FEEL THE MADNESS OOOH YEEEAH!

As the late, great Macho Man Randy Savage said in his debut (and final) rap album "I'M BAAAACK!" After taking a hiatus of laziness, I'm going to start blogging again. A lot has happened in the past couple months, so I'm just going to post up a few pictures of my automotive (and bike) adventures.

Remember this frenchie from a few posts back? I gave her a little makeover.

One of the coolest cars at the Toyota car show

Clean.

1970s Corolla race car

TWINS!

I went to 'Murica on a business trip, this was my rental car.

While killing time in 'Murica, I saw this. This is my kind of deathtrap.

Back to my dear old Falcon, Grace. The underbody of this car is amazingly clean for a 51 year old vehicle. Every time I look at it, I'm amazed. Though I'm in one of the nicest climates in the world, and I never have to worry about road salt, I would like to make sure the under side of this car never has any problems. That's why I've decided to strip it down and paint it, along with all the suspension parts. I'm making a great deal of extra work for myself and but luckily its the most miserable kind of work. Like a large portion of automotive work, it involves lying on your back, but when you are prepping an underbody, you get to be showered with debris, some of which is red hot bits of metal. I'm pretty sure it's against the Geneva convention to make POWs do this.

Underbody, 51 years old.

4-link cradle after paint, sway bars waiting on paint.

Axle housing after paint. 

Prepping for paint.

In addition to prepping the rear suspension area for paint, I am getting ready to build a fuel system. A word to the wise, if you are planning to build a high performance fuel system,  prepare to empty your wallet. It is one of those things that doesn't seem like it will be that expensive, but it is. Costs like these are the ones you forget about when planning a project, and that's one reason projects drag on.

At this point I have almost all necessary parts for a complete fuel system, so stay tuned kids. It's about to get real.

It may not look like much, but this will provide the nectar of the gods to my
cantankerous little horsepower maker.

All we've got right now is this box of one dozen starving crazed weasels.

A few weeks ago while I was working on Grace, I got asked a funny question. Mary, my roommate's girlfriend asked "How do you know what to do? Do you have a manual?" The question kinda made me laugh because only slightly unstable people want to put a noisy, old turbocharged 4 cylinder into an even noisier, older sedan. And if that wasn't enough, I am crazy enough to spend the money on a completely new front and rear suspension and brakes. All this on a 62 Falcon 4 door? There is no manual for that kind of insanity. I should probably get my head checked. But I digress. The question made me stop and think about how I had learned what I know about cars.

I've had interest in engines from a very young age. I remember my brother being in a small engines class when he was in high school, so I must have been about ten. He had a textbook from the class that I picked up and read because I thought engines were cool. At some point during my childhood I took the cylinder head off the lawnmower because I wanted to see inside an engine. Luckily it still ran fine when I put it back together. When I was in high school my parents made me be financially responsible for my own car repairs. I soon learned that doing my own repairs would make me a lot less broke.

Just before my senior year I got an old Ford Ranger, which overheated on the way home from the dealership. I soon found that this truck was painfully slow. I wanted more power. I got on the internet and discovered forums. Prior to this I had never really used the internet for much more than napster (to download Weird Al Yankovich songs of course). I did some research on www.therangerstation.com and found that I had two options for more power. Option 1 was to turbocharge my ranger. Option 2 was to swap a V8 into my Ranger. Option 1 seemed more economical and more interesting, so started gathering parts and signed up for an account on www.turboford.org . That old beat up Ranger forced me to learn so many things that I don't think any one specific object has had more influence on my life than that truck. It was what made me realize I wanted to work in the automotive industry, the things I learned while researching and working on it got me involved with senior projects as a freshman, and they are what set me apart when interviewing for an internship with Toyota.

Now that I'm done rambling, I'll show you what I've done. I found a place on the way to work that does sanblasting, so I stopped by to see if they could do my axle. I walked back into an old rundown looking corrugated metal building and saw an old guy sleeping at a desk. I woke him up and found  his name was Bill. Bill looked like a hilbilly character in a movie, and talked like one too. We agreed on him sandblasting the axle by that evening for $50. I have to say, he did the work just as I expected and I'd be happy to go back any time.

Brake line bulkhead.

Braided Stainless line installed.

That night I finally got to working on some brake lines. I ran braided stainless hoses from the calipers to a bulkhead which was welded to the housing. Then I ran a copper nickel alloy tube to the top of the differential at which point I added a tee fitting that will connect to a line running to the master cylinder.

Bending tubes.

Finished brake lines.

I discovered that I really enjoyed running brake lines, so long as I was not rushed. It was actually very relaxing.

During the week I called wilwood because I felt that my clutch pedal was too close to the brake pedal, that it was angled and it made for an uncomfortable driving position. They agreed to provide me with new pedals at no cost. I asked if they would be willing to let me upgrade to the pedals with adjustable pads if I paid the difference. They were willing to oblige, so I got me the coolest thing to put your feet on besides a liger skin rug.

I also went to a hardware store with the best selection I've ever seen. I found some parts I needed for my brake caliper brackets which I couldn't even find on the McMaster website. I needed a threaded spacer to center my rear calipers over ther rotors properly, and at this store I found the perfect piece for the job, after a little magic with the grinder.

Blingy drilled brake pedal pads are proven to stop your car  impress girls car nerds 50% better.

I bought this lil' bastard. <snicker>

Full spacer in my hand, spacer cut to size on the bracket.

One spacer welded to the bracket, one waiting to be welded.

Complete rear brake system.

Proper Schports car pedals.

Two Pedals Bad, Three Pedals Good

Today I finally got to spend some time with Grace. It's been a while since I've been able to dedicate some time to her, mostly due to the Subaru from the last post.

I'm a big believer in manual transmissions. If God wanted us to drive cars with automatic transmissions, he would have only given us one arm and one leg. Grace has lived most of her live as a two pedaled chariot, but today she got an upgrade.

Two pedals bad

1/8" thick pedal mount plate

Pedal assembly and mounting plate

Old pedal assembly vs new pedal assembly

Cardboard template for fitting the pedal mount plate to the firewall

Pattern transferred to the mounting plate

My redneck vise

Cutting out the old pedal mount

Looking through to the throne

Welded into place

Master cylinders mounted

Three pedals good.

Once I got the pedal assembly mounted, I started on the steering column lower mount. Originally the Falcon did not have a lower steering column mount. I got a pinch collar from McMaster-Carr to use as a lower mount and cut a piece of 16ga steel with my grinder to fit the floor. I didn't get a chance to weld it in place, so there will be more welding in the near future.

Sheetmetal cut with a grinder and hole saw

Lower column mount ready for welding

He broke the mirrors off his Cadillac 'cause he doesn't like it lookin' like he looks back

I'll call this one my post of shame. No, I haven't been working on the car much in the past month like I had planned. This is due to my daily driver, a Subaru Legacy GT. I think I am cursed when it comes to this car. Every time I try to do some simple maintenance, something goes wrong. Normally I'm not this incompetent, but apparently this Subaru turns me into a ham fisted mouth breather.

It all started when I decided to change my spark plugs. When I had almost finished the job, I was installing the last ignition coil, and the coil connector broke. This was on a Saturday, and the part was a special order part. On Sunday I had to leave for a business trip and didn't get back until a week and a half later. I got the part and finished the job. When I started the vehicle it started fine, but there was absolutely no power or throttle response. I spent almost the next weeks after work checking everything I could think of. I installed and uninstalled the spark plugs so many times I'm considering going semi-pro in Legacy GT spark plug changing. I also double and triple checked the coil wiring and it was spot on. I then remembered that I had found a bolt on my driveway that looked out of place...

The offending bolt.

 As I looked further, I noticed a hole in the timing cover. I knew that this was fairly recent because I had replaced this cover only about three months ago. At that time, the AC idler bolt had come loose and been pushed back through the timing cover and into the timing belt, breaking several timing covers and causing the cam timing to jump a few teeth. Well this same problem happened again, but this time it was a different bolt, but the same problem, just not as severe. One of the cams had jumped one tooth and then the bolt was ejected, putting a hole in the cover. I figured I had found the problem, so I replaced the timing belt and broken cover.

Hmmm....

 This helped a little bit but it turns out it was just one of the problems, not THE problem. I was now very worried that I had somehow bent the intake and exhaust valves. To find out if this was the case, I removed the spark plugs one more time and performed a cylinder pressure test. The pressure was a little low, with all cylinders right around 130 psi, but the results were consistent, leading me to beleive that the problem was not the valves.
My buddy Luis is a Subaru guy so I started picking his brain. He brought over a tuning cable and we connected to my Engine Control Unit. This way we would be able to view the data that was being used by the ECU to control the engine. As we looked at the data, the only thing I noticed that seemed strange to me is that the MAP (Manifold Absolute Pressure) signal seemed low. Any car at wide open throttle near sea level should be able to easily attain a MAP value of around 101 kPa, which is the normal atmospheric pressure at sea level. Any reading below this indicates an obstruction in the intake. At wide open throttle, I was only getting around 50 kPa. I thought that the ECU might have gone into limp mode to protect the engine,  but strangely there were no check engine lights or trouble codes. We removed the intercooler and made a strange discovery.

The creature from the black lagoon shaved and left his beard trimmings in my intercooler.

 There was some sort of gunk in the intercooler. It looked like shredded shop towel soaked in oil. There was a lot of oil in my intake.

The black lagoon.

 I'm not sure why it took us so long to come to this idea, but after seeing this and talking about it over the course of a few days, we wondered if there might somehow be a shop towel stuck in my turbo. I pulled off the intake hose (which is about a 26 step process) and BEHOLD:

It's like running a 400m sprint with a football player's sock shoved down your throat.

You probably wouldn't be too surprised to know how much of a difference removing a shop towel and all its remnants makes for an engine's ability to run properly. But let me just say OHMYFREAKINGCRAPYOUBETTABELIEVESHERUNSAWHOLELOTBETTERILOVEBACON!!!

With that out of the way, I've been collecting parts. I now have all the major parts necessary for my brake system. I still need to order all the lines and fittings, etc. Happy birthday to me. No for real, it showed up on my birthday. And because of that, I'm also going to post a picture of my birthday cake.

STOP! HAMMERTIME!

OK so it's not a cake, it's a pie.

don't let 'em play guitars and drive in old trucks

I don't have a lot to write today and that is a direct result of me not doing much work on the car lately. I had a business trip followed by a few days of vacation so that made for a lot of days of not touching the falcon. But before I left, I managed to get the steering column and steering wheel assembled and connected to the steering rack. I just said steering three times in one steering sentence! 

To use the steering column with a steering rack instead of a steering box I had to make some modifications. The steering shaft on the original box was actually a part of the steering box assembly, making it a large awkward assembly. I cut the shaft off near the box and had old man Nickerson machine flats on each side of the shaft, making it a double-D shaft...

...now that you've stopped giggling, a double-D in the automotive world has nothing do to with large bosoms. It is simply a type of shaft that looks like two Ds, one backward facing and one forward facing.

Old man Nickerson is a machinist at work who works part time and does whatever old folks do all the rest of the time. He does privateer work at his home shop on the weekends. Nickerson has white hair, and like most machinists, isn't in too much of a hurry because quality takes time. I had him make me a few parts for the steering system and delivered on both counts. It was high quality and it took forever to get the parts back, and to his credit, he didn't charge me full price because it took so long.

Steering box with integrated shaft (AKA Thoractic Impaler)

End of the steering column with the lower bearing and the "Double-D" steering shaft installed.

Intermediate steering shaft.

A steering wheel!

It's starting to look like a car on the inside.

Another thing I did recently was weld the front sway bar mounts in place. Once again, I welded with my welder running off 110V and was very pleased with the result. I also filled a few holes in the frame.

Before

After

When I returned from my trip, I also had the wheel studs I had ordered before I left. I was finally able to fit the wheels on the rear axle with brake discs in place. She's rolling on her own rubber finally, after spending several months on jackstands. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the wheels will still fit after I fit the brake calipers and brackets.

Lastly, I've finally decided on a name for the old lady. I will call her Grace.