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.

Why thermionic electron emission devices (valves to our friends in the UK)?  Well, I grew up listening to my LPs, cassettes, and the radio through a 6V6GT push-pull instrument amplifier and eventually found that I really missed its sound.  I actually didn’t know what it was I didn’t like about my audio system until I fired up that old amp again.  The brash, gritty sound was gone.  See my Thomas 6V6GT PP amp for more about that.  I don’t consider myself to be an audiophile, however the difference to me is noticeable.  For an excellent article with a bit of empirical evidence, take a look at Tubes Vs. Transistors by Russell O. Hamm.

The other part of the answer to this question is that I enjoy the challenge as much as (if not more than) the results of my efforts.  In terms of components in the signal path, electron tube amplifiers are about as simple as it can get.  Perhaps some of the healthy fear involved in working with lethal voltages has something to do with it as well. 🙂  Finally, tubes are just damn cool.  They operate on such a macro scale that you can actually “see” the process take place inside them that is providing you with service that you took the time to design/modify.  They’re also pretty to look at….

I found the damn electrical load that was draining the battery.  The battery wouldn’t last sitting for more than about 2 days.  I measured about a 300mA drain, which is a lot!  I isolated it to the power seat/power door lock circuit, which made so sense since I have no power seats and the power door lock motors draw many amps when they are on.  A quick glance at the wiring diagrams revealed the horn circuit also being fed from this circuit.  The horn doesn’t work and I never looked as to why.  It appears that the steering column wiring for the horn switch is shorted and it was disabled at the horn itself.  Unfortunately, this left the horn relay on at all times and, apparently, and relay coil draws about 280mA.  Anyway, I yanked the relay and now everything is fine.  I still see about 22mA of drain, 4 of those are for the Dawes Devices A/F guage, which was tied right to the battery.  The rest must be the radio and clock, I guess.

I re-replaced the left-front wheel bearing.  It went rather easily, considering what a pain it can be.  The assembly came out with a sledge and went in easily with a pair of C-clamps.  The only major problem I ran into was that the new rotors had rusted to the new (failed) hub assembly.  Ended up having to use a hydraulic puller and a sledge to get it off.  I think it rusted around the center of the hub, so I dabbed a little anti-seize on there.

For an encore, I went to tighten a hose clamp on the heater bypass valve when it went “click”.  Damn, and I was doing so well.  It was a Mopar unit and it was as if the plastic has broken-down.  Instead of being brittle, it had the consistency of hardened rubber hose.  It just crumbled in my fingers.  I had the spare from the Shadow, but since it had the new-style intake (bypass valve under the battery tray), the valve inlet points the wrong way.  I managed to find a nylon elbow that I could use for now.  I bought a new one at Auto-Stoned for $12.  It was the all-plastic one, like the one from my Shadow.  It lasted for over 7 years, so I won’t complain.

Had a little scare with the Daytona’s engine…thought I blew it.  When I pulled the fuel pressure regulator, the vacuum line appeared to be disconnected.  That may explain why it was running rich, but it shouldn’t run at all at 10psi of boost.  Anyway, that coupled with some apparent oil coming out of the dipstick and the fact that is was missing at idle, I thought I cracked a ringland.  Well, I snugged up the dipstick and after installing the new adjustable FPR, it seemed to run fine.  I did a compression check and it was the same as before: about 130psi on all four.  The plugged looked perfect.  I guess I’m OK, but it still starts missing on one cylinder if it is left idling for a while.  That Dawes Devices A/F gauge has rather dim green LEDs, so it’s hard to see them in the day and I don’t know if I am rich or so lean that I’m off the scale.  I might just install my old Cyberdyne so I can see what is going on.

Since it is an early-style T1 intake, I had to use a universal adjustable fuel pressure regulator from FWD Performance.  I managed to install it in the same location as the stock unit by grinding-out part of the bracket to clear the return line fittings.  I also had to bend the short pipe for the return line on the fuel rail slightly to clear the unit.  The regulator has 3 fittings: two -4 AN fittings on the bottom (outlet in the center and inlet to the side) and a 1/8″ NPT pipe fitting on the side for a pressure gauge.  I was lazy and just used two brass 1/4″ flare fittings for the inlet and outlet.  I placed an o-ring at the base of the flare fitting threads, which sealed the fitting to the regulator housing.  I also used Teflon tape on the threads so the threads were not so loose.  I then wedged a piece of aluminum between the two fittings so they would not turn when I installed the rest of the brass pipe fittings.  I enlarged the hole in the stock bracket slightly and used the 1/4″ NPT street elbow to mount the regulator to the bracket (between the elbow and flare fitting).  A 1/4″ NPT to 3/8″ hose adapter was mounted to the elbow (inlet) and a 1/4″ NPT to 1/4″ hose adapter to the center flare fitting (outlet).  In order to the fuel gauge fitting to face upwards, the elbow is rotated such that it is pointing somewhat towards the valve cover, similar to the stock regulator.  It’s a little tight between the two hose fittings, but it works and looks decent.

I haven’t driven this car at all lately.  I don’t like to drive it in the winter anyway, but real reason is that the starter solenoid was dying.  I knew it would go, since I got the car with no heat shield and the solenoid was all melted.  Well, this weekend I swapped the starter from my old Shadow in and found that my retrofit heat shield was now gone as well.  That would explain that burning plastic smell I was noticing this summer.  Luckily I had bought 2 new heat shields this fall (dealer parts), so I put one of those in along with the starter.