Harvest Time Celebration

The title of this update was chosen without any consideration of calendar position.  I can only sometimes answer correctly when asked what day of the week it is, and that's usually only because I had been told or overheard the right answer within an hour beforehand.  If your expectations include me being able to come up with a play on words that's reliant on me knowing where the big hand is on the year clock, you may want to adjust them down.

No, the title is about my harvesting images that relate to what's been happening in the shop lately so I can share with you an ocular feast of shitty pictures recorded by shittier camera software!  Let us give thanks.

So first off, the baseplate/Helicoil situation is still awaiting resolution, and has been a real bastard every step of the way.  Trying to extract the Helicoil from the other hole that needed repair took a lot of time, work, a previously-usable drill bit, and a t-handle.

I chucked an ez-out in that to extract the coil, as I had done with the other.  Just using my hands resulted in one twisted-to-hell tee and an indifferent Helicoil.  I eventually got it out by abusing the hell out of a drill bit and turning parts of the coil out of the threads, using a drift to hammer it in spots, and pulling it with needle nose.  Here's what it looked like when it was over.

After filling that hole with alumiweld,
I got as far as getting one of the holes redrilled and the heli installed.  It seemed to go well, but test fitting to verify the hole was drilled square to the surfaces turned out to be where the bad times were hiding.

After getting one of the hole to where I presumed it to be good and coiled, I threaded bolts through it and the two good holes, compared them, and found that the new hole was wonked.  Somehow.  I ran it on the drill press, made sure the travel of the bit was square with the table, etc., but it just wasn't enough.

If I had to guess, it looks like the drift occurred because the center point was near the edge of the alumiweld and the "whatever the hell kind of crap cast alloy" Redline uses when they half-ass these plates out.  As the bit plunged the materials, a much greater portion of the flute was in the potted meat metal than it was in the alumiweld (which is a fair degree stronger and harder than the other stuff), and cut through it with less resistance than the alumiweld, causing it to drift into the softer metal.  This maybe could've been prevented by feeding the bit even slower than I had been, but that's hindsight for you.

At that point, I thought I had plenty of reason to cuss. So I did. And continued to, as I removed the bolts I had threaded in, as well as one of the inserts that decided it would rather piggyback on the bolt and take a ride out of there instead of staying in its damned hole like it was supposed to.  Guess the red loctite wasn't good enough reason for it to stay put. . .

So I put the baseplate aside to work on stuff that would at least drive me crazy in a different way.  I guess I chose wisely when I went with the throttle cable, as I managed to get that sorted out without any real hassle to speak of.

The factory cable is fine, but there's not a lot of length to it once it passes through the firewall and into the engine bay.  Since I've still got to at least dry-fit the carb to see how much length I'll need for sure, I may still end up using it.  Judging by how things look already, though, I'm going to need a bit more reach.  Luckily, I have a cable from a ('98, I think?) XJ that needed only a little bit of modification to act as an alternate option.

The Gremlin and XJ cables match in just about every way that's critical; firewall and throttle pedal retainers, end clips for the carb/tb linkages, and that sort of thing are all the same.  The XJ cable is a slightly heavier gauge, is significantly longer, and has more substantial sleeving, though the position of the cable stops give it a longer throw.  If you install it without altering it, the gas pedal will drop to the floor because of the slack in the line.  Easy enough to fix, though!

All you have to do to set the length of the XJ cable to where it'll work with the Gremlin is take the stops off the pedal end, cut the cable to length, and braze a new stop to the cable.  I didn't think to get a picture of removing the first stop (the one that is farther away from the cable end), but what I did was carefully cut a groove down the length of it and slowly crush it with a pair of pliers, while making sure not to pinch or bend the cable.

You pull the cable all the way out on the pedal end on both the old and new cables, compare the length, and wrap the XJ cable with tape behind the cut point.  Using a cutoff wheel and the tape will prevent fraying.  Slip the plastic retainer piece back on the cable as far down as you can and secure it in place.  You don't want to have it get too close to the other end when you're brazing the new stop to the cable.

Once that's done, take a #10 pan head machine screw and drill a hole down the center.  You want the hole to be just large enough for the cable to closely pass through, but not snug.  A slight amount of extra space is needed to let flux and filler flow through when you braze the screw to the cable end act as a stop.  Braze the very end to hold the stop and cable together, then do the section by the screw head.  Don't use too much filler or the screw head won't seat in the plastic retainer, and don't use too little or the brazed joint could give under load.  Either too much or too little may create a bend point that could cause the cable to wear and fail prematurely.

Add a note to your service and maintenance records to check that joint periodically to confirm that it's holding and that the cable isn't wearing out until you're reasonably sure that all is well.  DO NOT just slap it together, install it, and forget about it.

Crimping a cable stop on is an option, provided you can find one that will fit to the plastic retainer.  I couldn't find anything like that when I checked at the hardware store and didn't feel like hunting for one.  Regardless of the method you use, just make sure the cable remains tightly wound, and doesn't get kinked.  Both will cause weak points that will eventually work-harden and break.

For my next trick, I'll need an old oil filter, the box for a new oil filter, and a plain old, ordinary, empty 1 liter Arrowhead water bottle.  Be amazed as I. . .  Store the old oil filter without making it wear a nitrile glove as a hat.

Ta da.

Since you've all been good enough to read through all this mess up to this point, I'll throw in this last trick I came across when getting starting fluid on myself as I was figuring out a way to light a cigarette with a dead lighter.  And a can of starting fluid.  So I guess that's two tricks.  I'm sure you can figure out the rest of how the cigarette one goes.

What I discovered is this: if you have jeans that are oil stained to the degree that no amount of washing will get the stains out, starting fluid will knock that dirt in the dick.  Either that, or my jeans have ringworm.  Check it out:

I could return these to the store for a refund and no one would ever know.

The Hell I Coil, Pt. 2: Hell Comes to Coil Town

I had a vision in the night.  In the course of my fitful sleep, I was visited by an entity.  Formless and empty, this absence of being was devoid of tone, feeling, or impression.  It was defined by nothing, save the message it had been charged with delivering to me.

I woke with no regard towards how little time I had spent resting through the six hours of sleep, and words fell from my mouth.

"Fuck.  I'm gonna have to get Helicoils."

Discovering you need Helicoils for a task is like going to an old man who's spent more time fine-tuning his craft than you've even been a member of the "things residing on Earth" club, asking him his expert opinion on what to do for a given situation, and waiting as he silently leans back in his chair.  After his feels-like-hours pause, he dryly opens his mouth.  Following the sound of his lips cracking apart you hear,

"Well. . .  I've got an answer for ya, but you're not gonna like it. . ."

The base plate that fastens to the adapter plate provided in the Redline Weber kit for the AMC 258 is made of some flavor of cast aluminum.  The cast part is okay-ish.  Not bad enough to be bad, and useful enough to not totally hate it.  The problems with it seem to stem not so much from the casting process as much as the lack of obvious finishing work done once the part is demolded.  The biggest pains in the ass I've had from working with it have all been directly related to the threads in the holes for the mounting studs.

While some grades of aluminum can provide threads that can withstand the torque needed to secure a carb to an intake (not to mention the stress of thermal expansion and contraction delivered by engine operation and cool-down periods), the mystery meat used to make these plates doesn't hold such a distinction.

I guess whoever was calling the shots figured "Why bother?" when determining manufacturing and QA processed for these parts, since the quality of the threads themselves are about as up to the task as the material.  And to clarify: I've been heckled on more than one occasion for my insistence on taking great care to make sure fasteners are torqued appropriately.  Like anyone else, I've stripped, broken, and rounded off my share of hardware, but it's not because I'm a reckless mongo that hamfists every threaded object I come in contact with.

The entirety of yesterday was spent doing the finishing work on a roughout of a phenolic spacer that's needed to give some clearance for linkage components, and to make sure the carb isn't just dumping fuel onto the floor of the intake from being too close.  The phenolic is some sort of horrible shit used to make lab workbenches, and can be a serious bastard about being worked in some respects.  So as I'm sure you know, I fucked up parts of it that will let it be alright to use with break-in, but doesn't really belong on the road.

The spacer is relevant here because I hadn't (and haven't) reached the point of even trying to install the carb to the intake before three of the threads were stripped.  It was the stress of dry fitting the plates to the carb and torquing the bolts only as much as required to confirm things lined up that was too much for the plate to handle.

As I made my way back to the house, I thought I would be fine sticking a bolt in the holes and flowing alumiweld into the gap to recreate the threads.  I had been up for 30 hours at that point, so cut me some slack.  It was a terrible idea, and it took me having The Ghost of Fuckups Future visiting me in my dreams for me to realize why.

I think alumiweld is kinda neat.  Not a bad thing to have around.  Kinda limited in its range of use, though, and a little fussy compared to brazing ferrous metal.  It's not really up to the task of flowing through passages as narrow and having as long a run as the mangled crap in the bolt holes without ending up as porous as spray foam.  It's also not an enchanted glue stick that will magically ensure a bolt will sit and remain centered in the worst of the three points that needed attention. 

The idea of having the threads give out for good while on the road was entirely unacceptable, so these threads needed to be fixed for good.  That meant threaded inserts.  The piss-poor supply of this kind of thing in a storefront here means the threaded inserts were going to be Helicoils.

After looking for a kit that I could buy for less than $30 (and failing), I got my kit and went to the shop.  It was at this point that the bad points of the baseplate really got their chance to shine. 

Depending on the location, material, drill size needed, and so on, I'll use the original fastener to fully strip the threads out and then turn a drill bit by hand that's equal to the thread diameter to clean up before tapping.  The reasoning behind this is that doing this will prevent me from making a bigger mess by drilling a drifting oval hole.  If I take my time, pay attention, and use good cutting oil when tapping the hole, the tall should be good with cutting through the extra material.   This should result in a clear, straight, threaded hole.  After today, I say "should" and not will.

For whatever reason, the godawful threads don't run completely through the bore.  There's a gap about 3 threads thick towards the bottom surface of the plate that interrupts the run.  It's this gap that gave my tap a chance to get distracted and wander off.  The result?  Two holes out of four are straight through.  The other two were so bad off that I had to get the easy out to extract the Helicoils, and then fill the holes with alumiweld so that I can drill new holes and start over again.

So to be perfectly clear, I went to go install the carb two days ago and am hoping that tomorrow doesn't end before I actually get it on there.  Here's hoping for a spirit-free sleep.  I don't need any more wise ideas.

The Hell I Coil

I'll be upfront with you here -- writing the last update left a bad taste in my mouth.  Not because I was sleep deprived and ended up getting a fine carpet of old tobacco all over my tongue from letting the mouth-end of my cigarette unravel worse than the cohesion of the text I was laying down.  Because I wrote about being successful when I tried coming up with a way of hacking something together.  If you dare read through the entire run of this log (fat chance that I'll do that), you'll probably find that it was a landmark event.  The first post in finding a good solution, but even more than that, terror and failure were nowhere to be seen.

Today I'll be making up for that.

I will post q second update before my day is done to cover specifics and details, but first, I think we need to do some stage dressing.

Take a minute and clear your mind.  Visualize yourself in a wide, open field.  The sun shining, the wind gently blowing ripples like those on a the surface of a placid pond across the grass expanse that radiates around you.  Imagine the warmth that bathes you from the sun, tempered and complimented by the coolness from the breeze.

Now, as you are in the field, imagine a garage.  A garage packed with trash, tools, and farts.  This garage was birthed in cosmic chaos, formed in the blink of the eye of the deepest, coldest, most malevolent core of space, then was fired out at a speed far exceeding anything that should be physically possible.  It's screaming in rage as it rips through the cosmos.  You stand in the field.  Happy.  Content.

Burning past photons emitted by stars that have been dead and gone for millennia, the garage howls as it passes through emptiness and galaxies.  You see a grasshopper jump over a rabbit to land on a smooth, flat stone.

The garage sees a dot of light in the distance, distance that is made meaningless by comparison to the expanses it has traversed to arrive here. It's destination.  You lie back on the soft ground and take off your shoes, spreading your toes and sunning your soles.

The garage bellows, not in the agony it should feel from Earth's atmosphere rending the ever-regenerating exterior from the garage's inadequate and warped frame, but of bellicose bloodlust.  The moment draws near.  You are picking out animal shapes in the stretched weave of clouds spanning the entire expanse of powder blue skies.

A screaming garage lands on you.

Still unsure whether you've unwittingly drifted off sleep and are now in the middle of a dream, you make no effort to wonder how you could possibly survive being crushed under the now-silent garage that surrounds you.  You look in front of you to see what has to be a workbench under a twelve foot long, three foot thick slab of rust, tools, and empty plastic jugs that once contained black coffee.  In the center of this is a piece of cardboard with a message, deliberately marked in black ink from a blunt felt marker across the middle of the surface.

S T E P  1:  I N S T A L L  C A R B .

And so it begins.

Report Card Time

 If you like reading what I write about resistance wire, then you're in for a treat.  Kinda.  While some people spend years and careers working on and writing about many types of vehicles, nearly none of them ever end up writing about resistance wire.  Despite that, I somehow have managed to make the subject a recurring feature -- and I have a feeling this probably won't be the last time it comes up.

Today I'll be covering how I dealt with a segment of resistance wire that is used in the factory harness, what it does, and considerations to have in mind when planning a new harness and/or alternator upgrade.

The original harness used a run of resistance wire unrelated to the starting circuit I covered previously.  It is spec'ed to 15 Ohms, and links the wire that delivers battery voltage to the ignition switch with the wire from the alternator to the idiot light.  The functions of this wire are current delivery to the light when the ignition switch is in "RUN", and a redundant source of resistance in the event that the bulb burns out.  The reason the latter is important is because the alternator's voltage regulator isn't designed to receive full battery voltage on that pin, and can end up getting cooked if run for very long in that state.

I've personally yet to find a local source of resistance wire that doesn't include a junkyard, so I planned on using a resistor I had laying around to get the job done.  Before I could hop to it, I needed to do a little research on what resistance value I should aim for, on account of the upgraded alternator I'm using.

The factory alternator was a model 10si, which allows for a pretty simple upgrade to a CS130, which has a rated output of 105A, is usually cheaper than a 10si, and will charge at lower RPM.  Another difference appears to be the light circuit resistor value needed to keep the alt from scrambling it's insides.  I found  a million opinions on what size resistor is needed, but the Delco service manual for the CS130 clears that up a little in the section on bench testing.

"Use a resistor of any value between 35 ohm, 5 watt, and 500 ohm, 1/2 watt between battery and "L" terminal.”

So now we're looking at a 15R value in the factory harness, while the CS130 needs 35R, minimum.  Since I'm not tied to the factory harness, I decided to go ahead and change the resistor value to something inline with the Delco manual.  All I had in my immediate vision was a 50W 150R resistor, so I figured I'd cut it open and trim the resistance down a little.

This is pretty much the same as what I started with.  First thing I had to do was peel it.  To do that, I sawed the base away from the bottom, then sawed from as close to the top side as I could, through the aluminum, down to the outer edge of the black circle.  Couple of hammer taps to a cold chisel later, and I was able to strip the aluminum away from that black core of epoxy.

The epoxy was surprisingly easy to remove.  I just gently clamped it in my pliers a few times and it crumbled away.  It's worth mentioning that this didn't take much force at all, which is great in avoiding damage to the wire the epoxy covers.

After shelling the epoxy, I cut the wire away from one end of the resistor core and stripped the wire away, periodically checking the resistance of the wire still wrapped on the resistor frame.  I got tired of dealing with tiny wire after a while and called it good at 41R.  Here's what it looked like at that point:

Then I wrapped the free end back around the post at that end, dropped a dot of super glue on it to hold it in place, then stood it up in a plastic tube and potted the whole shebang in some 2 part resin I had handy.  No pictures of that, but you'll see the finished product in a future update.

So with that, I finished doing what was required to be done with the base electrical system.  I've now got all wires to start and run, so here's where things are at now:

Gotta get up in 3 hours to get back at it, so I hope you'll excuse me ending this abrup

Directing traffic

Work has been focused on showing electrons who's bigger.  They may have me on numbers, but I can run wire.

I had to rebuild the starting and ignition circuits in the engine bay, as I mentioned before, though I'm glad I did.  Doing that gave me the opportunity to not only clean up my harness and make it more serviceable in the future, but also let things click as far as what I had been confounding that made things a mess in the first place.

If you start making changes to a Duraspark ignition system to replace the hot aluminum lunchbox tasked with controlling spark with a moderately more reliable, but easier to replace HEI module, you might find yourself in a situation where wires start getting jumbled up pretty quick.

I'm going to explain where I was getting mixed up in a sec, but to do that I'll need to give a quick rundown of how the start and ignition circuits work in their stock form.

The Duraspark setup uses a starter relay/solenoid (pick your desired level of pedantry) that has a total of 4 posts (5, if you have a torqueflite with a functioning neutral start switch.  This fifth post just gives you a path to ground when engaging the starter, assuming you're in neutral or park.  I may cover pros and cons to this system in the future, but that's all he need to know about it here). 

The two posts on the sides are for current delivery to the starter, while the two smaller posts on the front are for control and power distribution to ignition circuits ("S" and "I", respectively).  The "S" post, when activated by current being delivered from the ignition switch in the "START" position, closes the relay and engages the starter motor, while also acting as a terminal for delivery of full battery voltage to the ignition coil until the ignition switch has been moved to a different position.

The "I" terminal is a junction that serves to provide current to ignition components after the engine has started and the ignition switch is in the "RUN"/"ON" position.  The coil used in the Duraspark system is not designed to receive full voltage from the battery outside of when the engine is starting, so current is delivered to the coil from this post via a ballast resistor or (in our case) a length of resistance wire that is bundled in the harness -- presumably to keep the rest of the harness warm and comfortable during the colder seasons and to make your life miserable if you are forced to perform a factory-correct replacement.

There are several details I'm simplifying or skimming past in that description, but they're what's important for the purposes of this post.

When you start making this modification, you'll find a ton of helpful diagrams that mostly deal with bare minimum changes to make to get rid of the lunchbox and slap in an HEI module.  This can get kinda confusing, depending on how thorough a change you intend to make.  In all cases I came across, the diagrams either left the "S" terminal disconnected, or had a note that read something to the effect of "Not used with HEI".

That's all well and good, unless you find that your car won't start.  If you're really unlucky, like me, you'll find that your car is all too happy to start, but clearly unwilling to stop, regardless of what position your ignition switch is in.  If you end up in that spot, you may just say to hell with it like I did and throw a diode inline with the "START" wire, to keep it from being energized when in "RUN".  That'll work, at least for a while, but it's not really ideal because it's another point of failure.  You know as well as I do that the point will be made when it's most problematic and a 100V 6A diode is least-readily available, unless you happen to have a time machine to make runs to a Radio Shack.

Since you'd still be screwed, because they'd be out of stock even if you did bend time and space to get to a rad sack, eliminating the diode and wiring things better than a monkey would is your best bet.  How to do that?  Simple.  After you've set your wiring up as shown by the aforementioned diagrams, just run the damn starter wire to the "S" post and stop making things difficult for yourself.  See, the reason those diagrams probably leave this out is because,

1.  The diagrams are focused on IGNITION SYSTEM wiring and not STARTING SYSTEM wiring, and
2.  The people drawing them up probably expected you to have a modicum of sense and be able to figure this out without much effort.

I sure showed them!

I'll post up my diagrams after confirming that my wiring actually works.  In the meantime, I need to finish up with this power distribution board I started making.  The resin should be cured by now.

Wrapped tight in my plastic jacket, I'm rotting from the inside

Putting the finishing touches on the enclosure for my HEI module required that I pull out the engine wiring harness to get an idea of what needs to be done to allow access for the connections to terminate.  As I picked at the harness, it dawned on me: I have no damn recollection of what terminates where.

I then set out to check my notes.  Given that it was a fairly hectic and somewhat emotionally taxing point in time for me when they were written, I wasn't at all surprised when I discovered that they took off for parts unknown.  "No big deal," I said to myself.  "I wired it up before, and I'll do it again."

I found that the quality of work I did when wiring the ignition circuits was a direct reflection of my state of mind.  That is to say, after I finished peeling away the multi-layer insulation armor I had made with silicon tape wrap, heat shrink, and asphalt sleeve, I was greeted by wiring that looked like pure, unmitigated crap.  From excessive heat shrink covering inexplicable butt-joints, to using marine wire not suitable for the conditions I intend to protect against, I was left dumbfounded, embarrassed, and finally relieved.  Relieved that no one else would see what kind of half-assed work I was apparently capable of.

Situations like this are good opportunities to learn, though.  When cutting out the diode that I decided should be in (instead of putting connectors on each end and securing it in a place where it could be serviced without hacking into the harness), I discovered what my lesson would be.

The improvised "butt-connector" was used to join the diode lead to the wire shown in the picture.  Despite my propensity for doing stupid things, I'm certain that the wire didn't look like a urinal penny when I smashed that joint together.  I'll skip over the details of my investigation into the cause -- which are too boring for even me to cover -- and let you know what the cause was: solder.  Specifically, the flux in the solder.

See, I prefer to double up on my wiring termination by crimping, then soldering my joints.  The reason for this is mainly to serve in preventing corrosion.  The crimp provides the mechanical joint (reminder: except for when it is, solder isn't a mechanical component!), while the solder ensures that the components in the joint maintain continuity and are sealed against moisture ingress to the stranded wire core.

When soldering these joints, you always use electrical solder.  Not acid-core plumbing solder, or whatever the hell else.  Trial and error led me to discover that the best solder to use for my wiring is actually low-temp soldering paste used to solder SMD components to circuit boards.  It comes in a syringe, you can squeeze out just as much as you need, where you need it, and you don't have to spend a hand on holding solder wire.  You can also get it to flow easily with a pocket torch, which makes it great for field repairs.  All in all, it's fantastic -- so long as you use it right.

Electrical solder uses rosin flux to strip away metal oxide layers, wet the components, and allow the fluid metal to flow.  While rosin isn't an acid flux in the way the term is used to describe flux, it is still acidic.  Because of this, best practice when building soldered circuits is to wash the board or whatever with a cleaner (alcohol or some mild solvent) to remove residual flux.  Even though I had cleaned this joint after soldering, this still happened.  What gives?!?

Well, it's pretty simple: this was a result of what was basically a cold joint, meaning I didn't cook it long enough.  The flux used in SMD paste is actually designed to neutralize once it has come up to soldering temp and stays there for a duration roughly equal to what it should take for you to do a properly-flowed solder joint.  Since I didn't let it cook long enough, the remaining flux wicked into the wire core (probably even aided by the solvent wash I gave the joint after the fact), made itself at home, and proceeded to eat everything in reach.

At this point, you may be thinking that it'll be a huge pain to fix any other joints like this, but that's not actually the case.  Like I had mentioned, the flux is supposed to strip corrosion away from the base metal when it's heated.  If you re-heat it and reflow your joint, not only does the flux remove the corrosion, but everything should be neutralized after the joint is properly done, meaning the fix is as simple as hitting it with a torch for a moment.

It's pretty refreshing to find a screw up that is actually simple to fix, for a change.  I'm going to get back to work so I can make others that are closer to my comfort zone.

Words words words, coolant, transmission, words

I went down a rabbit hole here recently that ended with having to redo the trans cooler lines again.  The biggest problem was fan blade clearance, since the fatty wagon came equipped with electric or hydraulic fans, as opposed to the belt-drive fan that's fixed to the shaft of my water pump.  Whoops.

A bigger whoops was closely avoided when I started to take the alleged need to route through the integrated cooler in the radiator at face value.  I almost ended up plumbing things to run through it until I actually sat down and thought it through.  Here's the deal:

A lot of sources say that running the trans fluid through the integrated cooler is a necessary step to ensure the trans fluid is warmed by the coolant in the radiator.  Bypassing this cooler will have the effect of shortened life for the bands in the transmission, as a consequence of stress put on the steel through excess expansion and contraction.  Let's think this through a little bit. . .

As your engine is warming up and working to reach op-temp, your cooling system is closed. This is so you aren't constantly pulling heat away from the engine and delaying it from reaching the temperature range where it performs most efficiently.  This is why it's necessary to replace a thermostat that becomes stuck in the open position, as you'll be inviting a slew of problems if the engine runs cold for excessive periods of time (loss of power, guzzling fuel, overly-rich exhaust that can foul cats, and so on).

Once the coolant in the engine passages reach the temperature needed to allow the thermostat to open fully, coolant will pass through the thermostat opening and cycle through the cooling circuit (i.e., the radiator), allowing the engine to run while keeping it from overheating.  Generally speaking, an AMC 258 thermostat will be rated to be fully-open at 185°F, which means it will actually reach that point around 170-175°F.  Keep this in mind, as we'll be coming back to it.

While the thermostat doesn't go from fully-closed to fully-open like an electrical toggle switch, the duration of travel doesn't appear to take so long that the cooling circuit will be providing coolant of sufficient temp to warm the transmission oil during the earliest point of the engine's warmup period.  Really, until the thermostat is fully open and all coolant has cycled through to reach roughly the same temperature, the coolant in the radiator has the lowest temperature out of the entire cooling circuit.

Then there's the warmup procedure itself.

The way of warming up an engine that is least efficient and causes highest wear to an engine is to let it idle until op-temp is reached.  Best practice is to start the vehicle, let it idle for a couple minutes, then put the engine under light load until it's fully warmed.  During these first couple of minutes, the thermostat will be closed (or close enough to it to where any warm coolant that would be introduced to the radiator will have negligible effects on the radiator coolant temperature), which will be sucking away any heat in the trans fluid.  Since this will continue to be the case until the radiator coolant warms sufficiently, at what point does the overlap of the transmission oil being at a lower temp than the coolant occur?  If you have an answer for this, please post a comment to enlighten me, because I'm at a loss.

Up to this point, there's been a key detail that's gone without attention: the proper operating temperature of the transmission fluid itself.  This is where things get really confusing to me, as I'm of the understanding that the proper temperature for the oil in these torqueflites should be around 180°F, which is warmer than the temperature at which the thermostat can be expected to be fully open.  Now, an unmodified torqueflite will not be pumping fluid while in Park, so it's conceivable that you could be delivering warmed fluid to the system if you remained in Park until the point where the thermostat is fully-opened, the coolant temperature has reached equilibrium throughout the circuit, and it has transferred the heat to the transmission fluid in the integrated cooler, then put the transmission into gear.  Leaving the details of inconvenience and bad practices aside, isn't this kind of extreme heat fluctuation exactly what the cooler/"warmer" is supposed to be preventing in the first place?  If you've installed a shift kit that allows the fluid pump to be engaged while still in Park, the thermal shock in this scenario could be mitigated, though the fluid is still going to suffer from it's heat being wicked away by the coolant.

Following this reasoning, the ideal configuration seems to be one where the fluid is pumped while in Park, which will serve in getting it warm as it flows through an external cooler that has minimal airflow over it during those first couple minutes of warmup.  The best way to accomplish that would be either by having a thermostat-triggered fan mounted to the cooler, or a water pump fan with a clutch.  I have neither, so I'll be making due with being mindful in my cooler placement.

If you're still awake, you might be wondering why the hell any of this even matters in the first place.  Honestly, for most people it really doesn't.  In my case, I need to be reasonably sure that I'm not going to be causing damage to my transmission that will cause me trouble as I'm on the road, and I needed to weigh confidence levels.  See, I've already had one transmission die from the radiator cooler allowing coolant into the trans fluid circuit, so I'm already very distrustful of the design.

In doing research on the issue, I found that it transcends manufacturers, models, years, OE or aftermarket parts, and so on.  Coolant will, at some point, cause that barrier to corrode through.  That's a dead-in-the-water show stopper, right there.  Now, if you believe what some people say when they assert that the integral cooler is necessary, you'd suspect that bypassing the cooler in favor of an external unit will lead to equally calamitous results.  This may be true if you're towing tons of material through mountain passes or whatever, but in my case it doesn't seem that it's something to worry about.

A cheap radiator causing the inside of my transmission to be filled with strawberries and cream?  That's something I'll be making damn sure I eliminate as a potential reality.

This Page Intentionally Left Blanket-y Blank

[Feel free to fill this space with your choice of expletives, a 500-word minimum applies.]

Finishing Details Starting to Emerge

As hard as it may be to believe for anyone who may have been keeping up with this seemingly unending joke, a milestone is soon to be reached: that of the first startup and initial run of the Gremlin.  Here's what needs to be done before that comes to pass:

I decided to start from the front of the car and work my way back. The idea is that doing this will save me from bouncing around all over the place while I haphazardly take care of things as they come to mind.  I think it it looks like a lot more than it really is, but thinking like that is what got me here in the first damn place.

Though I'm taking this approach to provide some structure in my workflow, I'm still allowing myself to jump around in the order of things a little.

As a frinstance: I'm waiting for a second player to arrive before doing the brakes.  Next task is trans cooler, but I've got some undefined details on mounting it to hammer out before I can do that.  Moving ahead with doing things instead of reading shit, I installed the fan.  Boom.  See?  I'm already nearly done with all this.

Happy Birthdays

Today has been a celebration of new life.  The still silence of a concealed, cottony vessel was broken as a stream of fresh beings came scrambling forth to embrace the opportunities, risks, and adventures that fate has deemed them worthy to receive. 

As they spread over their small patch of newfound territory, some decided to throw their lives to the winds of circumstance and catch a ride with whatever they found that happened to be moving in any direction away from their native land.

Since arriving at the shop this morning, I've been picking tiny spiders off of myself.  All.  Damn. Day.  They all tried to go up my sleeves once they were discovered, so after a while I stopped bothering to try not to kill them.  I mean, I didn't go out of my way to kill them, but I had to prioritize finishing up with rebuilding my distributor. 

Despite my blood offerings, the distributor still isn't done. It would be, but the e-clip that secures the pickup plate to the baseplate evaporated.  I have a million count e-clip assortment.  Somewhere.  I'll be damned if I know where, though.  Still, the rest of it is all ready to go, then I can check my rotor and armature phasing and set my base timing.

The steering pump was mounted up and checking pulley alignment was a breeze.  Because the pulley as it sits will be a little more than half an inch too far inboard, of course.  Not too worried, though -- looks like the front, stamped bracket can be modified to correct the issue fairly easily.  That's right; I'll be attempting ps pump bracket modification again. 

Not immediately, though, as tasks are queued according to what's necessary to achieve and maintain first start.  After the distributor, it's tying up some loose ends with various systems and determining what belt is needed on the alternator side of things, since I don't have an AC compressor to allow me to use the original belt routing.

That's been the biggest reason for the space between updates, actually; I've been swarmed by lots of little things that aren't too remarkable on their own. 

Final Treatise on the Pumps of Big Burrito, Part the First

Having spent weeks combing through fields files with the bodies of wrecked land ships,  questing in search of tomes that exist mainly in whispers, legends, and rumors, and solving the mystic riddles and enchantments of protection lain on dark grimiores, I have returned from the land of pain and darkness to rejoin the land of the living and share what lies behind the veil of death.

Today I will be talking about power steering pumps.  A lot.  Grab a dose of your stimulant of choice and tuck in -- this will require some attention.

To recap: the AMC 258 was configured with a v-belt drive for a significant portion of its run, and the 242 was serpentine (unless there's an oddball configuration I'm unaware of that was v-belt).  Using the head from a 242 on a serp 258 requires either fabricating accessory mounting brackets, changing your belt drive type (including using a reverse-rotation water pump), or using a power steering pump compatible with the 242 mounting design and changing its pulley.  I'm covering the latter.

PUMP UP THE JAMS

For this subject, there's three types of steering pump to be aware of:

1. The Saginaw P Series pump. Ubiquitous for around 40 years, looks like a canned ham, and is what the Gremlin and probably any other power steering-equipped AMC came with.  Generally 3/4" input shaft.
2. The Saginaw TC style pump.  One of two base designs that are broadly referred to as "Type II", about the size of a baseball, found in XJs, ZJs, Ray Jays, and a ton of different year models of various foreign and domestic makes from the 80's and counting.  When doing a 4.0 head swap, this would be the style most-easily used.  Might as well get it with the head you pull from the yard and save time and a trip, because new units are priced well above what I think would be worth paying.  Generally 0.663" input shaft.
3. The CB style pump (or red herring).  Very similar to the TC, also referred to as a "Type II", can be used for some internal parts if needed, though largely useless for this use-case.  About as common as the TC pump, though variants of this design seem to be more wisely-used than the TC by foreign makes.  Usually ~0.705" input shaft, though this style seems to have the greatest variation in potential shaft diameter configurations.

Keep in mind that these are three very broad styles.  There's an incredible number of variants and derivates out there.  In the case of TC/CB pumps, the deeper you go, the more the lines can blur between assumed defining traits.  That's one big reason to stick with one from a Jeep, since it will save you a lot of headaches with fitment.  Don't worry, though; there's still plenty of hassle to deal with in getting the pump to actually operate appropriately with your original 800 series steering gear box, which I'll cover later.

PULLIN AROUND

I'll get this out the way: there are no OE pulleys on any make/model that will provide a v groove, and correct offset and bore diameter, at least none I've found over literal hours and hours of research.  Do yourself a favor and don't bother trying to find one.

The lack of junkyard or parts store options that meet the criteria I mentioned makes sourcing a nearby replacement nearly impossible.  This was a serious problem to me, but if you have more money than sense and don't care about getting parts shipped to you whenever you need them, good news: I've covered everything you need to know, so feel free to leave early or work on other assignments while the rest of us continue.

As explained, a Grand Cherokee is equipped with a TC pump, which has a shaft size of 0.663" and a serpentine belt pulley.  Pulleys of any drive type and that fit this pump have a bore of 0.662", making for one tough interference fit.  While some WJs provide a higher operating pressure than the other Jeep year models, the external features just described should be the same for XJs that are equipped with a type II (read, non-canned ham, Saginaw P series) pump.  All the same, I'm not a Jeep expert, so make sure you're up to speed on the differences between a TC and a CB pump if you start combing through XJs, just in case. 

Even though there are no press-on v-belt pulleys to be found at the yard or O'Partsy's that will fit our pumps, there may still be hope in the form of pumps that are fit with press-on hubs and bolt-on pulleys!

THEREIN LIES THE HUB

 I've found that there are a ton of Volkswagen year models from the past few decades that use a pressed hub which will provide mounting options for a myriad of v-belt pulleys of various diameters, almost all of which are about 15 bucks or less new.  If you want to stay with a domestic-themed brand, Ford Rangeplorers used a similar design, starting in the mid-to-late '90s.

Be aware that things get a little tricky with the VW pumps: I found that several of the Type II pumps used by VW (mostly CB) have a shaft size of 0.667", or just large enough to be useless on a Jeep steering pump.  If you're heading into German territory, as always, bring your calipers to the yard!

That brings me to the perils of Fording this river.  The Ford hubs *appear* to match the desired bore to mount to the 0.663" shaft, and also seem to match the bolt spacing used with the VW hubs.  Unfortunately,  I didn't discover this until after my last yard run, so didn't get a chance to measure.  Based on pictures comparing the Ford and Grand Cherokee pumps, these features should match.  Leaving a comment with details that settle these questions will be worth 10 extra credit points. 

Since there's no shortage of those Fords in the yards, and how much more easily accessible the pumps are in the Ford bays vs. the VWs, I suggest making them your first pick if you're doing the yard crawl.

CONCLUSION

I'm far from proud to admit that I had to grab an aftermarket pulley, though not because I preferred it over using a hub.  I'm so far out of time that I couldn't afford to keep chasing the yard option, while Eagle isn't up to making the drive for the distances going to the yard demands, and I've decided that I'm not giving my money to a company that treats their customers like Pick N Pull has repeatedly treated me and my friends.  If a replacement pulley is needed in the future, I'm definitely pursuing the hub option over trying to get another aftermarket part.

If you find that you end up having to go the aftermarket route, the cheapest option I found for a proper v-belt pulley is made by Sweet Manufacturing, P/N 301-30020.  At present, they can be found for roughly $35+shipping, which is a bit easier to swallow than what people charge for other parts that don't even have a collar to fit a puller onto.

So there you go! The info in this post should be all you need to mount a late-model power steering pump to a 4.0L head and tie a rubber band around it's wheel.  The upcoming second part of this. . . article(?) will cover how to make it feed the pressure your steering gear was designed to receive.  I think.

The Hydronaut's Descent Into Confusion

Seeing as it's now fall, it's only appropriate that the lights upstairs don't stay lit for as long or shine as brightly as they are during the parts of the year up here that aren't crushingly miserable.  Today I'll be going into detail about an idea that was birthed in late spring, and had a spastic fit of stupidity during the last two days.

If you've read this log for a while, you might remember the bit about trying to get the Saginaw ps pump to fit with the late model 4.0L intake and exhaust, my giving up on that, deciding to go with a Type II pump, then finding a problem with finding a v-belt pulley to fit a Type II.  If not, I hope that was all the exposition you need to be caught up.

Earlier this year, I discovered factory configurations that used a v-belt pulley, though only discovered the pump had a different shaft diameter, and thus pulley bore, after going to the yard, getting said pulley, and failing to fit it to my Grand Latte pump.  I'll spare you a lot of absurd back-and-forth and just get to the details in a sec.  Just let it be known that the info I'm covering was hard won through 4 different trips to the yard, at least 15hrs of online research spent picking out any real information about these pumps I could piece together, and at least 3 parts searches for what would ultimately turn out as false-positives for pulleys that would fit the Jeep pump.


The Type II pump comes in two flavors.  One is what you encounter all the time when you're pinching parts from newer Jeeps.  It usually (but not always) has a composite reservoir that's integrated to form an assembly with the pump body, and can be kind of a pain in the ass to check and fill if you're not used to the classic ham can saggy pump.  The shaft of this group of T2 pump measures out at 0.662", though like it's sibling type, is speced in some weird-ass base-10 system of measurement used by people who think they're smart until they have to eyeball the thread pitch of a small fastener.

The flavor many crave, particularly for racing applications, is normally hunted for in the carcasses of expired Corvettes, but can also be found in Neons made between '98 and '00.  I'm not certain that they're 1:1, but they are the same general variant of Type II pump.  More often than not, these pumps have an external reservoir, which will aide in keeping your steering sauce cooler, while also providing several more points of potential flame hazard leaks.  The snout on this pig measures at 0.709", at least by my micrometer reading of the one I've got.  You can ask the internet about it's metric measurement.

Like some of the internal components of these types, the pulleys are not interchangable.  Not all is lost, though!  Luckily, the fatty wagon's ps pump shaft is a smaller diameter than what comes in the Neon.  That gives us the obvious option of turning out a sleeve to adapt the larger bore pulley, though there also seems to be another, more labor-intensive option that I'll cover in a sec.

Sleeving the Neon pulley is what I've determined to be the best option for giving a fatty wagon pump the v.  The reasons for this are:

• Cost.  You can find aftermarket v pulleys for the GC pump online.  I just want to make that clear.  These exist, and carry at least one of the words "performance", "team", "track", "speed", and/or a synonym of any of these in the company and/or product name.  Don't be surprised that they're priced accordingly.  I may be dumb, but I ain't dumb enough to pay $80-$200+ for a goddamn pulley.
• Availability.  The aftermarket parts are guaranteed to be in stock -- for the website you're buying it from.  You may be able to see the website on your phone, but trust me when I say that the part is actually physically located very far away from wherever you are when you need a ps pulley.
• Serviceability.  The sleeve can be reused.  Even if it gets damaged during extraction, it can be turned by hand with a file and a power drill, then pressed in with a bottle jack no matter where you are.  Time, metal scrap, and red loctite are all you need.  The pulley is the easiest part, since there's no apparent shortage of dead Neons.

I may post an update showing pictures of the sleeve process in the future, but you can probably figure out if you need to.

The pain in the ass option I mentioned before is more of a mental exercise than a practical course of action.  It definitely falls waaaay short of the level of serviceability the sleeve option provides, but check this out:

Left: grande pulley - Right: Neon pulley

So the left pulley is a composite, with a space plastic body and a boring, Earth metal center.  The right is 100% Earth metal, but is still two parts: the center and the rest.  From the looks of things, it would be possible to turn out the center portion of the left pulley on a lathe, cut the weld out and press the center from the right pulley (or turn it out), swap the left center to the right body, then weld it up.

To hell with that.

FCAW y'all who thought I quit

Good god, you want to talk about hell on Earth?  It's working on something that depends on skill, knowledge, specific tools, and proper materials while having none of the above.  All the same, I've finally got the exhaust system together in working order.

It's as primitive and looks as horrible as you might expect, since I only had the flux core welder available.  In my defense, though, it's a shock that I managed to end up with something usable and looking like it could last long enough to do the job until I get to a point to get a good system in place.  With the combination of what I've learned and the template that the end product can provide, I think I'll be able to put together a respectable replacement when the day comes (assuming I have access to a MIG setup).

The main delays I ran into largely stemmed from having to COMPLETELY redo both sides, end to end, more than once.  I would get one side plumbed proper, then find the other side was out of whack after looking at it from the one angle I overlooked before.  Fixing the other side required changes on both, and this just kept going on and on. 

Of course, when you get locked into that kind of soul-crushing ping pong match, you become demoralized and even more error-prone, which will instantly double the work hours spent on your project as you fuck, unfuck, refuck, and defuck things -- some of which never needed to be messed with in the first place.  The eyes are only as good as the seer, and without a stunt double to take the reins, I had only stubbornness, stupidity, and fury to carry me through to the end. 

Problems with the welding material ended up being just as much of a delay and obstacle as my cognitive troubles presented, though this didn't come up until around the same time as the last update I posted.  The wire I had been using was actually working out perfectly, despite the slim wall thickness of the tubing I was using.  As I was able to make my welds easily, quickly, and with nearly zero burn through, I was rocking right along.  Then the spool ran out.

I had to switch to a different brand of wire, since what I had been using wasn't locally available.  Ordering more of what I had been using wasn't a practical option, so I was stuck with using a different brand.  The first spool was okay. . .  It had more of a problem with burn-through, but not enough to stop me in my tracks.  The subsequent spool's were worse, not only for burn, but also because it seemed like more of the filler material shattered and sprayed all over the place than was actually fusing with the work material.  No amount of setting or position change fixed the problem, but I was eventually able to get it to a point where I could at least use it.

Now, if you're wondering why I didn't post any updates through all this, the answer's pretty simple: I didn't want to write it, and you wouldn't want to have read it.  Chances are good that I would've just kept spinning my wheels, trying to rationalize things while I wrote, and shit would've taken twice as long as it already has.   So with that, I can't say I intend to do daily updates from here, though I will have updates to share soon enough. 

Coming soon: walkthrough of reconditioning a Motorcraft distributor.  This will probably come after I get done bending and installing new brake line from the front to the rear (yes, really; found signs of the old line leaking, probably expanded when I got too close when doing the floor boards), but before I get the carb installed and tied in.  Initial startup and break in are going to be happening in the near future, and I hope to capture the moment on bit film.

I'll keep y'all posted, but do me a favor: post a comment or even just email me if you actually read this mess that I write.  It's a big motivator to know that other people are interested in seeing how this shit show unfolds.  Have a good one!

I guess it's safe to update the sign

Haven't been posting because I've been working on getting stuff done.  Rest assured, if the stuff I've been doing lately was worth writing about again, I'd have been posting it.  Slow news is good news, right?

Anyway, I will have a pretty pleasant update in the coming days -- once I manage to stop bandsawing  windows in my fingers, burning parts of my hands to bacon fat whiteness, setting my workbench on fire with my face several inches away, and letting spiders crawl into the armpits of my shirts.  

Vertebrae for keeps

Last three days have been solidly locked up in my neck.  Went to bed, feeling as fine as I usually do, then woke up the next morning with my shoulder pinned to my ear.  It's just a thing, happens now and again.  Usually, though, it's my lower back that's decided to quit without giving notice.  Those situations tend to take a week or so to clear up, though, so I guess I'm ahead of the game.

Back in the shop today, at least.  Been cutting and welding, fitting and spitting, fussin and cussin.  I don't really want to talk exhaust, but I guess I'm talking exhaust.

Long/short, the pipes I had just weren't going to fit.  I used every means I could think of to make that shit work, but it just wasn't happening.  I eventually had to make the call that I was going to need to pony up and get a new solution, because trying to make something out of what I had was getting more and more into diminishing returns country.

I figured out what seems so far to be a pretty good solution: I got a few mandrel bent 90s and a pair of woodpecker-flavor straight tube glasspacks.  In light of having recovered my cats, I think I made a pretty solid decision.  As of close of business, I'm back to where I was a few weeks ago.  That is to say, I've fit everything together on the driver's side correctly, verified clearances, and am now working to get hangers sorted out before I make some tack welds to retain exact placement.  Afterwards, I'll do the same to the right side of the car, pull everything off, finish the welds, paint, and wrap as appropriate. 

What a pain in the ass.  Still, gonna be worth it when it's done!

Defying odds, one wheel at a time.

Walked out to get in Eagle and feed it before going to the shop.  When I got to the wagon, the front passenger tire was flat.  Totally flat.  Earth flat.

Don't get me wrong -- from the moment I bought it, my expectations for this tire were as low as it currently sits.  I don't think anyone would buy a used tire from Les Schwab and hang any heavy hopes on it being long-lived.  I mean, the damn thing already had fuzzy sidewalls when I bought it, but I wasn't in a position to be too choosy.

The part of this that's throwing me for a loop is how I've now had two situations occur where all 4 tires are holding air when I park and go inside for the night, though I discover a totally deflated front tire when I return the next day.  Same street, even. 

When I get done with the Gremlin and finally get the hell out of here, ain't nobody gonna be able to tell what I'm driving.  The entire exterior is just going to be covered with spare tires

Solvent quill, controlled foam dissolver.

Note: this post has been written over several days, so contradictory temporal references and information/statements that were already covered in prior posts will be even more common than usual.

I found my cats.

I don't know how the hell I didn't find them the last 5 times I looked in the place where they were, but at this point I'm not putting much thought into that.  You'll probably also notice some u bends in the picture as well, along with the fact that none of it is welded together yet.  I'm sure it won't take a lot of thinking to figure out what's been going on with the exhaust.  Still don't want to talk about it beyond that, though.

The heater core box is as done as things have been getting lately.  It took a little more time than I'd have liked on account of needing to track down what parts it should and shouldn't have, but I got all that ironed out.  It's now fixed in place (I wouldn't say installed, because I have a suspicion that it'll be coming back out at least once).

I had to cut some foam gaskets for it, due to not having a couple that were needed (probably lost over the last couple years).  It was pretty straightforward, except there was a small hole needed in a place where a neat cut would've been beyond my abilities.  After thinking about it for a few minutes, I decided to see if I could etch it out with a solvent.  Results weren't too bad; certainly better than if I had used a blade.

To do this, I snipped off a couple inches of spare brake line with my side cutters.  This gave me a sharp edge and collapsed the tube walls, which was almost perfect.  I used a pair of pliers to squeeze the end open just a hair, and the result was something kinda like a quill pen.  I dipped the tube in some acetone and capped the open end with my thumb, using the interior of the tube as a reservoir.

I drew the circle on the foam using the acetone as "ink", and confirmed that the foam started to slowly dissolve.  From there, I just refilled the tube with acetone periodically and gently rubbed away the foam with the sharp end.  I thought it was a neat trick, even if the results aren't laser sharp.

Here's a shot of the bay the end of the (yester)day:

Left a little length in the hoses until everything's nice and in place.

In other news, the A/C evap isn't going to work. More on that in a future update.  Maybe.  You can read about my crazy-ass attempts to investigate it here:

http://theamcforum.com/forum/topic95637_post843546.html#843546

Time capsules, treasure chests, and garbage cans

They're all pretty much indistinguishable to me.  As you may have picked up on, I'm not very well-practiced when it comes to keeping a workspace organized.  Really, the same can be said for my living space, since I don't usually delineate between the two.  Generally, I end up doing a purge every few months to clear out things that I don't need around anymore.  More often than not, these are event-driven, meaning that they're a reaction to some unexpected circumstance that's usually seen as being some flavor of crisis.

When these situations come up, I start by gathering up all the stuff that I've been tired of seeing, then throwing it out.  A lot of times I don't put as much importance in whether I actually should be throwing it out as I do in if I want to throw it out.  Like when I throw all my dishes away every couple years instead of washing them.

Once I've cleared some space, I collect everything I've been working on since the last event, which is followed by shoving it into a box or pile of some sort.  Since I'm rarely working on a single task at any given period, these boxes and piles can make for interesting snapshots of what was going on when the object wad had been formed.  Today I got to crack open a number of these easter eggs as I searched for the missing heater box parts. 

So let's take a look at what I unearthed:

Here's the hat Gremlin came with.  I'm hoping to be able to make an adapter for the Weber so that I can use it again.

A Nova steering wheel that I used for a bit, since it was a smaller diameter than the original wheel.  The larger wheel was a problem for me when getting in and out of the seat, since the Gremlin didn't come with a tilt column.

The starter that Gremlin had when I bought it.  This was a really interesting find, since I could check the drive gear teeth for signs of damage.

Looks like the teeth are fine.  A hair smooth where the reliefs are to allow the teeth to mesh, but nothing that looks damaged at all.  I take this to mean that the tooth decay that prompted the repair I did recently to be a recent issue.  I may keep this and rebuild it so that I'll have a backup on hand.

Sun visors from a Concord.  I pulled these a few years back with the intention of using them in the Gremlin.  I later found a pair in another Concord.  Those came with naugahyde instead of the thin fabric, so I'll be using those in the Gremlin.  Since Eagle's only visor was completely trashed, I went ahead and installed them.  They're an exact match, and Eagle's been overdue for a treat.

Of all the things I found (and there's a ton of interior stuff I forgot I had that isn't being covered here), I was most excited to find the scrap of plastic sitting on top of the heater core in this picture.

See, one of the main reasons this rebuild was back-burnered a couple years ago was because I couldn't find that damn part.  I searched everywhere I could think of, but came up with nothing until today.  Part of the problem was that I thought it was a metal part instead of plastic.  The other part was that I had no recollection of the big plastic tub-capsule full of parts that I stowed in the car hole, behind the AMX. 

Anyway, as shown in the picture, the heater box is near done.  I would've finished, but I ran out of rivets.  I just found the pack I have here at the house, so I should be able to button that up, install the box, blower motor, and heater core, get the cooling system hoses connected, and start installing wiring.  Woo!

Cementing bonds after fixed contact

So I've been doing something I have no business doing.  That something is being in the same room as this.

And also this.

Case in point: I didn't think to use gloves, so my hands look like I've contracted some exotic disease, fit to be showcased by the media as this season's hot new pandemic.  I'm probably better off, though -- the only thing more horrible than bare hands and glue is gloves and glue.

You may be wondering why in the hell I'd be using contact cements for anything related to my exhaust; I'd wonder that, too.  Fact is, I'm not working on the exhaust right now.  I'm not even talking about the exhaust right now.  I'll talk about the exhaust when I'm ready to talk about the exhaust.  Until then, it doesn't exist.


I said I don't want to talk about it.

No, the contact cement and it's propellant aspect are being used to finish something I started working on looooooong before I even started thinking of starting this page.  Probably close to two years ago.  That is this:

This is a pile of garbage.  Well, let me take that back -- it was a pile of garbage, but I stripped it down and painted it after removing the rust and rodent remnants that it contained.  Prior to that, it was a heater box. So while it's no longer garbage, it still has the same utility as if it were.

The rebuild kit I bought for this was of respectable quality, and I can only assume it's improved from when I bought it.  The weak point, however, is in the documentation.  Despite that, there is an incredibly useful step that I had ignored in my haste to make a mess (or "fix" the heater box, as I said at the time): take a buttload of pictures before and during teardown.

Even if I had done that, it was two phones ago and an age before I decided to put my neurotic clumsiness out there for the world to have the option of seeing, so any pictures I'd have taken wouldn't be any use to me anyway.  I have the service manual, of course, though I haven't found the chapter on "How to fix being a dumbass and tearing your heater box apart before putting it in a tub for over a year".  Yet.

What I have found is that AMC thought the Pacer and Matador sections of the chapter on heaters needed to have fully-detailed, exploded diagrams of their respective heater box assemblies, while the section covering the Hornet-chassis models could make due with a mostly-black picture of one side of the assembly for those applications.  I'm hoping that the parts catalog I have at the house will be a little more help.

Regardless, I'm doing what I can with what I have available, and right now that means smearing and spraying glue all over my person and getting what I can on the sealing foam and metal surfaces.  I also get to reassemble the box, which introduced me to peel rivets.  They're pretty neat.  It's like a jack nut crossed with a pop rivet, but none of the dickery.

But don't let my complaining fool you, because I still managed to get the better part of this stuff reassembled. 

If you're wondering what's going on with the worse part of it, since the better is assembled, well. . .  I'll let you know.  When I *ahem*. . .  Well, when I find it.

If you don't fit in, just get a hammer

Still working on the exhaust.  Yep.  Same exhaust that was supposed to be done yesterday.  Ran into a new set of fitment problems that stemmed from my impromptu pipe stands causing improper alignment.  Since most of my time lately has been within a couple feet of scrap metal mountain, I just reached in the pile and used the first pieces of steel I grabbed to make a hat for a bottle jack.  Now it holds one end of the exhaust for me, while the
trans jack that's been having an extended stay at the shop holds the other.  This allowed me to put the sidepipe fully in-place as it should be once completely installed.  Well, after I modified the 90 that attaches to the muffler inlet, that is.

Know that I'm being very generous towards myself by describing the act as "modifying".  What I really mean to say is that I made some cuts in the pipe where it failed to clear the rocker pinch weld, hammered the hell out of it, then welded the cuts back up.  See, I eventually came to the realization that "shut up and make it work" is the name of the game at this point.

On that note, I'll be signing off now for food and rest.  I have to redo the hanger hooks I had made during the time I thought things were fitted correctly, but was very wrong.

Like pork fat on a camera lens

When I try to look back at any point over the past 3 days -- even as recent as 5 minutes ago -- the image isn't "blurry", or "hazy", but smeared.  There are a couple exceptions, like the hyper-detailed and slow-motion recollection of when my shitty vise decided it was tired of holding the red candy iron I was hammering and tossed it directly at my face.   Though I managed to dodge the hot steel, the experience left a mark.  My relationship with the vise is now troubled, at best.

If the past three days were headcheese (and there's no saying they weren't) then the distinct memories are the tiny, delicious pork bits suspended in the greyish gelatin mass.  So I guess I'm saying that these days were tasty and I don't regret eating them.  Still don't want to do it everyday.

On that note, the exhaust is nearly done.  Had a little setback when I ran out of wire, but I spooled back up and ended up knocking out everything except the connectors that link the sidepipes and the rest of the exhaust, and a couple of the hangers.  Reason for that was less due to time and more due to the fact that I realized where I was going to attach them would've been a bad idea.

Once I finish up with the exhaust tomorrow, I'll have every one of the vehicle's systems present and installed to some degree.  I could actually go nuts and start it up at that point, but I'm going to stay focused and get the cleanup work done.  By that I mean backtracking to take care of the remnants of work needing to be done that aren't strictly cosmetic; heater box, connecting interior harnesses, that kind of thing.  Just about all of those tasks are halfway done or more already.

I think I'm going to head to the deli.

Cooperate, damnit!

So while everyone else was experiencing automotive hell today (friend's trans blew a seal somewhere in the vast expanses if the Dakota territories, and my neighbor's Subaru keeps eating fusible links), I somehow managed to get some headway made on my stuff once I did what I could to help both folks out (not much on the trans; my arms aren't long enough. I've pretty much just been giving troubleshooting suggestions and a resource to bounce observations off of with the Subaru).

Today was a day of minor compromises, a slight setback, and a couple moments where I felt my stomach pack up and move in with my feet.  Lucky for me, those guys don't get along at all, so my gut would show back up and apologize before doing the whole routine all over again (kinda like a girlfriend I had years ago).

The compromises centered around how many 90s I was going to end up using after surveying the space under the car from yet another angle, and whether it's really wise for me to spend my time making and welding pie cuts for each of them when I have an actual bundle of unused Jeep exhaust pipes tied together and propped up in one of my metal piles. 

The pipes being crush-bent was my main reason for deciding against using any of those pipes in the first place once the actual exhaust construction started.  That decision was made before I became aware of how much larger than necessary the 2" pipes were (I think?  Not going to go back and check).  Basically, I'm not going to be running a risk of introducing too much restriction by using crushed pipes.  Also, I doubt that any impedance that results from using them would be worse than what would come from me having to pile filler wire into the burn-through and pinhole voids permeating the spiderweb of metal that I would produce by trying to do the slice and stack.

So I hacked the exhaust pipes apart and collected the 90s.

The setback came in the form of the 90s that came with the side pipes being wayyyyyyyy too damn long for me to use them as-is.  If I laid them where they would be placed on the vehicle, there'd be maybe a foot of space between them.  Aside from minor things like the subframe rails being in the way if I don't want to drag the pipes on the ground, it's just too damn much 3" pipe.  Ideally, there'd be no 3" pipe at all, but this is what I've got and I'm gonna have to make it work until I have a grown-up's exhaust system in place.

All of the clearance issues I was somehow only just identifying made me fear that the pipes just weren't going to cut it and I would be totally stuck unless I ended up making my own glasspacks.  That's when my gut checked out and hit the floor.  Then I replayed my thoughts in my head, or more accurately, two words from my thoughts: "cut it".

So I'm hacking part of the sidepipes apart and shortening the 90s.

I also spent some time getting some 1/2" round stock bent in preparation of welding it on as hanger bars.

When I do the torch and bend, I have to restrain myself to avoid being overcome by the urge to touch the red part (just for a second!).  Every.  Single.  Time.  It's only a matter of time before my sense is asleep on watch and my stupidity sees the opening to grab hold of that glow candy.  I just hope I don't bite it when that day comes.

Bending steel with your mind

Without bothering to look back at my last post, I can only imagine that it became a little incoherent by the end.  That's why I'm doing this write up that should (hopefully) be clearer in how I formed my exhaust hanger bushing sleeves using only a pipe nipple.  And other tools I already hand on hand.  The nipple was actually the most important player in the whole process, though.  Let's check it out!

First off, I started with making a tool to seat the end of the bar stock I was going to be rolling.  I picked up a 3/4" pipe nipple, since I estimated it to be the correct size needed to give the sleeve a 1" ID.  If you intend to play along at home, please be aware that you will need a different diameter pipe to achieve that result. 

I ground flats on opposite sides of the pipe, then set a point that was vaguely middleish on one of the newly planed faces.  This was to mark where the slot was to be cut for my bar stock to seat. 

Using a cutoff disc on the die grinder, I carefully ground out a slot that was intended to be uniform and thin enough to only allow the bar stock a snug fit as it passed through.  I took my time and periodically tested with a square, deburred end of the bar, and immediately stopped grinding as soon as the needed fit was achieved.  With the slot ground out of one of the pipe's flat sides, I drilled to holes clear through the pipe at opposite sides of the slot.  The finished result looks like this:

Also needed is piece of angle iron that's several inches longer than the pipe.  Set the pipe in the angle iron with the holes centered on the bend in the angle, then drill corresponding holes in the angle iron.  This should allow you to bolt the pipe down into the angle recess.  I'll have a picture of the assembly further down.

Having finished making my rolling tool, I determined how long a piece of flat bar would be needed by using these  dimensions:

- Bushing OD: 1"
- Bar stock (thickness): 1/8"
- Desired sleeve OD: 1-1/4"
(bushing OD + (bar thickness x 2) = an expected ID that will fit the bushing.  It won't.  More on that later.)
- Mounting tab: arbitrary.  Enough to have excess when fitting to underside of vehicle.
- Brake tab: variable.  Dependent on squareness of end, how even surface is of bar.

A sleeve with a 1-1/4" OD has a circumference equal to just under 4", so rounding up, I knew I needed at least that much, plus some extra to grab hold of, and a little more to put bolts through when I was done.  This is the end result:

Since the grabbing end was variable length, I wasn't able to mark out my 4" length until  I set the end of my bar in the pipe and marked exactly where it met the pipe surface.  The extra metal up to that mark is my grabbing end (referred to from here as "brake tab") and is sacrificial.  It will be broken off once the metal is rolled enough to allow it to be finished into a properly dimensioned sleeve.  Here is the stock seated in the tool:

After making the first mark, the additional lengths were added as shown above.  The 4" for the sleeve was marked incrementally, since I would be scoring the stock at those points to create relief channels to make the bending easier.

The next picture shows the bar stock in the tool, then chucked into the vise so that I could begin cold bending it.

Once I reached end of travel as shown, I released the vise, then rotated the tool towards me before clamping it back down, like so:

Tightening the vise can allow you to do a fair amount of the bending without much extra effort.  This process was repeated until it was no longer practical to keep trying to roll it this way, at which point the assembly was bolted to the angle iron.

From here, you pretty much do the same as with the vise, except instead of tightening vise jaws, you steadily and evenly tighten each bolt until you've reached end of travel.  Unbolt, rotate, and repeat until it's not practical to do anymore.

This is about where I was once the point of being impractical was reached.  From there, I chucked the assembly into a vise and used a MAPP torch to heat the bar where it began drifting away from the pipe surface.  Once the metal was solidly orange in that area, I clamped some vise grips on the free end of the stock and continued curling it.

It's worth noting at this point that the section that will serve as the mounting tab is probably significantly arched.  Don't worry about it.  That will be flattened out when the final shaping is done.

Curl, heat, bend, etc until you have nearly curled the bar around enough to contact itself.  There should be a gap around 1/4" or so.  You'll be able to see that the relief cut made for the bending tab is showing signs that the metal is fatigued from being worked, and will break soon. 

At this point, feel free to take a couple cracks at that point with a cold chisel to break the brake tab and free your tool.

It appears that my phone didn't want to save the picture of what the stock looks like at this point, but it will more or less look like a numeral '6'.  If it looks like a '9', throw it away and start over, or turn it upside down. 

From here, you're just going to be closing the gap.  Use whatever tools you have available to compress the roughly circle shape into a less roughly circle shape.  What you're shooting for is the newly created end that the brake tab broke off from to meet the surface of the bar stock.  You want the contact point to be as close to the final mark of the 4" length as possible.

It doesn't matter at this point if it's out of round (it will be).  Once that gap is closed, drop a couple tack welds to keep it in place before uncompressing it.  Make sure that these are solid tacks, or they'll pop once things are loose.

At this point, you may be thinking that the ID of this proto-sleeve looks a fair bit bigger than 1".  That's because it was.  I saw early on with with first sleeve that the 3/4" ID pipe nipple wasn't going to give me the results I was after.  I rummaged around in Eagle and found a set of shackle bushings for an IH Scout that were large enough to eyeball that they'd fit, so I used those instead.

Now that you have your general shape secured, run a bead down the crevice where the outside surface of the sleeve and the mounting tab meet (or kinda meet, if that's the case, but NOT in the ID of the sleeve, or you're going to be doing a lot of grinding to get the bushings to fit).

With the piece welded together, you can start shaping it.  Start by flattening out the mounting tab.  This will help round the sleeve out.  With the mounting tab flattened out, start hammering or compressing the high points of the sleeve.  Use heat if needed.  Get it round enough that you have a snug fit for your bushings.  This isn't a tight tolerance part.  It doesn't have to be pretty. When it reaches the point of clearly functional, you're good to go.

I missed the mark a little with the second piece while I was closing the gap, which left me with a corner edge on the interior surface that interfered with the bushing clearance.

No big deal.  I just used a carbide burr in the die grinder to give it the old "port & polish".  Here's the resulting pair of hanger sleeve bracket things:

No bolt holes in the mounting tabs yet, since I need to check under the vehicle for best placement.  I'll follow up with how I'm making the hanger arms here in a bit.