Build Thread 1978 Mercury Cyclone. The pig is in the pen.

74stang2togo said:

2JZ NO S#!T! Billet Oil Cap | eBay

Suit all 2JZ engines. This chunky billet alloy oil cap is a fantastic accessory for your 2JZ powered vehicle, CNC machined to exact specifications it willset off any engine bay and let the world know of the power underneath!

rover.ebay.com

Found it for $11 cheaper!

Click to expand...

I’d buy it..for 11.00

It’s raining here for about the 50 bagiliionth day in a row. It will rain tomorrow on my day off.
The rain won’t bother me tomorrow, I’ll be inside. The only down side being having to grind/ cut steel in the same space that the Monster is in. Currently, he is covered in the residue from that, and before this is all over and done, he’ll get covered in more. The secret to all this is not to touch or rub the car while the abrasive metal dust covers the thing.
What it means today is that I’m bored.....when I’m bored, I get on here and babble..as long as I’m babbling here in my own thread, I’m not pissing in other people’s Wheaties.....in retrospect....a good thing for the rest of you.

tommorow the flood of nit picky sht arrives starting today actually. When I get home, the stupidly expensive cooling fan ( Cat sucker V3) shows up, as well as an assload ( or sht ton) depending on your perspective, of small parts to allow me to finish the trunk. In the trunk is the newly mounted fuel cell ( with the newly adapted Aeromotive A 340 pump.)The old tank had one of theStealth systems installed in it, converting it over to the new cell required that I hack a 3” hole in one end for the pump to drop through.
But....the old 200 LPH pump had a tiny little pick up screen, and it fit inside the foam cylinder that surrounds a Stealth pump system. That Foam cylinder is there to control pump cavitation. The 340 pump has a bigger inlet, and a much bigger pick up screen, and when you drop that pump into that foam cylinder and the inlet screen gets all folded up.........

The 3AMD wakes you to discuss possible fuel pump starvation issues...He rambles on about the fact that that screen is now folded into the shape of a u and worries that the rubber floor of that cylinder might get sucked up against the inlet and completely block fuel flow out of that pump.

And reminds you that when fuel stops flowing into the engine....bad things happen.

So,..part of the pile of “nit picky” sht that will come in the next few days will include 100.00 worth of fuel cell foam,and that goofy assed yellow foam cylinder comes back out, and in goes custom fit pieces of foam that will allow that screen to lay down like it’s supposed to 1/2” away from the metal tank floor.

Shut the hell up 3AMD.

the objective tomorrow HAS TO BE that I get done with everything that’s back there. The fuel cell plumbed, and mounted. The radiators get plumbed, the pump gets mounted, the battery remounted, the water reservoir mounted, the lines plumbed, and
The floor built...( seems like way too ambitious if you ask me)

Somethings gotta change.

It seems that this time around, working on the car is much harder. Every single time I go down there with some plan, that plan becomes a joke. I don’t even get close to what I was hoping to be able to do. When I start it’s usually non-stop after that. I’ll go from the moment I pick up a wrench, till I’m so tired I can barely drag my ass out of the garage 8-10 hours later. Yet, despite the work ethic, every single thing I do is a struggle.

And I usually have to do it over.

Take my oil pan for starters. The last time I filled it,, there was dripping oil coming off the front corner of the rear sump. After going through the process of removing the engine so that I could weld the leak shut ( but mostly because I forgot the baffle), I weld where I thought the leak was. I fill the pan with solvent to check it for leakage, and it doesn’t leak. I put the baffle in, I bolt the pan on, I reinstall the engine,...I wait a few days to be sure the black RTV I’m using for a gasket sealant has dried, and I fill the pan back up with oil.

And it’s leaking in the exact same spot. Only this time, the leak is coming from much higher, not on the bottom corner.

Heres an epiphany: It was always leaking from much higher. The leak was just dripping off of that corner. When I checked the pan for leakage after I had it off the last time, I only filled it a couple of inches higher than where I thought the leak was.

That was the very first thing I started with yesterday....... Defeat. I drained the oil, but I ain’t pulling the engine. I’m not pulling one damn thing. Once that leak stops completely, and after I brake clean the piss out of that area, and after I check it several times after that to be sure there’s no seepage,.......I’m gonna use knead-able epoxy to seal the leak from the outside.

Summit didn’t ship the fuel cell foam from Atl, so I didn’t get it in time. Consequently, finishing the fuel cell had to get put on the back burner. Summit also missed including the aluminum fuel line in the order that I did get, so I couldn’t finish the fuel lines either.
None of that matters, I never would have gotten to it anyway.

This is what I did get done:

The two little radiators that were in Old intercooler Monster, are back in New improved intercooler monster. The SBC electric water pump that was in old ford engined Monster to cool the engine , is now repurposed in new Toyota engined Monster to cool the intercooler. The frame you see holds the 15 gallon Chinese fuel cell, and is welded to the frame of the car.
That will look like this when it’s installed.

Yet to be determined is whether or not I put that little fuel cell that will hold the water for the heat exchangers where it is in the pic, or way back in the left rear corner.

the fuel cell needs hold down straps, but because it sits so far back, I have to come up with something on each end that will do that. Should be a simple piece of angle with tabs that will allow me to use threaded rod bolted through the frame on each end.

The floor that is in front of the fuel cell is a piece of .032 aluminum. Really flimsy sht. That’s why there are straps under the floor in the previous pic. I figure once it’s riveted in, it’ll be good enough to serve it’s purpose.....covering that big assed hole.

Which brings me back around to the start...My hands hurt from all of the hose building. I pretty much ache all over. The build time I have amounts to a day,...maybe a day and a half a week..At the rate I’m going, I can’t even see the tunnel, much less the light at the end of it.