Rear suspension looks pretty dang good right now. My slip yoke stick-out is 5/8", which isn't too bad when you account for the additional 1/8" in driveshaft length; OE specs are 3/4" to 1". I'd like it to come out a touch more, but suspect that will happen once the trans mount and crossmember are torqued to spec.
Eagle's power steering needs a little bit of love, but should be easily taken care of by doing a fluid flush (pretty sure ps sauce shouldn't be black. Equally confident that it's contamination from the rotted return hose that's caused it).
Now, for the part where I tell you what to do. It's not difficult, expensive, or time-consuming, but it'll totally change your life under your car (possibly more, if you're some kind of strange person that spends time anywhere else). Here's your new mandatory maintenance activity:
Stick magnets everywhere.
That's it. I've got a few neodymium magnets scattered over Gremlin's unders - diff cover, oil pan, floor panel, and a number of other places I forget. Just make sure you don't put them near traveling or moving parts, so that they don't end up where you don't want them.
I'll be upfront and say that you probably aren't going to see any hp gained, but I'll gladly lie about it if it makes you try it. Instead, it'll help minimize repeated occurrences of doing the two things that consume 90% of the time taken when doing any work under the car: getting out from under the car, and getting back under the car.
That wrench you left well out of reach when you were doing the traveling worm from the diff to the trans? Now you can get it by sticking your handy magnet to whatever's actually near you and you've immediately gained the power of that jerk scientist from the Fantastic Four. To maximize utility, always keep a breaker bar or absurdly-long extension somewhere under the car. Hell, do what I do and just throw them both under there before you go spelunking, especially if you think there's no way you'd need either of them.
The mention of jerk scientists brings me to our next subject: trim and interior repair.
There are a few products that seem to be pretty effective in doing repairs with a wide range of types of plastic, and the kind I'm specifically interested in are two-part agents that cure as a plastic. They're generally named something that's a portmanteau of "plastic" and "fix" or "repair" or whatever, and come with a "molding bar" that allows you to make a press mold of a part to cast a reproduction (think grille tabs and the like).
I looked at the MSDS sheet for one of these products and found the following for the solvent part:
Ethylene glycol dimethacrylate - 0.0-20.0%
Methyl methacrylate monomer 60-100%
The powder was a little more hush hush. The really interesting part was the 0.5-1.5% benzoyl peroxide, but the rest was secret sauce and residual monomers. I reckon that the top secret parts are likely ABS and glass powder.
Long/short, I figure I can probably make something pretty damn close with stuff I have lying around. The molding material seems to just be a run-of-the-mill thermoplastic, and since I'm not trying to do a full copy of the product, the solvent half can be done with MEK/acetone in whatever proportion I feel like with some ABS powder sprinkled in to taste. I don't have glass powder, but I do have plenty of ABS that I can turn into powder.
Milling the ABS portion is kind of interesting, since this plastic has a low enough glass transition point to make abrasion or household grinding methods unusable. You pretty much will just end up with gobs of semi-melted plastic instead of powder. What I found you can do, is to dissolve ABS in an equal weight of acetone, then slowly disperse the solution in boiling water. The acetone will immediately vaporize, leaving ABS particulate suspended in the water. After drying, the resulting powder can be as fine as baking flour, which I can then mix with whatever reinforcing agent I have available.
I'm not sure if this will work out the way I expect, but I'll let you know once I get there.
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