First, redneck engineering at its finest. Red duct tape to cover
the torn bumper cover on the Beater: It otta get it past safety inspection. I don't think it'd pass with the ragged edges exposed. I dunno whether it's rated for 200 mph, but with the little 2.8L motor, I don't think it matters a lot. I've replaced the front wheel bearings, found a coupla cracked/broken vacuum lines that seem to have been causing the intermittent Check Engine light (I hope) and replaced the transmission mount. All tolled, it wasn't a lotta money, but I sure spent some time, especially trying to make a TH350 tranny mount work with a T-5. I had to kluge my own intermediate mount to the crossmember. The T-5 mount is a dealer-only part and when they were available, the price was over $300. No way. My kluge works and it's stayin that way. I haven't been able to fix the temp gauge, so I tore into the dashboard: Don't ya love those crazy $20 seat covers? :) Anyway, I replaced the burned-out dash lamps, but didn't find anything that would have caused the temp gauge not to work. So I'm gonna run a long jumper wire from the instrument cluster plug to the temp sender. If that doesn't fix it, I'll do two things. First, I'll just assume that I don't know a damned thing about basic electricity and then I'll go buy an aftermarket gauge. One other thing visible in this photo is the red/red w/black stripe wires hanging down from the area of the fuse box. I figgered they might be for the horn, since it doesn't work, but I couldn't find anything in the wiring diagrams (the set I have is for 82-83) but that doesn't mean a lot. It looks like the connector on the end should plug into the back side of the fuse box, but I couldn't see a way or a place that it would fit. Any ideas? And then the race car. This is a "middle-of-the-project" shot of the wiring "tidying up" process. There's a lot more work that's gone on than is visible in the photo. I relocated the coil, redid its wiring, shortened a lotta wires and did a lotta re-routing. It's gettin closer. I just called the vendor and my 4 3/4" cowl induction hood still hasn't been received from their manufacturer. I've still got some time, but it's gettin closer and I already paid for the damned thing. Oh, well. One of my favorite sayings is, "everything takes longer and costs more." More when I have it to report. r |