metaruss

The floorpans and all associated nonsense are finally, officially completed.  All the welds and seams have been caulked from underneith using polyurethane roofing caulk.  It takes a long time to cure (especially in this weather), but it sticks to anything and resists solvents better than silicone (which turns to jello when exposed to gasoline).  I don’t care for the water based acrylic caulk, as it doesn’t stick as well and…wel it is water-based.  I also coated the fenders with the stuff as a replacement for the rubberized coating that I stripped off.

I have been working with the wiring to update to ’87 electronics and the ’91 interior.  I have the complete harnesses from the ’91, but they are so different from the ’86 that it makes no sense to try to put them into an ’86 body.  The big differences are that they flipped the gender of the bulkhead connector (the male side with the bolt is inside instead of outside) and the body connectors are next to the rear seats instead of under the dashboard.  It appeared to be much easier to adapt the ’86 dash harness to the ’91 dashboard.  The ’86 wiring has a seperate dash harness and body harness (behind the dash), which I see in most of the early body styles.  The ’91 combines the dash harness with the body harness so that you have one, huge body harness with a bunch of tails going into the dashboard.  I found a way to neatly route the ’86 dash harness in the ’91 dashboard and solder the appropriate connectors from the ’91 harness into the ’86 harness.  I chose NOT to cut any of the ’86 connectors off in the unlikely event that I want to go back to the ’86 interior.  The instrument cluster and message center are easy, but the headlights and windshield wipers/washer is more complex.  The ’91 electronics uses a HUGE bank of relays to control everything,  The switches on the dash are tiny and cannot control these accessories directly.  Therefore, a small relay module is needed to adapt the ’86 exterior lighting and windshield wiper/washer circuits to the ’91 switchboard.  In the near term, I hope that I can just keep my old steering column and let the old headlight switch dangle until I have this figured out.

The floorpans are painted.  I got stalled over the weekend because I ran out of paint.  I had ordered more the previous week, but it was delayed until yesterday due to the holiday.  I also painted the area under the rear passenger seat, which was fairly rusty around the rear seat belts and in the bowls.  It looks like it rusted from the inside and I’m not sure where the water came from.  The rear quarter panel windows are the most likely candidate.  I still have to replace the center section of the passenger side front seat crossmember, which had to be removed to replace the rusted metal underneith.  Once that is done, I can finally reassemble.

I am seriously considering upgrading the interior to the 1991+ style.  I have a line on a mostly-complete black interior from a ’91, plus a pair of doors.  Supposedly, the new interior will mount to the old body.  The exceptions are the door panels and the center console (and the wiring, of course).  Since I would get the new doors, that is not a problem.  Some fabrication will probably be needed for the center console, though.  The other part I’m not sure about is the steering column.  I’d like to keep the one I have, so hopefully that will work.  I have not run across anyone who has really done this before, so it should be interesting.  In the interest of time, I may have to delay this until the spring though or perhaps do a partial conversion.  It would be a shame to put all the old stuff back in just to rip it all out again, but I am pushing my luck with the weather as it is.