1982 Mustang #50

[Basement Paul]

Good thinking!

Yesterday I went to Summit and did the deal on the rearend, picked up my front tires, new longer rear lugnuts, a new gas can, and a tire depth gauge (on closeout). My rear tires, although shown as in stock on the website, are actually in stock in Atlanta... so they're shipping them to me this week. Kind of a bummer since I wanted to bring them home with me, but I most likely won't get a chance to break them down until later this week or next weekend anyway. I did find out that my tire machine is configurable to deal with the really wide rims and I shouldn't have any problems mounting them myself. They'll also fit on my balancer, but being so wide, I'm not sure how it will work. I'll give it a try though using sticky weights on the inside of the back of the rim. I just have to be careful with the tubes. I've never dealt with tubes in car tires before, but have in lawnmowers, so I'm thinking I'll be OK as long as I take my time and pay attention.

-BP

[Basement Paul]

Turns out I couldn't mount the tires after all. My shaft was too short (story of my life) to turn the tires off the bead. So I took them to my buddy Donnie at Cleveland Tire and Wheel. He's got machines to handle those monster ghetto wheels, so I knew he was up to the task. For $70 he mounted and balanced both tires, which included tearing his balancer apart to be able to deal with these wide tires.

Over the weekend I got the center section reinstalled in the car, only to find it does not have a fill plug. I'll be able to use the vent, so it's not the end of the world, and the Motor manual I have says every 9" in the world takes 5 pints, so that should be easy.

Tonight I was going to reinstall the axles and found that the bearing on the passenger's side was cracked on the outside... Via the internet, I was able to cross the old part number on it to a Timken part number that I should be able to get from Autozone, or any other place. I will need to get the bearing pressed off and the new one reinstalled though as I don't have a press for this sort on nonsense. I hope this crack isn't the sign of a different lingering problem.

Hopefully I can get this all dealt with this weekend.

-BP

[Racin'Jacin]

Hey Paul, when you driving this to work????


Lots of progress - it's really gonna be right when the weather hits!



Can't wait to see it in person.

[Basement Paul]

I'm hoping to be done and driving by the end of May. We'll see how it plays out for real though.

-BP

[Basement Paul]

So this weekend I spent a lot of time in the garage. I got the passenger's side axle bearing replaced. I cut off the old one, saved part of it, and used it to carefully drive the new one on. Disappointment of the day: My new Timken bearing is made in China... WTF?
I got the axles reinstalled, the new synthetic fluid in, and the tires put back on so the car is on the ground again (for now). I also tried to get the rear u-joint matched up while still on the driveshaft, but that didn't work. So Saturday night I was going to my brother in law's place anyway, so we torched the injected plastic out of the u-joint and I took it apart yesterday. Tonight I'll measure it up and try to find the correct one online.

Yesterday I had a bunch of time available since my wife was at a baby shower, so I took advantage and started the body work. I filled in the little gouge in the front of the hood, sanded it out and repeated a couple more times. I also DA'd the primer on the trunk lid, DA'd the gel coat on the hood carefully, and cleaned it all pretty well. I also constructed a make-shift paint booth in my garage which worked out pretty well and got both panels in primer (top & bottom hood, top on trunk). I have one little sag on the cowl portion of the hood, and a batch of isolated fish-eye on the hood to block & reprime. The trunk has just a tiny excess of primer on the bottom edge I think I can take off with 500 grit and a gentle touch and I shouldn't have to do anything more but paint it.

Here's some of the action:








Oh, I almost forgot. While I was priming, a guy from Newbury called me about my tires. 35 minutes later, he was there picking them up. Nice guy named Mike that lives on Butternut and has a '71 Dart Pro-Street he's finishing up. I'm looking forward to seeing him running around.

-BP

[Basement Paul]

Turns out finding the right u-joint wasn't that easy, but ultimately I ended up talking to the guy that made the driveshaft for my S-10 and he got me hooked up with the right piece and this morning I drove out to Henderson Driveline in Westlake and got the correct u-joint and had him install it while I was there. $44 seemed reasonable.

This afternoon sanded out the fisheye on the top of the hood, and carefully blocked out the two small sags I had. I recleaned the hood very carefully this time too, just to make sure I didn't have to do this again. I spent a little more time playing with my spray gun and turned down the volume of paint considerably for this coat of primer. This seemed to work well as this coat turned out well. Tomorrow I'm going to try to throw some paint at the underside of the bonnet, and the top of the boot. Now that I understand the gun better, I should be able to put an initial coat on reasonably dry, then go back and lay it on heavier so there's a little more something to stick too.

I'm pretty excited to see what happens...

-BP

[Racin'Jacin]

Paul, out of curiosity what type of gun are you using? I've had great luck with pressure pots - small ones. The versatility is amazing on them and they are VERY easy on the week end warriors arm muscles if you know what I mean.

Anyways how'd the respray come out???


Jacin

[Basement Paul]

Well, the gun I'm using is straight from Harbor Freight. $9.99 with a coupon. I bought four of them and just threw them away when I was done. It's an HVLP unit with all the controls you think it should have on it. We use them at work all the time to paint our hydraulic power units. I buy them for work over 20 at a time. I think the problem is not with the gun, but the operator.

Yesterday I repainted the trunk and am happier with the outcome than the first time. There's still a couple blotches that have more metallic in them, and there's a few dirt specs, but all in all, from 10' it looks OK. The paint did dull after it dried so I'm hoping after a couple weeks of dry time, I'll be able to rub it out and get a little more shine out of it. The hood turned out the same way. IF you don't look at it too hard, it looks fine, but if you're really picky, you'll be able to spot a bunch of flaws. Again, driving down the road, it will be no problem.

I'm not painting it again...

This afternoon I cleaned up my garage, tore down the paint booth, returned some borrowed items, and got things back in order. I also jacked the front of the Mustang up to start on the torque converter job. I also see that there's a hole in the bottom of the passenger's header from scraping, so I'll have to patch that up too. Not sure yet if I'll have to pull the headers to do the torque converter job, but I'll get into that as the week progresses.

More to come.

-BP

[Basement Paul]

-BP

[Basement Paul]

This past weekend I aligned the boot and bonnet on the car. Looks about as good as it can considering the fiberglass hood isn't too square up along the cowl area. While in the garage, I also pulled the front tires and swapped on the new ones. While this was happening, I came to the conclusion that I need a new steering rack. Both wheels have approximately 1/2" of play in them from left to right coming from the steering rack. This play is independent from one side to the other, so when I wiggle one side, the other side doesn't move... The tie rod ends unfortunately are still in really good shape. So there's issue #1 I discovered yesterday.

Issue #2 is that my headers were paper thin on the bottom, most likely from being scraped on the ground, and in many areas there were swiss cheese style holes all over the place. If you've ever tried to repair this, it's not fun. Lots of careful spot welding and some grinding. Then more spot welding. Anyway, I think I got this part cured. Both of the collector gaskets were shot too, so I'll be getting some of those.



Issue #3 is that even though I was told I have a C6 transmission, I really have a C4. I started trying to locate my nagging transmission leak. It turns out that whoever wired the trans brake poked a hole in the tranny pan, but did so in the poorest fashion and created a very nice, very consistent leak. I will be buying a new trans pan, but in my investigation for a trans pan, I realized the C6 pans don't look anything like mine. So I looked up pans for a C4 and imagine that, that's what I have. Problem with that is that I already bought a new torque converter for a C6... which is fine, I should be able to return it to Summit, but there are several different converters for a C4, and I won't know which one to get until I pull the tranny.

Issue #4 is that whoever put this motor in forgot to check to see if their parts would actually fit. What I'm getting at is that the front of the oil pan is rubbing on the front part of the frame... DUH!!!!!!!! It's not leaking now, but I'm quite certain it won't be long before that happens.

So what's going to have to happen is that I'm going to pull the motor and trans out, which I'm not too thrilled about. I'm going to modify the frame as necessary to provide clearance for the oil pan. It should only take a die grinder and about 15 minutes to make that happen. Unfortunately there's no room to safely do it with the motor in place. At that point, I'll split the motor and trans and find out what converter I really need, get a new one, and reinstall. I'll also put the new trans pan on at the same time.

I'm debating whether to buy new headers too. I hate these headers, they hang too low. Now there's a company that makes a set of 3/4 length ones so ground clearance shouldn't be an issue. These are probably $500-600 though.

I'd also like to replace the steering rack with a flaming river manual rack and get rid of the jerry-rigged power steering set up on this car. Sadly, the conversion is another $500.

ORRRRR, do I just put a new trans pan on it, stick the driveshaft back in, polish it up and sell it? The thought of sinking another $1500 into a car that I haven't even driven yet is making me a little weary. Not to mention the time. On the flip side, once that's all done, I'll know I have a good solid piece that will be safe, and hopefully fast.

-BP

[GMJohnny]

June is the month to sell...............

GM

[MostMint]

I would go over every inch of that car and find whatever else is not right so you know the whole picture before going any further. Check all the welds and all the rear suspension for worn out parts, radiator, alternator, starter, flywheel, brakes on all four corners - including all the rubber lines, suspension bushings in the front, wheel bearings, wiring harnesses, everything. You have found many things but what you have mostly found is signs of bad engineering. I would also look at engine internals - things like does the oil pickup actually go to the bottom of the pan, is the dipstick showing full when it is actually full.

In one of your early posts you mentioned a goal of "making it right" which you have not achieved yet. I understand if you want to bail out on this experiment but you are quite the ways down the road of having a pro street car you can race.

[Basement Paul]

I think I'm going down with the ship on this one. I'm going to start the motor pulling process this weekend and see what happens... What's the worst that can happen, I'll break even?? For some reason I really haven't been annoyed working on this car, which is odd for me. So I guess I'll just get it into my brain that I'm at least another month away from driving it and that will be OK. I keep myself busy enough, that it really doesn't bother me much.

As far as going over the car... I pretty much have seen it from the inside out at this point. As far as the motor stuff goes, I actually feel confident that at least the insides are OK after driving it 80 miles home and not being real easy on it. The radiator looks newish, but I might make a mount for the electric fan instead of zip tying it through the radiator. At the end of the day, it will be a cool car, reasonably fast, and I should be able to get my money back if that even matters. It's like my therapy...

So more posts to come!

-BP

[wxo]

As I read this most interesting tale, I focused on the worn steering rack. I had seemed to remember that this was a very low mileage car, so I went back to the beginning to see. It only has 8800 miles on it. I can help but wonder how the steering rack could be that bad already.

[Blue_69_malibu]

June is the month to sell...............

GM

Cars.....or wives?