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I've decided to do the head at the same time. Might as well... it's all going to be apart anyway. I'll be sending it to Junsei Motorsports in Arizona. I wanted someone who had experience with the 4AG engine to do the headwork, otherwise I would have just found a place here in town. I'll be getting all new seals and guides, shave the head .010, and the ports will get ported and polished.
I'll be sending the block to PowerHouse here in Bakersfield. It'll be getting new pistons, new rings, assemble pistons on the rods, size and hone cylinders, resurface and resize all bearings & sleeves, balance crankshaft, clean and polish the deck, and a bunch of other little stuff.
It's cool that I'll be getting a nice new engine, but I'm really not looking forward to this. My plan was to just get the thing smogged and that I'd build a new engine over the summer when I had the time and when the weather is nice. I didn't want to spend all this money right now and I wanted this thing to be done with already. =\ |
- posted by //Ender-DI @ 7:25 AM
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Saturday, January 17, 2004
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So... My car has been at the mechanic shop for 5 days now. It won't pass smog because the piston rings are shot from sitting for so long. So I'm without car again. So it looks like I'll be rebuilding my block myself... and installing it myself... because I REFUSE to pay the shop $2K to fix an old engine. Dammit!
Well, the one up side to this is that now that I'm taking the engine out to rebuild the block, I can then get the engine bay painted too. I was really wondering what I was going to do about that. So, now that's taken care of. Which is actually REALLY nice for me. For some reason, I was really fearing having an unpainted bay with a nice paintjob for the rest of the car.
Still... totally weak. |
- posted by //Ender-DI @ 1:42 AM
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ARRRRGGGHHH!!!
Ok, this isn't AE86 related but... I just came back from the L.A. Auto Show. While I was there, I took nearly TWO HUNDRED pictures with my snappy new digital camera with the 256 MB memory card I bought just for this event. The last picture I took... on the way out of the convention center... the memory card takes a shit and it looks like all the pictures may have been lost. It was a brand. new. card!! I bought it about 10 days ago just so I could take a ton of pics at this car show. Words cannot describe the frustration and anger.
I'm hoping that the last picture was just corrupted and the camera can't read past it. So I gave it to Andy who is going to put it in his card reader and see if he can pull out the other pictures.
*sigh* I hope so. I took some REALLY nice pics today. |
- posted by //Ender-DI @ 12:43 AM
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Always something.
The crap news for today is that a small fuel leak sprung up on the way home from the pizza place tonight. As I walked around the front of the car I got a whiff of gasoline. I popped the hood and noticed that there seemed to be a small trace of gasoline coming from one of the lines above - but not connected to - the fuel filter. GAH... oh well, it's going to the mechanic on Monday and that'll just have to be added to the list.
The other something:
The good news is that while driving the car around a lot today, the high idle that's been plaguing me (around 1500-1700rpm) mysteriously went away. I was driving to work and the car started idling lumpy at the stoplights. It would run fine while at speed. After a few "lumpy" stoplights, the idle smoothed out and started idling between 800 and 1000rpm. Ummm... ok? I guess that's good news, too bad I don't know WHY it happened. |
- posted by //Ender-DI @ 9:40 PM
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Thursday, January 08, 2004
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Oh man, there's another thing I forgot to mention in here. Way back in late September, I ordered a single-DIN sized cupholder from a Ford SHO Taurus. I had to do some modifying to it, but it basically slipped right in underneath the stereo. It's really trick. With the placement in the AE86 tho it pretty much renders the stereo completely inaccessable. The other downside is that the holes for the cups are pretty small. It's really only good for holding cups like the small and medium sized cups from McDonald's. You can see it here.
Oh well... It's still cool. I'll have to take a daytime picture of it... the three on eBay right now have crap for pictures. |
- posted by //Ender-DI @ 9:46 PM
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Ok, so the electrical is fixed... yay! But I've noticed 2 little lame things. Now that stuff works, I've noticed that the connectors to the passenger side headlamp and side marker are kinda loose so that the lights can flicker at times. Guess I'll need to get some new connectors.
Ok, so here's the lame story I mentioned yesterday about getting the electrical fixed...
On Tuesday, I went to the junkyard to find the little gas door release pin (forgot to add this to the blog). Not sure I've mentioned this before, but that was broken, so the previous owners just bent the mechanism on the door so that it was held closed by friction. Anyway, during my junkyard hunt, I ran across a pretty nice 1986 burgandy SR5. It even had the center console cupholder! So I took that, the wiper switch, headlight switch, the gas door release pin, and a gear selector (for Gabe at T3). I took the headlight switch thinking that maybe, just maybe that might be the problem I've been having all along.
So I got the stuff home, plugged in the new switch (everything's taken apart and stripped on the inside, so plugging it in took all of 30 seconds), and turned on the headlights. Still nothing. Oh well, I was taking it to the electrical shop in the morning.
Well, I was in a hurry and forgot that I didn't even have a taillights fuse in the fuse box. So when I took the car down to the shop, the first thing the guy does when he gets to my car is plug in a fuse, turn on the switch and - lo and behold - everything works. It was the DAMN SWITCH ALL ALONG.
Now, the good thing about this is that since it worked, the guy at the shop figured that it must be a loose connection somewhere and went through a good portion of the car checking EVERYTHING. He *did* find that the illumination wire on the stereo wiring wasn't shielded and was thinking that *maybe* that might be it, so he wrapped it up and thought that might work. He was all apologetic that he couldn't find something more solid than that. I was so elated that the thing just worked I kinda didn't mention that I swapped the switch the night before and was too stupid to plug in the fuse and check it. Oh well... I skated outta there with a working car and only $40 less in my pocket! w00t!! |
- posted by //Ender-DI @ 9:40 PM
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Wednesday, January 07, 2004
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W00t! The electrical is fixed! Turns out it was the headlight switch. There's a stupid story to go along with it, but I have to get outta here! I'll write more later!
Next up is taking it to the mechanic on Monday to get the engine running smoothly.
Still looking for a decent and cheap (notice I didn't say *good*) place for bodywork. Oh man I'm getting excited. |
- posted by //Ender-DI @ 5:04 PM
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Well, holy crap. This car may get running yet. The company vehicle I've been driving has taken a crap, so I need my car running ASAP. So, I've taken some time off work to finally get this thing back on the road. There's a mildly amusing story, but it warrants a bit of history:
I bought this AE86 sometime in the fall of 1999. Shortly thereafter, I ended up moving to Orange County and was driving back to my hometown of Bakersfield nearly every weekend. It was racking up a lot of miles and was hard on the tired old AE86. So, on January 2nd of 2000, I bought a brand new Mitsubishi Galant. About a week later, the AE86 went into storage where I planned on making it my project car that I could work on during the weekends. Well, between moving 3 more times and my son being born in September of 2000, the AE86 project was very much on the back burner. So, it's been nearly 4 years to the day since the car was put into storage and you can read in this blog just about everything I've done to it since.
Now, when I bought the car from a used car dealership, the lowest I could talk the guy down to was $1400. In hind sight, I was ripped off, the car needed (needs) a lot of work. Jerk. Anyway, I only had $1000 in cash with me. The guy was pretty cool and let me pay off the last $400 $100 at a time over the next few months. A day or so after I paid my last $100 was the day I moved to Orange County.
Here's where it gets interesting... I went to the DMV on Monday to get the car registered. When they pulled up my file, they asked me if Superior Motors still held the title to the car. I said WHAT?! Apparently, I never got the title from the car lot after I made my last payment. So I had to go back to the car lot - fortunately it was still in business - and get the pink slip from him.
So, it wasn't a big deal after all. But the bottom line is I finally got my car registered! Or at least temporarily until I get it smogged. And Superior Motors is finally off the title. AND! I ordered a personalized license plate that will read ENDER DI. hehe!! I'm so excited.
So, now that it's all official, I drove (yay!) the car down to an automotive electrical shop to get that *@&%*@#ING ELECTRICAL SHORT fixed. Amazingly enough, it's only going to cost $40 for the diagnostic and the guy said that usually once he diagnoses it, he'll just fix it right there, so it shouldn't cost much more than that. Which is a freakin' miracle. But I'm not counting on it. Seems like the guys there were pretty cool... so, we'll see.
Anyway, after that, it's off to a mechanic to get the car tuned so it will idle and run correctly so I can pass smog. Like I said earlier, it seems I can take anything apart and put it back together... I'm just clueless when it comes to making it run right. The car runs okay, but it has a high idle and I think it's running rich.
Then it's time for bodywork. w00t! I'll get this thing running yet. |
- posted by //Ender-DI @ 1:00 PM
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