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[quote=“FishMan” post=62477]Scott,
Is the radiator overflow port on the same side as the radiator cap? Looking at the picture on the Pro-Tek website, the cap appears to be on the passenger side. I guess you would need to extend the overflow line across the top of the radiator to the expansion port… Is this what you plan to do?[/quote]
Negative. If I use an early model coolant overflow bottle it all works out.
Decided air compressor was hopeless and bought one off Craigslist. It’s quiet enough that I might be able to run it after quiet hours (9PM). This is a big deal since 10PM to 1AM is “Scott-time”.
Armed with decent air pressure, did some nice work painting the cage. In a major emotional event, I decided that the cage was good enough for now and I should move on.
Spare parts are good. I had thought that I needed new sheetmetal to go behind the front bumper and even scouted a PickNPull for candidates. Then I found that I had the 5’ long piece of sheetmetal after all, Woohoo. I also went rooting thru the attic for bumper shocks. I was very happy to find that not only have F and R early bumpers, but also F/R early shocks. It remains to be seen tho if I have 4 big pieces of plastic that go with the early front bumper.
Swapped thermostat housings because my old one already had the right ports plugged, has the Stack temp sensor in it, and has the modified 170deg tstat. Pulled one of the tstat’s studs out of the head and replaced with a bolt so the tstat housing will rotate forward away from the intake manifold. This makes tstat housing removal much easier.
Pulled coolant barb out of the block (hose to throttle body). Was a SOB to get out. Plugged with a cut-down 12mm bolt.
Sunroof. After much hand-wringing, finally decided on a sunroof course of action and chose the solution I could execute fastest……slapping a piece of sheetmetal on top and calling it a day. Retrieved the piece of sheetmetal that covered the sunroof on Old#6 by drilling out rivets.
Bought a double-action sander and sanded roof bondo in preparation for painting and installation of sunroof sheetmetal. More bondo is going to be required.
Removed the last of the PO’s decals.
The triple-pass radiator. Did a bunch of test fitting and imagineering. Found that even with a radiator cap on it fit under the hood just fine, but my old hardware wasn’t going to hold it in place, and the outlet hose was a problem. Also, the coolant tube that runs across the front of the engine wasn’t going to attach to my early model water pump.
While at the shop that does my aluminum welding I’d hatched the idea of having the outlet (bottom) tube come out horizontally like the OEM design (see pic). That proved to be a bad plan and made running the coolant hose from radiator to coolant pipe more awkward than it needed to be. I resolved to take the radiator back to the shop and have them restore the “up” incline to the outlet.
The reason the outlet tube has to be modified is that it’s diameter is too big.
At great risk, I used a grinder past midnight and fabbed a new radiator clamp.
Installed PO’s SPAL fan on the radiator. Was dismayed to find that it was a Pull fan, not Push. A quick experiment indicated that Pull wired backwards is Push. Nice.
My experience with SPAL fans is that wired backwards they sort of work. The don’t move near as much air if you do that. But then, it may depend on which particular SPAL you have.
I think it depends on the curve of the fan blades as to whether u need to swap the blades around as well.
+1[/quote]Engineers help me here…
A 16" fan has an area of 1.4 ft2. The Spal fans push ~3000 cfm. At 50 mph, assuming unimpeded radiator area equal to only half the fan area, the airflow is the same (50 mph = 4400 ft/min x 1.4 ft2 = 6100 cfm through the rad).
You need a fan for <50 mph (i.e. red flags and on grid). The push/pull/fan blade orientation can’t make that much of a difference if you’re only trying to handle idle cooling requirements.
+1[/quote]Engineers help me here…
A 16" fan has an area of 1.4 ft2. The Spal fans push ~3000 cfm. At 50 mph, assuming unimpeded radiator area equal to only half the fan area, the airflow is the same (50 mph = 4400 ft/min x 1.4 ft2 = 6100 cfm through the rad).
You need a fan for <50 mph (i.e. red flags and on grid). The push/pull/fan blade orientation can’t make that much of a difference if you’re only trying to handle idle cooling requirements.[/quote]
You need more airflow than you might think to keep an idling car cool on a 100 degree day sitting at a red flag after running hard. I’m not an engineer, in fact I’m borderline retarded, so I won’t try to pretend I understand airflow difference between blade curves, but you would definitely want whatever you’re using to work properly.
Not having a fan definitely doesn’t work. And I can speak from experience when I say that using the electric AC fan doesn’t work either. So clearly a certain amount of air does need to get moved successfully. On a 70 degree day on grid? Maybe not. But why risk it when we’re talking $100.
@ Steve. I agree. Setting up the fan to move air backwards thru the radiator would have worked. The fan only needs to work when the car is stationary or nearly so and it just doesn’t matter that much which air is flowing. It would be nice for air to be brought in to cool hot engine surfaces, but it’s not a crisis.
I think the rule of thumb is that a fan is only helpful <30mph.
The AC aux fan is a workable solution. There’s a number of ways to goof a fan install so if a person’s fan doesn’t seem to be cooling the car the should try to figure out what is going on. Put your hand behind the radiator and see if you feel air flow. If not, consider that the fan does as much circular churning as pushing air longitudinally. It’s very helpful for there to be something that catches the churning air and helps direct it longitudinally. Some “stand off” between spinning blades and radiator surface helps with this. Also, some radiators have a very fine mesh. These are particularly tricky for getting the circular churning air to flow longitudinally thru.
If a car has been running hard and then pulls over for a Red the temp is will increase a bit because the amount of cooling air flow that the aux fan can provide isn’t nearly the air flow going thru a minute prior. But still, the aux fan can dump more heat than the engine creates at idle so after climbing a little the coolant temp will start dropping down to a reasonable steady-state that has as much to do with the tstat as the heat source vs. heat sink situation.
If the SPA hadn’t been willing to Push, I’d a grabbed an AC aux fan from the attic and installed it. That’s what Old#6 had off and on.
Good Karma today. Must buy lottery tickets.
Working on the 401. Today’s project is to clean up both the crappy gauge/switch wiring I did, and also get rid of some of the factory wires that no longer have anything to plug into.
By way of background, my cluster tach stopped working for unexplained reasons when I put in the new motor last summer.
Back to today. So, I rig the car enough to run again, so I can check as I cut to make sure things are still good. Even though the dash is out, I temporarily hook up the cluster, and start the car. I have my usual complement of warning lights and gauges (fuel and temp, no tach).
I then cut the bundle going to the check panel (which hasn’t been connected to anything for years. Restart the car, and… the tach works again!
I’m happy it now works again, but I hate when I don’t know why.
I’ve not updated this thread for several days of working my ass off. Too busy working on the car until 1AM each night, and then working my ass off all day at work. Haven’t been able to write any.
Good news about an hour ago. The clutch pedal sits so low that it won’t disengage the engine from tranny. I have to turn the engine off to shift. I think PO did a clutch swap just before the car went under a tarp. I think that the plastic pivot pin that the clutch fork sits on was forgotten. Looking at the tranny from the outside where I think I should see the external “nub” of the plastic pivot pin, I see no nub.
I’m hoping someone will chime in here and tell me it’s probably < > and don’t have to drop the tranny after all. But I fear the worst. I hate dropping the tranny. Not only are the engine’s bolts hard to get to, but I’ve the scissor lift to contend with.
It’s really evil to have to drop a tranny because a little piece of plastic was overlooked.
I got behind on this tale. Between working hard on the car until late at night and then being really busy at work I wasn’t getting any time to sit down and write. The car went to Maaco a week ago. The adventures below are all from 2 weeks ago.
I got in big trouble one night around 11PM for making too much noise. I was using a sander on some bondo. Neighbor called the house and woke up wifey who then stormed into garage spitting fury. The next day, hat in hand, I apologized profusely to neighbor. We than conducted some noise experiments to see what I could and could not do. This was a critical issue for me because Scott-time doesn’t start until the kids go to bed and often goes into the AM. If the tools were too noisy I was going to have to look into putting sound insulation on all 4 walls and the ceiling. But the experiments indicated that the sander, grinder, and even the new air compressor were relatively inaudible to the neighbors and therefore I was good to go. The whole problem was that my garage door had been open that night. And the reason it had been open was to give the noise an outlet pointed directly away from the other neighbor, the one in the Glock story. So I think all I have to do is to keep the door shut and not bang on anything and I’m good. And also, no one gets shot.
The saga of the oil pan.
After sucking the oil out of the engine with a vampire, I lifted the motor up with a rail across the fenders (see pic), undid the motor & tranny mounts, removed the 50 bolts that hold the oil pan on, and removed the oil pan. The intent was to install one of my baffled oil pans, a crankscraper and a blue printed oil pump, all of which I have several.
I thought.
Cross bar engine lift.
To my irritation it turned out that none of my 3 backup oil pans had the oil temp bung welded on, nor the baffling that IMO is necessary to keep the oil pump pickup submerged. And clever me, I’d already removed the oil pan on a car that needed to drive on to it’s trailer in 48hrs for the trip to MAACO.
First thing Monday morning I took an oil pan to the aluminum welding shop with a spare bung and a drawing of the little door that needed to be installed in the left side baffle. He told me to come back at the end of the day and we’d do it together. In the afternoon I left work a little early and headed home to try to get the Metric Mechanic baffle out of Old #’6’s oil pan, currently crushed between block and steering box. Rolling around under Old #6, in a big hurry, with grinder and Sawz-all turned out to be a big waste of time. The only thing I accomplished was to erase all the healing that my cracked rib, which took a whack in the crash, had done in the previous month.
My mother was visiting. I walked into the house complaining about my rib with my hand pressed firmly against my rib cage about where the liver is. My mom, who is kind of a nut, said with concern “Are You Having a Heart Attack”? Groaning inwardly at the amazing things that come out of my mother, I said “Damnit mom, quit making me laugh, it hurts like a bastard”.
Frustrated, late and gritting my teeth against the knife in my ribs, I hustled to the welding shop.
We managed to weld one of my spare 1/2NPT bungs to the oil pan easily enough, and after imagineering a number of solutions for the little trap door in the left side baffle, I ended up leaving with a stainless steel door hinge sort of thing. I chose to finish the project on my own because he was doing work I could do and my time is free. Which, of course, is when the problems started.
The first problem was drilling a couple holes in the SS hinge so I could fasten it to the baffle. The SS defeated 4 drill bits before I had 2 holes. 4 bits to make 2 holes. Jeezus.
Oil pan bung, OEM baffle w/ hole cut for door, stainless steel hing.
The second problem was that I’d cleverly had the guy weld the 1/2NPT bung on backwards. It was designed to be inserted into a hole from the inside of the pan and that hadn’t occurred to me. For any other kind of thread it wouldn’t have made any difference but NPT is tapered. That is to say that the threaded hole gets more narrow as you thread in. So I had a bung that was at its most narrow on the outside of the pan and there was no way I was going to be able to thread in the temp sensor’s adapter. Using a 1/2NPT tap I gingerly tapped the bung from the outside, full knowing that if I went in a little too far I was going to be screwed because the adapter would then thread in all the way without every really getting tight. Thank god, it seemed to work.
While this was going on I ordered an oil pan baffle from TC Motorsports. It looks nice. I’ll probably take one of the other spare oil pans, have the baffle and the bung installed and have it ready for the next time I take off the oil pan.
Installing an oil pan with a crankscraper is always a treat. First you have to go thru some test fits and grinds so that the scraper will clear the oil pump and the crank counterweights. This takes a while because you have to “locate” the scraper each time with at least 8-10 bolts otherwise it won’t go back on exactly the way it did before. Once you are finally happy with the fit, you have to put goobage on the scraper and fasten it in place with all 40 bolts. Or was it 60? Then you walk away and let the gasket goobage dry over night.
If you did a good job above, when you remove the 60 oil pan bolts, the scraper won’t fall on your face while you install the oil pan. But if you’re an idiot you’ll find that the reason you can’t seem to install the oil pan is that you only removed 56 of the oil pan bolts so that’s why 4 of them won’t go in. If you are a complete and utter moron you will do this a second time having removed 58 bolts, and not get it right until the third time.
I’m anal leaking oil pans so I carefully cleaned all bolt holes with acetone and a brush from a rifle cleaning kit. I used a thick paper gasket that IMO seals a lot better than thin cork gaskets. Then using clean bolts and blue locktite and installed each one with an in-lb torque wrench. The bolts going into aluminum were torqued to spec and the bolts going into steel went a little tighter.
The saga of the radiator.
I had a lot of trouble installing the triple pass radiator. Recall that it uses a return tube that is too large so I’d had it replaced with a smaller dia. tube. Cleverly, I had the smaller tube pointed horiz rearward instead of pointing up a bit like the earlier radiators. I figured that would make it easier to connect a hose to the cross tube. Nope. I tried for quite a while to get a hose to work, but in the end I decided my idea for pointing the tube rearward had been a bad idea and it needed to go back for a redo.
The next evening I spent 2hrs at the welding shop as we fabricated a tight 90deg turn in the return tube. Not until halfway thru that effort did I figure out that 1) The reason I was having problems with the return (bottom) tube is that it’s about 2" higher in this brand radiator than the radiators I’d used previously. And 2) It’d be a helova lot easier to modify the coolant tube that goes across the front of the engine than the radiator return port that connects to it. But I was committed so I sucked it up.
Radiator Return Pipe, 2nd Design
With all of the work done on the radiator, my bargain solution saved no money. It’d cost me a fortune if the old guy at the machine shop charged me what he should have.
After getting the radiator modified I pressed on with the install into the car and ultimately got the hose routing to reasonably fit. And after some cut/fit cut/fit imagineering cycles my fastening clamp hardware seemed to hold the radiator in well enough.
Radiator, Installed.
The saga of the paint job.
I had some Bondo on top of the car where the holes had been cut thru and I’d had to weld in patches, and some more on the RR quarter panel. I don’t have much experience with body work but after a couple iterations with Bondo and after buying a dual action sander I got roof in decent condition. I didn’t end up really finishing the RR quarter panel. After a couple layers of Bondo and sanding I figured MAACO could give it 20min and it’d look a lot better than my effort.
The car was originally Cinnabar Red but had been painted an awful yellow color. Because it was peeling a little in a couple places, and a great big sheet of yellow paint had come off of the hood when I removed a big decal, I decided to remove all the yellow paint. I was concerned that if MAACO painted over the yellow, I’d put a decal on and then upon removal the decal would take 2 layers of paint with it. So over the course of 3 days I spent 7-8hrs covered in yellow dust sanding away with the new dual action sander. I used a pretty harsh grit, thinking that when MAACO went over it with their 180 (or whatever) that they use for paint prep, that would nicely smooth out what I was doing with 60grit. As usual, this all turned out to be an expensive mistake.
All that yellow paint turned out to be pretty tenacious so maybe my worries about it coming off were baseless. And MAACO took one look at my 60grit sanding job and said “uh oh”. “That will look awful if we just do a sand and paint. We’re going to need to do an extra sanding effort, then we’re going to have to hit it with a special “high build’ paint. Then we’ll do your paint. Also, they wanted another $120 to do the Bondo work that I’d thought would take only 20min. The consequence of all of this was that I’d just doubled the cost of the paint job to almost $1k. if, instead I’d just feathered the paint where it had come off and finished the bondo work on the RR quarter, I’d a saved myself $500. Doom on me.
Misc
The night I got in trouble over noise I started looking for a useful task that would be quiet. So I did a valve adjustment. All the exhaust valves were too tight and all the intakes were around the OEM spec, which is a little loose IMO. I didn’t spend the time getting everything perfect but I did redo about half of the valves that were the most egregious.
I noted that the rocker arm eccentric nuts were a bit tighter than they should have been. This was a surprise since virtually every fastener I’ve touched so far has been loose. The one that got my attention that night was the loose Jesus nut on the front of the crank. A loose Jesus nut on the front of the crank is a little spooky. The loose fasteners that got my attention last night were loose motor mounts, tranny mounts and all oil pan bolts. Every single oil pan bolt wasn’t torqued down to spec.
Scott, the stock plastic piece with the rubber donuts will do better holding the radiator in place. You may have to slot the holes slightly but they work great. Chuck
I think I have one of those in the attic, I should give it a try.
You recognize your work on my oil pan baffle?
I hope your not buying harbor freight drill bits. They are dangerously poor quality. I bought a 10 pack of 1/8 inch bits for less than 2 dollars at harbor freight while skinning the inside of the drivers door. The were all bent and the “titanium” coating was sticky. After the first couple shattered and I nearly stabbed myself and put my eye out I went to sears and bought some good bits for 4 dollars a piece.
Actually forgot all about doing that.
Also use the donuts on the bottom…the radiator won’t be real solid, but the hoses hold it in place and it is isolated from vibration. Chuck
One other suggestion…since that motor took such a hard hit, I would check the thrust bearing on the crank and also the front of the head where the rocker shaft lock lives. Chuck
[quote=“cwbaader” post=62979]Actually forgot all about doing that.
Also use the donuts on the bottom…the radiator won’t be real solid, but the hoses hold it in place and it is isolated from vibration. Chuck[/quote]
I kept the donuts in the bottom, although I did trim them a little to drop the radiator by ~1cm.
Lol, don’t stab yourself bro, it’s not worth it.
They probably are HF bits. You make a good point.
Visited the car at MAACO today to provide guidance on the “go-fast stripe”. The paint color is a charcoal or anthracite sort of thing. I chose the color based on a Rustoleum spray can color to make for easy spot painting.
Looks good Ranger. Good luck with the rest of the build. Hope you can get it ready for CMP.