metaruss

The new trans seems to be working well.  It’s an A555/A520 hybrid (A555 with the mainshaft and ring gear from an A520) with a 3.50:1 ratio.  This is the perfect gearing for this car.  This setup with the OBX torque biasing differential is a great combo.  The only weak point is the mainshaft bearing surface.  The bearing near the pinion gear rides right on the shaft and eventually the area starts to break up from surface fatigue.  This shaft has a bit of life left in it, but when it goes I won’t have anything to put in its place.  The later transaxles (A523/A543/A568) have a real inner bearing race here.  The bearing itself is the same, so it may just be a matter of machining the shaft down to accept the race.  My main concern is the weakening of the shaft from removing the hardened surface in that area.  It may create a stress point at the base of the pinion gear.  If it were to break, the transmission would be destroyed.  That is not something I am willing to risk with this tranny.

The OBX is an interesting piece.  The car really wants to accelerate in a straight line, as the torque tends to get biased to the inside wheel.  The effect goes away when coasting.  I didn’t beat on it too much since it is brand new and I also put in a new clutch that needs a little break-in time.  It is made in China and is basically a cheap knock-off of the Quaife unit that was designed for the Dodge Neon 420A transmission.  It definitely needs to be gone-through when received.  There are issues with the spring washer orientantion, the case bolt torques, and the axle fitment.  The machining on the element gears, the axle holes in the case, and the splines are also pretty rough and need to be checked/honed/deburred.  Time will tell on how they hold up down the road, but at one third the price of a Quaife they are an attractive option even with their flaws.  I will be changing the trans fluid once it gets a couple of hundred miles on it.

Got a little work done.  The ATC is all installed and seems to work OK.  The CSX broke again, so more detours.

Well, it’s running so sweet that I broke 2nd gear.  It was an A520, but it had the chrome-moly bearing retainer plate.  Time to accelerate the A555 build-up that I’ve been putting off, as the Daytona is still apart.  Picked up an OBX and JT hooked me up with some carrier bearings.  The main shaft in the A520 still looked pretty good.  It’s got one little dink on the bearing surface…like it chewed something (a gear tooth perhaps…).  Hopefully it will hold for a while.  New shafts are no where to be found.  Gonna have to find a way to fix these things.

I was running 5psi of boost all winter, to save the Blizzaks.  That’s why I didn’t notice that my intermediate sprocket had jumped ahead a tooth when I swapped the cam.  When I turned up the boost, it misfired badly when I accelerated.  Set it to 10 degrees and now it is running sweet.

Got some custom brackets welded to the front of the frame rails so that the new beams inside the core support have something to bolt to.  Yes, bolt…no dinky welds on the edges of tin foil sheet metal.  I can’t believe these things stay on for as long as they do.  I noticed some cracking on the CSX near the spot welds, just like on my old Shadow.  I painted it all with POR-15.  The frame rails are inside being prepped for paint as well.  While I was painting, I painted the inside of the floorpans with POR-15.  What’s that?  I already did that?  Yep, it’s true.  For reasons I don’t fully understand, the paint on the inside of the pans (only) bubbled up and delaminated from the new metal.  I followed the directions and did all the right metal prep, but the surface of the new metal was very smooth which seemed to have effected the bonding strength of the paint.  I also did the first coat of that paint with an older can of flat black and did the second coat with newer gloss black.  Perhaps that was a factor.  I hit the metal with a 40-grit sanding wheel on the angle grinder.  I suspect that it won’t happen again.

I also built up the adapter harnesses that I need to install the ATC system.  I have the heater/AC out and the ATC parts are all installed on it.  I completely failed to notice the respirator for the passenger cabin air temp sensor in the donor that I got the ATC from.  Apparently it’s behind the instrument cluster somewhere.  I managed to identify the thermistor type of the sensor based on some diagnostic data I found in the 1987 and 1991 FSMs.  A small computer fan, a little RatShack project case, and some tubing later, we have one respirator.

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.

Synctree is a tool to synchronize two directory trees based on a set of rules.  It has been enhanced with the ability to interface with the Sorune database manager for the Neuros audio player.  By handling the transfer of files with this tool, it can automatically transcode/peel audio files into a format that is fully supoorted by the Neuros (which has trouble with high bitrate files).  It is written in Perl.

Packages

• synctree_0.8-1_all.deb
• synctree_0.8-1.tar.gz
• synctree_0.8-1.dsc

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.