I need to put the front clip back on my 83 Cutlass and wire it up
F#&%in car.... what can't it ever be happy.
🤣🤣🤣
What Did You Do To Your G-Body Today? [2021]
- Thread starter CopperNick
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Nothing wrong with showing the car once in a while , Donovan, it’s a good excuse to shine her up, take a nice drive and show off your handiwork! And you get to check out some nice rides while you’re at it! 👍
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Unplugged the battery today, it's gonna sit for 3 months and I don't want it to die. Gonna have to put the tender on the Z06 which is a bit more finicky.
So today was get brave day and tackle the differential. The item on the list was the new seal for the pinion. Sitting on the bottom rung of my step ladder you see the old seal in the jaws of one of my thin jaw vice grips with the pinion yoke parked beside it. The very keen eyed might be able to pick out the scarring on the seal surface of the yoke. it is slight enough that while a finger nail won't catch, a finger tip can feel it. Since a new one around here goes for around two bills, tax incl., i had a chat with my local Napa dude and he managed to find and order a repair sleeve for it.
Elected to drive in the new seal as a precaution against the drips. May not be an awful lot of lube left in the belly of the beast so adding a pint or so may have to be added to the to-do list for this.
AND NOW, with no fanfare or fireworks, i present, the Upper ears of my 10 Bolt, now fitted with their brand new Poly-urethane bushings after a mere 22? years, (near as I can figure), of waiting!! The Hotchkiss upper and lower control arms were installed before 2010 and while the Monte was still on the road but, at the time, I did not have either the facilities, funds, or tools to deal effectively with the upper bushings. Over the years I have managed to rectify those shortcomings to the point where i was now able to deal with the issue and resolve it.
5spdcab, I would say you got very lucky with the install portion of your own upper bushings. Even after 22 years of residence in the freezer, these new bushings had still only shrunk marginally with the cold. It was just enough to be able to start and true them in the openings by hand but after that they required some serious encouragement to enter their new and permanent residences.
Meet the engine of their installation. What you see here is my ball joint installation tool, with two of its adapters, and a driver head borrowed from my Lisle seal and bearing driver set. How it worked was that I set up the installation tool using the seal driver head at the screw end and the shallow cup at the bottom end. This assembly was set in place over the bushing and ear, and aligned/tightened into the correct position by hand. Then I hung the 1/2" air gun off the hex end of the forcing screw and pulled the trigger, literally. Chug, chug, chugga-chug, and in went the bushing. Once it had started to appear at the other end of the upper ear, I swapped out the shallow cup for the deep one and went back to the gun to finish the push. The bushing shells come with a stepped shoulder in the them that acts as a positive stop or detent so they can't be driven too deep or past center.
The second bushing was a lather, rinse, repeat iteration of the first one.
The only thing I confirmed, and I more or less knew this going in, was that the check measurement for verifying that the bushings had centered themselves correctly showed as 3/4" on one ear and 5/8ths" on the other. This is/was not a mistake. During the removal of the old bushings I had measured how much the shells had projected out past the ears and obtained different readings for each side. it turned out that one ear on the casting is 1/8th inch thinner than the other, so the thicker ear shows the shorter measurement and the thinner ear reads longer; the difference being that 1/8th of an inch. As noted above, the shoulder located on the outer shell acts as a positive stop so they only go so far during the installation process and no farther.
The keen eyed will also have noted that the rear end looks like it has been painted in winter camo. This is actually the response of the metal to two coats of SEM Rust Mort. it will be getting a third application to make sure I have not missed any nooks or crannies or managed to knock off any stubborn rusticles during other work being done. Once the third coat has dried and any blooming or flowers knocked off with a hand wire brush, it will get taped off for painting. The base coat is going to be a layer of Rust Check's anti rust specific paint that I have used before, then a coat of Krylon flat black anti rust, and a top coat of Duplicolor matte black anti rust as a top coat. For show and go brigade, this is not about pretty, This housing has been exposed to too many years of salty winters and shitty roads to ever be showroom pretty again. The best i can do with it come under the heading of applying lipstick to a pig!! Mostly,. the black matching the floor pan of the cabin as it does, what should occur is a fade out, that is the housing won't get noticed because it matches the rest of the color scheme and therefore appearing to belong, the observing eye just kind of slides over it and moves on. Camouflage.
The sleeve for the pinion yoke had to be ordered so that puts any more work, apart from paint, on hold until the middle of next week. i had thought to harvest a yoke from one of the spares but they are on the differential rack and buried behind/underneath enough boxes of stuff that It would have been a day's work just to remove everything in the road and gain enough working room to bring in the cherry picker to lift one or the other to get to the pinion end of things. Plus which the odds either or both of those yokes would be in any better condition, given that they are actually older than the 85, borders on problematic, gave me enough pause for thought that I said F*** it and elected to go with plan A.
Nick
Battery Tender makes a version of its units called "Battery Tender Plus" It both will charge and then supply storage supervision as needed by the battery. Use one for the AGM battery in my Non G-Body G-Body and it keeps the faith, faithfully. Even dealt successfully with a multi-week situation where it was not plugged in battery and the AGM had to survive without its e-love for a while. Brought the battery right back to fully charged and then went back to babysitting it.
Nick
Nick
Placed a new alternator on it's core support and walked away. Maybe it will install itself?
LOL, ROTG and LMFAO!!!! For that act of mechanical indifference you will probably be lucky if it doesn't cost you the skin off at least two knuckles plus one slashed finger tip. It's a well known urban myth that toys hate to be ignored and/or have desired repairs or upgrades stalled/stopped in mid-work. They can and will have their revenge, usually by having a perfectly correct and new part fail to fit or work right once installed, or fighting the install every inch of the way, and turning a 10 minute "easy" repair into a 10 hour battle that includes having the dog hiding under the porch, the cat nowhere to be seen, and the wife on her way to her mothers for a weekend "visit".
Nick
Nick
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