6/14/1832 – Nicolaus Otto was born in Germany…”Who?” He invented the gas motor engine. An engineer and experimenter, Nicolaus Otto invented the first practical alternative to the steam engine in 1876 — the first four-stroke internal combustion engine. He called it the “Otto Cycle Engine,” and as soon as he had completed his engine, he built it into a motorcycle.
The Otto Motor powered Cycle
6/16/1903 – The BIGGIE….Ford Motor Company was established. On the same day in 1953 Ford introduced the power steering. (Two for the price of one)
Also on 6/16/1896 Jean Peugeot was born in Paris. Founder of Peugeot the auto maker. The family began with coffee mills and bicycles and then cars.
6/18/1943 Tom Gale was born in Michigan, Flint to be more exact. His Dad was a designer for Buick and his grandfather worked the assembly for Buick. Guess where he went to work when he finished school….nope….Chrysler.. Gale became head of design in 1985. He previously worked on the some of the iconic cars such as the E-bodies-Barracuda and Challenger and was a major contributor to the Chrysler Portofino concept car.
1987-Chrysler-Portofinow Concept Car
6/19/1947 the Tucker shows up in Chicago.
The Tucker-Torpedo - I love these cars!!!!
And on the same day, 1969 GM produced the 4 millionth Cadillac.
This isn't actually "THE" 4 Millionth Caddy..but you get the idea.
Steve Sears is one of the readers of this blog and owner of a 1982 Mercury Cougar Station Wagon (again..I love this car).
But that’s not all, Steve does a lot of his own work, including this unique paint job on his 1992 Ranger.
Here is his recent project.
The before:
1992 Ford Ranger XLT
Tim,
I completed my project last week and thought you’d like to see it.I painted my Ranger with a roller.I only did six coats of each color, usually 8 – 10 coats are required.I like to call the color Haze gray underway and white.I spent 26 years in the Navy so I thought the gray was appropriate for me. Ha Ha.It’s painted with rustoleum mixed with mineral spirits in a 1:1 ratio thus the many coats required.The body prep is the same as any other type paint job except that a primer is not used over the whole truck.I only spot primed the bare metal and over the bondo used to fix parking lot dings.It took a full 8 days to complete the project including the paint on the topper.I have to wait a few weeks before buffing out for a full gloss.For that I’ll just remove the mirrors and the bug shield on the front.The process is well documented on the web over the last 10 years or so so I won’t repeat the process.
I thought your readers would be interested. Finally I have the truck looking like new again.It’s a 1992 Ranger XLT that I had bought new on April 24, 1992.It has the 2.3 liter four and a five speed tranny.The picture labeled 019.JPG is the before shot is attached.
And the after photos:
After Pic 1
After Pic 2
After Pic 3
Thanks very much for sharing it Steve. (A roller? Wow!!!!)
I was about to start the pillar moldings mini project when I ran into a couple mechanical issues.
About a week ago the Mustang began squealing when pushed to high revs. That normally indicates one of several problems.
1. It could be a water pump
2. It could be the power steering pump
3. It could be a pulley
4. It could be a bolt that was holding the alternator bracket to the engine worked itself out and was in contact with the fan belt.
5. It could be a combination of the any of these.
Now the Mustang did, every once in a while, drip some fluid from the power steering control value but it wasn’t a huge deal.
Well, Saturday I went to start her and the battery was dead. It’s over 3 years old and I had left the lights on the day before and had to have it jump started. So off to the auto parts store I went and pick up a new 3 year battery and stuck it. When I started the engine up, it made the squeal and I decided I needed to fix this, before the pillar molding.
So with a neighbor revving the engine I noticed the bolt protruding from the water pump/block ( it passes through left side water pump housing in to the block). With the revs the fan belt would flex and briefly hit the bolt. This bolt was “custom” made when we were fitting everything up to reman’ed long block and was about 7 or 8 inches long.
It took a bit to get that back in place, had to loosen up the alternator’s other two supports and toss a little loctite on the threads and she was good to go…..almost…..
Yeah….option #5 above was the correct answer BTW.
Started it up and there was still a squeal – not the same squeal but clearly an ‘accompaning’ squeal. Shortly after that a power steering hose let go and well liquid does what gravity make it do and I spent the afternoon cleaning the driveway. So there went my allotted time for Saturday. So replacing both hoses seem the best way to go and they’ll be in today. Right now it’s at the shop down the street, I had no time to undertake this task at the moment, will be traveling the next couple weeks.
One of my travels takes me to the National Corvette Museum. I’ll spend an entire day there which include the assembly plant tour.
So the other cost I mentioned will be in the area of tires.
In this event I just ran with my street tires 255/50 ZR 16 BFG GForce Sport and stock rims (only chrome). There was a lot of tire spinning and some smoking. The surface of the track was…well lets just say less the optimun..ok…fine…it was horrible. (You could toss in a few cuss words in front of horrible and you wouldn’t be over dramatizing.) It was black top, cracked, uneven and there was grass and weeds growing on the far end. The tires looked rough when I finished the 10 runs. Too many more events (this was the second auto cross on these tires) and I think I’d have to replace them.
So that really means that to protect the street tires and the chrome rims, I really ought to have an other set of tires and rims. Now you are talking money that many of us average guys aren’t going to spring for. This is true for vette owners..tires are not cheap for the older vettes. Not so for my co-worker running his Civic, they are reasonable.
Take my C4 the tires and the Wheels are uni-directional. Not unusual for tires, but my 1984 C4 rims only go one way and are labeled left front, right front and the same for the rear. I do have the original set of rims that I will eventually restore to the factory aluminum and clear coat, but right now they would for auto crossing. But the rubber can run upwards of $700.00 and if I put racing rubber on it, according to SCCA rules it will change my class.
The last cost is the “I broke it cost.” They could be just about anything on a car that’s racing. Anything mechanical, brakes (oh..they will wear out a lot faster in auto cross…or at least the way I do it!!!!), undercarriage, right down to the dreaded “cone damage”. (yeah…yeah….I know you aren’t suppose to hit them…I know the object of the race..but man did I kill some of them ‘good’..no doubt!!!) I did no damage to the vette but I did see a Evo that took out a portion of his front air dam.
In fact the vette performed flawlessly, only problem was the driver. I’ll get to that next blog. You’ll laugh and I’ll give you my times and points and we’ll talk about PAX times and classes.
Ok..let me finish up blogging to you on this event. I had a read ask if it has really taken this long and the answer is No and Yes. (I’ll explain the YES in a bit..it ain’t pretty!!!!)
After find the correct bolts, wrestling the covers back into place was, I bolted them down. Installed they looked pretty good.
Check it out.
Left side painted and installed. Still missing the emblem..right now
The only difficulty was aligning the holes in the cover and the gasket and the engine. Due to the lack of room to maneuver I wasn’t able to keep the gasket and cover holes aligned while wrestling them into place. I used two (small enough to slide into the threaded holes without damaging) phillips head screw driver to help keep them aligned and put the bolts in.
Errrkk……whatever you do tighten them carefully…..let me spell that for you (Mickey Mouse Club tune playing in my head) C…A….R.(because you care about your car)…E…F….U…L…L…(cause you want to keep the oil full)…..Y…(because if you tighten too much on the 1984 C4 magnesium valve covers you’ll crack them and they can’t be welded, JB or other wise, and then you’ve got to find used ones, because aftermarket aren’t all that great)….Ok…end of Mickey Mouse Club song…and the end of one of the original valve covers….
And in case you didn’t get the between the lines intention of the above Errrkkkk…I broken one.
I wasn’t sure at first, my mind refused to process the sound so that I could be sure..it might have been a crack, or maybe I just crunched one of the plastic tubes covering a bundle of wires. Yeah..that’s it…I sure (it might have been a crack though….crap!!…let me spell that for you…oh…never mind….just invision huge font type all in upper case, bolded and underlined.)
I inspected the cover while it was in place and I couldn’t see anything and said…ok.average guy.. with average skills and average budget..you have above average luck…at least today…at least that’s what I thought…or hoped.
When that happens the only way to tell is to either take the cover back off and inspected…that wasn’t going to happen…or let her run and build up the oil pressure and see what happens….that is what you’d normally do any way after replace the gaskets.
Here she is running: (includes bonus views of the injectors…I think they are pretty cool to watch.)
Covers don’t look to bad…but they aren’t going to stay…because..there really was a crack…but it didn’t show up by leaking on this run…it should up the next day when I took the car to work. I checked it when I arrived (about a 15 minute drive) no leaking…drove it home and she started to run poorly and had no power…yeah….it was leaking…on to a spark splug….got home and a little puddle of oil formed under the car and…well lets just say as I replaced the tightening episode in my head the crunching noise…sounded a lot more like a crack..in fact it was very clear on the replay!!!! The little referee in my head….said ‘After reviewing the play..the ruling in the garage is over turned, and Tim is charged a time out and $400.00 fine for cracking the cover and the vette gets parked until the parts get here!’
Here is the pick where the crack occurred.
Yup...cracked!!!!
That was Monday (4/5/2010) fast forward to today new cover have arrived (chrome) and they’ll be installed today or tomorrow. So Yes it was finished and now No it’s not.
I’m now at the point where I can re-install the valve covers. I’ve painted them and cleaned up the gromets (for one of my vette buddies who was dismayed when the saw the interim pics).
If you remember I had to remove a few things including vacuum hoses, spark plug wires, a/c parts. In addition the bolts that hold the covers down had spark plug wire holders and other brackets for hold wires.
Brackets that would mount through with the bolt for the covers passing through.
Keep this in mind as I explain what I learned from my decision to use Fel-Pro gaskets.
Ok..fine enough dramma..lets get to the lesson I learned (which is often learned the hard way when you have average skills and less than average experience).
I am not smarter than the engineers at GM. They knew what they were doing when the used permatex…it was all about the bolts. Specifically, the length the engineers decided do use, or maybe it was the budget guys. They knew how to follow the build sheet. Here is the bottom line. The length of the bolts supported the thin layer of the permatex and the brackets shown above and that was it.
They did not support the thickness of the gaskets. They were just under a 1/4 too short. With the brackets and the Fel-Pro gasket in place barely two threads poke out, not enough to catch the thread on the engine. errrk….When did I know this and what got into your head to do it anyway?
Fare enough question. I found out when I queried a couple of Corvette forums about what gaskets to use. I got a lot of responses, everyone has an opinion..ya know!!! But only one had actually done an 84 C4 and he said..if you don’t use permatex you are going to have to get longer bolts and BTW your bracket for the spark holders won’t fit. So I knew this before I picked up the valve covers (but not before I ordered the set from the supplier).
Why I didn’t go with the permatex solution was the amount of space and jostling what I had to do when I took them out. I was pretty sure getting them back in would be worse and the changes of wiping off the some of the permatex and messing up the seal, making the odds of redoing it high.
Finding the longer bolt took some doing. The auto parts store…yes..yes.. the same one that said they didn’t have anything but cork and when querying another employee show me what I and originally asked for..didn’t have the proper bolts. The 84 C4 was all metric, bolts and nuts, you can even switch the digital the dash from US to metric. The heads are 11mm the threads were 6mm and the pitch was 1/4.
I ended up at ACE hardware and the only thing that would work and look good were the chrome. Ok…average guy with average budget…warning..they weren’t cheap…I know that when the manger took me to the back of the store and showed me a stack of boxes that were padlocked shut. They lock them up!!!! They were over $2.00 each, washers were nearly a $1.00.
So I decided on the chrome but they only had 7 bolts..I needed eight with washers as well, they only had 1 washer. When did we as a nation have a shortage chrome??? Any way I went ot another Ace and the guy there didn’t have any, but tried to tell me the ones I purchased at the other ACE wasn’t correct. He had the washers so I picked those up and traveled to the next ACE (they’re a lot like Walgreens..they’re on nearly every corner here in Tucson).
Replacing the covers was about the same as removing them and while doing it I was very glad I didn’t use the permatex, most of it wouldn’t have made it on the covers or the engine. I’m thinking at the GM factory they put the valve covers on before the AC and all the vacuum hoses and alternator…etc.
Tomorrow I’ll finish this up….well maybe…one more lesson was in store.
Here the next installment of the removal of the valve cover. There is very little room in this engine compartment, as compared to my 70 Mustang, and I had to remove a few things to just get the covers out.
But first a couple of mistaken assumptions I need to clear up. GM did not use cork from in the factory for the 84 vettes. They used Permatex sealer gasket maker. I got that wrong. Carrying on with that assumption as I viewed the old material in one of the videos, I suggested that the gasket had been replaced once before. That was based on the previous assumption that the factory used cork..in fact, what you will see in the video (post that one tomorrow) is the original factory seal. With 64k original mile, I’m guessing that is correct. (Learning is good…oh and don’t worry..I have one more lesson to share…..sigh)
These next photo shows how tight it is on the right side of the engine.
The black outline shows the span of the valve cover. The white shows the pieces that have to be removed.
There are a couple videos coming up andlet me tell you that aren’t great… its tough to record with one hand and work with the other…oh…well…you’ll see.
This next video shows the air cleaner coming off and a vacuum hose.
This next video is more of the same.
errrk.. I’ve learned that this blog take a while for video to process so I’ll have more video loaded tomorrow….errrk.
Of all the parts I had to remove on the right side the worse (meaning it’ll cost me later) was the A/C electrical sensor. You can see that in the picture above circled in white. Yeah….I know why the garage wanted $700.00 to replace these…..
Often if you get the right size radiator or heater hose it will be a tight fit(eerrrkkk….don’t tighten the clamp first!!!!….just kidding…eeerrrkk) getting it over metal fittings. You can buy them bigger but you are asking for leaks!!!! Here are a couple of tips. One I’ve used and the other I haven’t tried yet.
1. I live in Arizona, and it’s hot here and normally if you are going to have problems it will be from over heating in the summer time. I’ll take the hose and leave it on the concrete driveway for a while in the hot sun. That often softens it up enough to slip on.
2. This one I have not tried. If you have clear wire-pulling compound, you can rub a light amount around the inside of the hoses and it will slide right on. Here is a link where you can find some. http://www.twacomm.com/catalog/dept_id_608.htm
Thanks for reading.
Don’t forget our project car contest. $100.00 online shopping gift card to your favorite auto parts web site.
