metaruss

Driving the car again in the nice weather.  Hopefully I’ll get a chance to do some work on the Daytona.  Tweaked a few things in the cal to fix some summertime “cold” start quirkiness and hopefully addressed a low boost stumble.

The original fuel pump croaked a couple of weeks ago.  Since this is my only running car, I had to fix it ASAP.  I ordered a new Walbro 190lbs/hr fuel pump from FWD Performance, but couldn’t afford to wait for it to show up.  So, I dropped the tank and yanked the pump from the Daytona (same 190 unit, only 1 year old) and put it in the CSX.  Seems to be working fine.  I replaced the shifter cable bushings with the polyurethane “Booger Bushings”, since the originals under the hood were long gone.  I also changed the oil, which was way overdue, swapped out the air filter, and gave everything a good looking over.  There are coolant leaks from just about everywhere one can have a coolant leak.  They are all slow, but add up to a quart or two of coolant every couple of weeks.  The freeze plug next to the one that blew before is starting to seep.  I REALLY need to swap this motor out soon.  It is on borrowed time.  The new cal is rocking along and gets better mileage than the ND unit did.  It’s still lower than my Shadow was, but the CSX has smaller series tires and the short gears on the tranny.

Well, I spent much of the summer working on house and yard related things, so the Daytona sat for a long time.  As such, the CSX has been my daily driver all summer and probably will be all fall.  On the upside, some of that work included running 60A service out to my garage, which allows me to power my recently aquired compressor and stick welder.  Hopefully I can get the Daytona back together in time to get the CSX back in the garage before winter.

On a whole, the CSX has held up well.  There seems to be a coolant leak coming from the radiator.  The radiator has desperately needed recoring since I got the car.  I have also been using a custom calibration in place of the ND Performance cal I had before.  It is much improved, though still has idle issues.  The ND cal would always die two or three times at cold startup, but would eventually get going.  It also would break up real bad around 5000rpm and had a part throttle lean spot around 10psi of boost that would cause the engine to cut-out.  Aside from the idle problem (which may be mechanical), the new cal has none of these problems.  It seems that I have the mixture setup right, but we shall see how my gas mileage is.  See my Automotive Electronics pages for more info.

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 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.

Well, the car is back together.  It’s not perfect, but it’s close.  I didn’t notice it before, but the right rear quarter is pushed in about 1/4″.  Also, somehow the subchassis is tweaked such that the taillight is mounting a bit high and the bumper a bit low on the right side.  It sort of spread things out.  It looks fine until you get up close.  Once these cars get bent, it’s really hard to get them back where they should be again.  Everything else lined up well, though the liftgate is not popping open as it should.  I suspect the latch is not operating as smoothly as it used to.  Still need to paint that trim below the taillights, but it will just have to stay red until the spring.

Putting the bumper back together was a bit of a pain.  All those stupid plastic studs broke off the bumper fascia when I got hit, so I ended up making bolts with very flat heads to mount them.  The heads are covered by the CSX fascia, so that’s no biggie.  I also threaded the CSX fascia studs so I could mount it to the bumper fascia with regular nuts.  A lot of the original push nuts were gone anyway, so this setup worked well and allowed me to adjust the tension for minimal warpage.

With my Shadow now donating the rest of the parts I need, I have finally made some progress on the repairs.  Using my dad’s handy hydraulic kit, I was able to push the underbody most of the way back…still needs a few tweaks though.  I test fitted the Shadow’s bumper, just to make sure the frame wasn’t tweaked at all.  It fit perfectly.  Looks like the restoration will have a happy ending.

Thanks to our club’s prez, Jason Trotter, I now have a tail light and that flimsy trim piece.  Now I just need a bumper support and struts.  I’m thinking of getting brand new struts from Mopar, since all the ones I’ve seen in the yard (and on my cars) are rusted pretty bad.

BAM!  Some kid in his daddy’s SUV rear-ended me today.  A few seconds after stopping for a red light, he hit me thinking I had gone through (it had just changed).  Just what I needed…another project.  The damage isn’t too bad: collapsed bumper struts, bent bumper support, broken taillight, and the metal trim between the taillights and bumper is twisted up.  There is no other frame or body damage except for the underbody behind the right tail light.  That’s going to need a bit of pushing.

Kudos to Dave Tekampe for helping me install the new suspension components.  The work wasn’t too bad except for the control arm bushings.  Whatever stories you’ve heard about removing those suckers is true.  It’s a chore getting the rubber out of the metal sleeve.  All the metal pieces need to be saved because the kit from energy suspension does not contain anything useful except for the rubber itself.  The rest of the bushings are fairly straight forward.  After some trial and error, we found that pushing out the center sleeve with a large bolt, followed the rubber works best.  There’s no need to push the outer sleeve out of the control arm.  Of course, he had access to an arbor press….

Anyway, the CSX now has new Koni struts and shocks (including KYB strut mounts, etc), new Energy Suspension polyurethane control arm and sway bar bushings, and new lower ball joints.  The car handles wonderfully now, compared to before, even with the eye-balled alignment and shot tires.  Those are next on the list.