metaruss

For reasons I don’t quite understand, the #4 exhaust cam and follower got trashed.  The valve train was making some horrible sounds when I got home from the meeting last night.  I swapped the FM475 cam with an ’88 TBI roller cam.  Also put in the PT Cruiser followers.  The valvetrain is very quite and the lope at idle is gone.  Idles real smooth, but runs a little rich now and lost some bottom-end and midrange torque.  Pulls OK at the top end.  Need an adjustible cam sprocket, as I can’t remember if the donor car had the square tooth or round tooth sprocket.

Hacked off the old core support and the 20lbs of random steel that had been welded to the frame rails for it.  Wore out 2 cut-off disks and one grinding wheel for the angle grinder to do it.  Brad just so happened to hack the whole nose off of an ’88 J-body a while back, which I picked up from him a few weeks back.  The spot-weld drill bit from Eastwood was really handy in separating the two halves.  I’m going to add some reinforcements to this thing on the inside so that it can take some abuse.

I also fabbed the brackets and installed some bolts/studs in the tunnel to adapt the ’91 center console to the car.  I finally have my head around the different types of late-style G-body center consoles and I finally have the parts I need to do what I want, thanks to Paul Fosen.

There are two completely different center consoles and underlying bracketry available.  There is the “cockpit” sytle, where the console is several inches higher than the normal one.  The extra height is split between the top plastic part and the side “fuzzies”.  The ash tray then completely blocks off the lower two bays in the center instrument panel.  All you get is the radio and the heater/AC controls, which means the bezel around these is missing the bottom half.  It also requires a different e-brake arm and the bracket under the console raises the shifter partly, but not completely up.  The leather boot around the shifter is huge as a result.

The “normal” style lowers the center console by several inches, revealing the lower two bays.  The bottom bay, used for the factory CD player, may be blocked off by the plastic in front of the ash tray.  It may also be filled with a little fuzzy storage bay when there is no CD player.  I’ve seen both.  The instrument panel bezel is then extended to surround these two bays and meet the center console.  If you ever do anything like this, grab all of the center console parts and anything that goes near it.  If you factor in manual-vs-automatic, there are four possible setups for these things.  The cockpit style console may have been obsoleted after 1991, as I have never seen one in a ’92 or later.

Just shot the clearcoat on the doors.  Spent the past month filling dents and primering the doors and the new hood.  Shot the color on the doors last night and now they are cleared.  The clear refused to lay flat unless I loaded it on there good.  There is a fine line between accomplishing that and ending up with runs and sags.  Got a couple of runs and lots of orange peel.  What a pain.  I had this same problem with clear before.  I think I need to use a different clear coat system.

I don’t have time to do the hood due to the cold weather approaching, but the old hood is still on the car and if I can get the fenders off of JT’s black ’87, then I can at least drive it.

Some dude switched lanes right in front of me while I was accelerating to merge into traffic and checking my blind spot.  I hit the brakes and swerved too hard to avoid him, came around and ended up in the guard rail while going backwards.  These cars are way too tail-happy when you are really on the hooks.  The car hit the front corner first, so the front fender and the door took the brunt of the damage.  They are a loss, but the rear quarter is definately fixable…it didn’t even touch the tail light.  All four of my new tires have flat spots on them now, especially the fronts.  Grr….

I pushed the front-end underbody out with the Porta-Power, gave the fender some foot-stomping action out in the yard.  Also used the Porta-Power to push the door back out by the hinges.  Doesn’t look half-bad, considering how little time I spent on it.  The Daytona is nowhere near being done, so the CSX still needs to put out.

Remeber the pics of that nice turbo?  How about these?  On the left is the “S60” turbo mentioned earlier.  On the right is the new “Super 70″ turbo from Turbos Unleashed with their 3” swing valve bolted to a .63 A/R exhaust housing (compare it to the .48 on the S60).  Not sure how the lag is going to be, but I got my hands on an FM ported 2 piece intake and a Spearco, which will hopefully help out.