Saturday, March 31, 2018

The Dutch method of exhaust leak repair

Say you've found yourself with an Eagle that had far too attractive a cat converter for someone else to pass up.  Though you're now minus a cat, they were nice enough to replace it with a straight pipe, but weren't bright enough to effectively seal the switched runner tube connected to the manifold.  You'd find yourself with quite the exhaust leak, despite the thief's best attempt being made to clamp the tube shut with a parts store clearance rack set of $1.50 vise grips.  Here's what to do when that day inevitably comes.

1) Go to the grocery store to get dinner.

2) Before going inside, mix up a generous helping of JB Kwik.

3) Find an extra finger.


4) Break it off, turn it inside-out, slip it over a meat finger, and slather your exothermically-reacting goo all over it.


5) Get distracted by how impressively warm it is.

6) Remember you have a very short set time, and that the heat of the exhaust tube isn't going to help.

7) Scramble to get your sticky finger jabbed up at the end of the tube, while having no regard for personal safety or cleanliness (as per usual).

8) Roll the extra finger off the meat finger and onto the tube, making sure to mash as much already-set epoxy into the tube as possible.

Note: my extra finger rolled off before I could get a picture.

9) Go into the store and get dinner.

10) Return to your Eagle and be amazed that the exhaust leak is gone, though expect to be doing more of this kind of thing.  Kwik Weld is only supposed to be able to withstand temps of 230°.


Sunday, March 25, 2018

Working like a whole mule to write this half-assed post

Found the cause of the tcase leak I last wrote about was the output shaft yoke seal being dry, hard, and leaky, the yoke having deep grooves inline with the seal springs, and a spline washer that was rotted and poorly installed.  The yoke wasn't fully seated, as well.


As you can see, the seal replacement is going well.  It'll be better tomorrow, when I return to the place where Eagle is camping across town, with the shop seal puller in hand.

Did a yard run in hopes of finding a suitable yoke, didn't, but discovered the existence of speedi-sleeves and how absurdly proceed priced they are.

Also got new trans lines for the Gremlin (kindly donated by a mid-90's Grand Cherokee).

I've been soaking in transmission fluid for the past three days. Going to sleep now so I can make it four tomorrow.

Thursday, March 22, 2018

Boxes are bridges to fences

Awareness is kind of a problem.  See, we base all of our decisions on it, have no way to escape it without putting ourselves in some degree of danger, and arguably case to effectively exist in its absence.  The real fuck of the situation is that awareness is just a product of our constant internal comparison of pieces of information.  As though that's not enough, it's not even "true" information, since it's internally-recorded and based  on our recollection of that information.  It really amazes me that we're able to get anything done at all when I consider how much of a fundamental challenge to effective action that condition presents.

Even though navel gazing is a great way to figure out the most expedient way to talk out of your ass, I promise I have a real point to make here:

My transfer case only had about 3oz of fluid come out when I drained it.  

Seriously.  3oz is a lot less than the 2.5 pints it has the capacity to carry, and the groaning, hopping nastiness that I thought was the transmission dying, or the torque converter not being secured to the flexplate, or whatever other ideas I had started over 1,000 miles ago.  It's incredible that things worked at all.  It's also incredible that my tcase housing didn't fragment like a party popper on the highway or any of the thousands of steep-ass hills I traverse all day, every day.

And here's what that paragraph has to do with the one I started this update with:

It took a long damn time for me to figure out that the problems were coming from the tcase, due in no small part to my lack of familiarity with troubleshooting and investigation flows for 4WD/AWD machines.  Coupling that with the experiences I've had with the transmission in the past, I had a pretty large gap in my awareness of what was actually occurring.  As a result, this con/perceptual void kept me chasing what I knew of that could potentially explain the behavior I was encountering.

Form was brought forth from the void, though, when I lucked out and actually managed to get a good listen to the sound when it happened today. It was distinctly coming from under the car, where I knew the tcase to reside.  Once I got where I was going, I set about changing the fluid and just got done taking the first steps hill I've taken at a speed over 15mph in quite a while.  It felt effortless, I felt good about it, and I think things may be moving ahead without binding up.  It would've been nice to get this fixed much earlier in the game, but at least it happened before I lost the tcase while driving in traffic.

I guess that the end result is a pretty unpleasant experience may have been avoided, and this reminds me of how many problems are directly tied to shortcomings in awareness.  I'm just happy that the issue turned out to be one that I could discover a cause for, and the only barrier to doing it was my lack of information.  

This experience has kind of underscored my objection to opaque digital systems being a mandatory organ in all modern cars.  While my preference is to not have to do network/computer troubleshooting as part of vehicle maintenance and repair, my need to understand how to care and feed for over a ton of steel that is capable of traveling at 100+mph is even more important.  Proprietary digital controller systems are intentionally made to be voids in your awareness.  This is why you have to pay through the nose to get software upgrades and other intangibles that sometimes play a very important part in ensuring the vehicle is operating safely or at all.  No auto manufacturer will give you the documentation on the circuits and code that make up your vehicle's *CM, and it's impractical to impossible for most people to get that information from any alternative source.

If some people end up getting their way, it'll eventually be impossible or illegal to repair or modify your own vehicle.  Hell, you most likely won't even be able to even drive it yourself, despite it costing you two or more years worth of your annual income.  The future sucks.

Sunday, March 18, 2018

What's this update share in common with a sack of pea gravel?

They're both full of a crapload of little useful stuff that's set to spill all over the place and make a mess without giving any notice.

So let's get this show on the road!  Here's some developments, odds, and ends in no particular order:

⚡Getting the Gremlin's exhaust routing figured out to accommodate the true dual exhaust side pipes just became a lot easier for me after paying attention to the plumbing under Eagle during some exhaust leak patching excursions.  See, as luck would have it, the presence of the t-case on Eagle demands the routing of the exhaust from the driver's side (where the 258 exhaust manifold resides), across the body (between oil pan sump and inspection cover), to passenger side, where it makes a 90° bend before meeting the cat.  For rigidity, the cat incorporates a bracket in its front collector flange that acts as a hanger and bolts to the transmission skid plate (or thereabouts. Memory is slightly fuzzy on the exact fastening point).

Though the hanger design won't be directly useful, Eagle's exhaust does provide me with a ton of useful reference data for the placement and radius of bends for routing exhaust to the passenger side.  Enough so that, when the stock plumbing is taken into account with the placement of the collectors for the header-style manifolds, I should be able to verify whether it's feasible to get these segments mandrel bent at a muffler shop that has templates for each vehicle.

I'm gonna wander to a shop today or tomorrow to see if I can't get a ballpark estimate of what the cost would be for sections from each, from collector to cat.  I reckon that a little bit of grinding/bandsaw, hammering, and some strategic placement of flex couplers, I should get sorted out at a fraction of the price I'd pay for it to be done up at a custom shop.  There's also the serviceability aspect of basing the plumbing off well-documented (please god, let that assumption be correct) templates that are widely available, versus a custom job that will require measurement, tracking, and manual bending to fab replacement segments for.

⚡⚡ Eagle's TC bolts were checked and tightened a bit.  My half-assed method to check for whether or not a bolt was loose was to get a wrench on it and turn while grabbing the flexplate with my other hand.  If the bolt head turned, it was loose and I cranked down on it until the engine crank & flexplate turned.  If the plate turned, I kept turning the wrench until the next bolt was accessible. 

While admittedly far from correct, it was a good enough method to allow me to find that two bolts opposite from one another were about 1/4 turn out.  That strikes me as plenty of slack to produce the knock at the volume I was hearing it at.  As you may have guessed from the tense used in my  previous sentence, I've yet to hear the sound return since making that adjustment.

The groan at takeoff, however, persists.  I heard it yesterday during a rare moment of my having the windows rolled up and my stereo silent, and suspicions relating to the hub are starting to return.  It's tough to say, though, as it's nowhere near as pronounced as it had been.  It could well just be TC shudder (though I doubt it, since it doesn't happen at higher speeds/RPM).  Next step will be to pull the CV axle stub I've been using since they broke a few months back and see if the splines are stripping out.  If so, that would explain the sound, feel, and diminishing intensity of the groan.  I'd prefer that I catch that before the inside of the hub wallers out, though.

⚡⚡⚡ The F150 that we've been tending to is up, running, and rolling along.  There were a couple slight complications, but I have to say that it was a pleasure to work on.  We may have a little more work coming in from that particular truck, since there were a few things noticed that really deserve some attention, but as far as the idle issues it was having, it was partly from the carb and mostly from a deteriorated manifold gasket that had been causing a nasty manifold vac leak.

The YF's metering rod and jet were found to be pretty messed up during the rebuild efforts.  A channel had been worn into the jet passage, either through the rod being bent during handling at some time in the distant past, or due to a setup error when the metering rod was last installed (maybe both).  Searching online for a replacement jet was no problem, however the metering rods are flatly unobtainable as replacement components.

By grace or curse, I've discovered I have a talent for finding things that are normally in the zone of impossible to source.  Unfortunately, this talent doesn't really extend to things I have a direct need for.  This makes me a pretty handy go-to guy for folks in need of weird shit and obscure parts, so I went to the closest yard to see if I could find any YFs to pull or pull single components from. 

My first attempt netted squat.  There was a total of 5 carburetors (domestic, of course.  Didn't bother looking at imports, though in hindsight it might have been worth checking.  I wouldn't be surprised if Carter supplied a carb or two for imports to employ in the American market.), 4 of them being quadrajets, and the other being a single-barrel Mopar. . . thing.  So I loaded up in the Eagle and took a 30 mile run to the next yard, where I found nothing again.

On the first pass, that is.  On my second run through, I decided to check under the hood of an '89 Ranger, and bam!  Found a picked-at YF that still had it's metering junk, and in perfect condition to boot!  After that, the rebuild was simple (after I remembered the bottom level screws thread in bottom-up, not top-down).

Getting the manifold gasket replaced actually turned out to be a much faster and easier affair than rebuilding and configuring the carb.  I was sincerely amazed.  Not a single broken fastener, no forever-scrubbing off of the mating surfaces, and not a single crack in the intake or exhaust.  It went how you always think of jobs going when you're quickly running through order-of-operations in your head when planning on doing something, and not the doomsday clusterfuck that a lot of tasks end up actually playing out as.

So that's about where we're at.  I'm having a little bit of a challenge with making some decisions with sourcing flexplate bolts for the Gremlin, but that's a different story.





Wednesday, March 7, 2018

If you think you found the problem, yoke's on u!

One thing I can't be accused of lately is having a surplus of free time.  I mean, I guess someone could make that assertion, but no way in hell would it hold up in court.  That's why my updates have fallen in the band of "infrequent to rara enough to start assuming the project went dead".  My odd jobs have consumed far much more of my time than I think anyone could reasonably assume, and Eagle has become very cranky as this never-ending winter continues to grind down on this god-forsaken territory.  These factors combined have slowed my progress on the Gremlin to the pace of a snail on barbiturates.  Despite this, I still have some news to report.

The last few days have been spent by my friend and I investigating and attempting to remedy the cause behind a 1978 F150 with a 4.9L I6 being unable to hold idle.  I'll bet I'm not giving anything away by saying that it was determined to be caused by the Carter YF that it came equipped with.  After a rebuild and attempted tune, idle is now maintained on both circuits, though low RPM is accompanied by loss of vacuum, making the slow idle circuit require a much higher RPM than is advisable.  Consequently, we may have further work ahead of us in the form of installation of a new manifold gasket.

I've also managed to install the Gremlin's flexplate, though my clearance situation demands an open-ended torque wrench.  I'm hoping to find a clever solution that doesn't hinge on spending more money, but I'm not sure that's in the cards. 

Speaking of things around the transmission and clever solutions, I came across this video that would've been a godsend when I was pulling the trans and will be a huge help when I finally get it bolted back up.  The video covers taking care of those damn top three bell bolts, and the access via the firewall is the same for my '78 Gremlin with AC (not a big surprise there).  Really handy info- check it out here:

    https://youtu.be/Hf3usGA0-78

While Gremlin sits neglected, Eagle is still playing little brother.  Recent developments and persistent behaviors have steered my attention with it towards it's flexplate, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

If I didn't mention it, the problem that prompted me to do the trans fluid change was a resonant groan that would come from. . . somewhere when I was moving uphill under load, accompanied by a lack of power.  If I didn't let off the gas, this would be followed by a hard shudder.  The fluid change had no real effect, and the behavior was intermittent.  Since I usually drive with my window rolled down, it began to sound like it stemmed from the front left wheel.

I checked the torque on the spindle/axle nuts on all four wheels and found that the suspect wheel was slightly below spec.  The issue persisted.

I thought that it could be the slip yoke, so I greased the hell out of it.  No change.

I had some u joints that fit, and Eagle was overdue for a change, so I got that settled.  It made zero difference.

I should mention at this point that the knock I was hoping had been coming from the AC compressor returned.  This is important because I found a video that featured a 4.0L Jeep demonstrating a condition that I had previously never heard of: torque converter to flexplate knock.  Suddenly, all of the problems I thought previously to be unrelated, the bad radiator, the knock, and the slug groan could all explain a cascading failure.  If a torque converter is cooking and ballooning because of a failing radiator, it could make the flexplate to crack, or at least work the bolts loose.

Tomorrow I'll be pulling the inspection cover and counting my blessings that the cat is still pulled to aid in other troubleshooting efforts.  Reason being is the small switched exhaust pipe that runs right in the way of the inspection area won't be an issue.  As an aside, it's pretty irritating that this piping is run like that and the service manuals say jack all about how you're supposed to deal with it in a stock configuration.

Regardless, here's hoping that the lack of usual symptoms of a failing torque converter means that I just have to tighten the bolts that attach it to the flexplate. . .  Good god, do I hope that's all that I need to do.