gain some experience at painting the Daytona.  Then I’ll be able to repaint the Shelby, finally.  I may try to polish the rims next winter to have a nice, fresh Shelby by next summer.  Yeah right. :p

I actually did not do the work to create this, but I wanted to make
it available to the free software community. Special thanks to Eric Valette for all the hard
work in putting it together.

Basically, the kernel image used on the rescue disk for the Debian
2.2 “Potato” PowerPC distribution will not work on the Motorola MCP750.
There are a few patches required to make the IRQ mapping and IDE
controller work properly. If you do not have a native PPC or
cross-compiler environment to build a PPC kernel, then you will not be
able build a kernel with the required patches. Even if you do, the
MCP750 may not be able to boot from floppy or CDROM, depending on what
type of CompactPCI chassis it is installed in. Therefore, you will
need to network boot the board, which requires a combination rescue/root
image to be transferred to the board via TFTP. Eric’s image provides
that setup, using a Linux 2.2.17-pre9 kernel. Here
are the files:

• boot-mcp750.bin – the kernel/installer image.
• BOOTING – board setup example (env, niot, and nbo).

Be sure that you have “Network PReP-Boot Mode Enabled” set to “Y”
and don’t be surprised if the “nbo” command fails with “Network Boot
Controller/Device Error”. Just try again. Once the installer is up,
you may install Debian in the usual fashion EXCEPT if you are installing
to hard disk. If that is the case DO NOT use the installer to setup
your partition table (cfdisk). Doing so will not work and will also
break the installer, requiring a reboot. Instead, scroll down to the
last few installation options and select “Start a shell”. From here,
use fdisk (not cfdisk) to setup the partitions and exit the shell when
complete. Also, I recommend using /dev/hdc1 as the root partition,
since this is the default boot parameter in Eric’s image. Otherwise, you can use a hex editor to easily change it (is there an rdev for PPC?).

Once I had Debian installed and upgraded to a sid/woody setup, I built a 2.4.x kernel for it. The 2.4.18-pre6 kernel worked on the MCP750 without any special modifications. While the 2.2.17-pre9 from Eric did not work on the MCPN750 (non-system slot version of the MCP750), the 2.4.18 seemed to.