The Black Pearl - Progress Thread

UPDATE:

1. New valve cover gaskets;
2. Cleaned up and painted valve covers;
3. Put on new speedometer cable;
4. Reconnected some random vacuum line that goes to an actuator of valve of some kind right behind the driver's side header - I had no idea these things had any kind of a valve directly attached to the header. (I have no idea what function it serves, since the EGR valve doesn't have a tube running to it or anything and just bolts right to the intake manifold like a carb'ed car. )

Next weekend, I have to fart around more with the speedo cable, since I apparently don't have the thing pushed in all the way into the back of the speedometer because I have absolutely NO speed reading, now. Gonna bump up the timing to 12* and see how it responds. MAYBE going to get around to sealing up that damned hatch wing.

Here's pics of how she looks without pinstriping, and of the engine bay as it now sits with the prettied-up valve covers:

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85ragtop said:

I remember the days when my 85 was CFI. I kind of liked the setup.

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I can't wait to ditch this CFI crap and switch to carb. It still doesn't run quite right after all the fiddlin' and fartin' around I've done with it, and it's pretty damned gutless (especially with an AOD behind it). That, and all of the extra crap that this thing has for relays and vacuum thingies and so forth just to make the CFI setup (attempt to) work properly, the whole engine bay winds up all cluttered. Although when I first switch to carb, I'll probably keep everything in place and just do the intake and carb, leaving everything else there in case the Smog Nazis are wise to my scheme and fail it, in which case I'll be forced to swap back to CFI until I can afford to just drop in a whole '86-'93 EFI motor, ECM, and wiring harness.

Anyone know what that weird vacuum-actuated valve on the back of the driver's side exhaust header is supposed to do?

stykthyn said:

do you have to drop in a whole motor? wouldnt just the intake and ECU/harnesses all that you need?

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Pretty much, yeah. Remember, 302's weren't roller motors until the '85 GT with a 5-speed (dunno if the '85 CFI's were roller or not, but I doubt it) and all 302 Foxes from '86-up, so I'm still running a flat tappet cam and cast iron distributor gear. For all the trouble it'd be worth - if it could even be done - to make my longblock work with an EFI setup, I'd have way more time and money in it and it'd never perform as well with the crappy pre-E7 heads, as opposed to just taking a whole '87+ long block and dropping it in there with a full EFI setup. My only options with the long block I've got are to build it up as a carb'ed setup - even just switching to a carb and going with dual exhaust will net me a pretty huge gain over my current setup - or just leave it as-is with the CFI crap and just suffer with it. I was hoping to do the dual exhaust part before switching to carb, but now I've first gotta figure out WTF that funky valve thing is off the driver's side header and if I need that for the CFI setup to stay functioning in the meantime until I can afford to do the carb swap...

LaserSVT said:

Just slap one of thoes Holley injection setups that look like a carb
Shouldnt cost much more then the car itself

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Meh ... if I had that kinda money, I'd sooner throw a proper '87-'93 EFI setup on there.



UPDATE:

1. Replaced the starter cable, negative and positive battery cables all with new 4-gauge cable I had laying around the "garage" (salvaged from Teh Notch, from the piss-poor battery relocation the prior owner of that car had done), new brass terminal ends, and new ring terminals for the accessory wires that led to the positive and negative terminals;
2. Added a redundant ground from where the battery cable grounds to the block over to a spot on the frame;
3. Pulled both ends of the speedo cable, found that on the gauge side the cable had slipped aside from where it needed to poke into the back of the speedo and was pinched in there. Got it properly poked into the speedo now and cinched the cable sheath down securely where I found it was hanging a bit too low under the frame;
4. Advanced the timing to 12* BTDC.

Results: the car now no longer acts like it's got a nearly-dead battery when I start it up (the OEM Motorcraft wire was a puny 6-gauge POS that is better suited for a riding mower), the car has just a wee bit more grunt to it in acceleration from the timing advance (without pinging), and the speedo works again ... although it's still a bit bouncy between 25 and 40 MPH and then a little bit more when above 55 MPH.

I need to seal up a leak on the top fitting of where the transmission cooler line connects to the radiator, as it's got a small, slow little drip going on there that's just enough to annoy me. (Yes, I used Teflon tape when I sealed it the first time, but apparently the brass fitting is screwed up.) Probably going to re-connect the add-on plate-style tranny oil cooler when I do that, but I need to get some longer transmission cooler hose, or at least locate the cooler in a different spot so that I can get the thing to reach both the radiator fitting and the output tranny line - the prior owner was trying to use the accessory cooler as a stand-alone unit instead of using it in conjunction with the stock radiator tranny oil cooler, which doesn't really work so great.

Sometime this weekend, I might get around to painting the dash, the passenger-side door panel trim (to match the driver's side), and maybe even the headliner if I get crazy enough and have the time. Otherwise, it looks like the only other major must-do thing I've got left is getting a set of tires that I can actually trust not to spontaneously explode from old age and dry-rotting, and thus the Black Pearl will be road-trip worthy.

UPDATE FROM HELL:

Today sucked. I mean, seriously. Sucked. Major. Donkey. Dong.

Went to the junkyard, found a double-hump crossmember for $25. Woohoo, it's not even fully bolted in there, just sitting in there with two bolts just poked through there with no nut on the other side - pull the bolts out by hand, ta-daaaa, I have a double-hump crossmember and I'm that much closer to getting a dual exhaust setup for this beastie!

Went back to teh house, getting more annoyed by that squeak which I believed to be due to the A/C compressor clutch bearing going bad. (When spun by hand, it has a bit of noise to it, although not exactly a squeak, and it does spin freely. But anyway...) Went to Autozone, rented the tool to hold the A/C clutch; went to Checker, got the bearing for the A/C clutch; went to QT, put a full tank o' gas in the car. I was just turning the corner to pull into Lynn's ex's place when all of a sudden ... **thunkity-thippity-whap-whap-whap-whap-tweedle-thumpity-thwack-etc** comes from under the hood. I knew exactly what it was before I even hurried into the dive and shut that sucker off in a hurry. Sure enough, the belt (only 2 months old, perfectly nice Goodyear Gatorback) had decided to shred itself into oblivion and wrap itself around the frickin' fan clutch.

So I stood there for awhile (grumbling and cussing profusely under my breath), trying to figure what forced the thing forward so that the front-most belt rib frayed out, made a strand turn loose and get wrapped around the fan clutch and thus lead to a catastrophic belt failure. Right away, I found the crank pulley was wobbly. Closer examination revealed that when the previous owner had apparently hit something with the bottom-front of the car - I've been finding evidence here and there that he put it in a ditch or hit a parking block or something stupid - the crank pulley was slightly dented in one spot and one of the four pulley bolts had its head snapped off, allowing the other three to start working themselves loose. Okay, made sense.

Off to Autozone again. I blast away a chunk o' change on a new harmonic balancer (the one on there was getting kind of iffy, anyhow), some bolts to replace the lost/broken pulley bolt, and a new Goodyear Gatorback belt - about $80 down the toilet, although it would've been $100+ if I hadn't had a $20 credit on my "Rewards" card. I spend forever farting around with getting the old balancer off and poking on the new one because I have an AOD car and can't just put the thing in gear to help keep the frickin' motor from spinning when I'm trying to get the crank bolt loose. (Wound up using the old "bump the starter" trick.) Okay, new balancer's on, I've worked over the crank pulley to get rid of the burrs and stuff that I figured might have helped fray the belt, I get the pulley back on there and all that, belt goes right on, I start it up, give everything a close look, life is good again.

I get on the road to head back home, and not even two frickin' miles later ... **thunkity-thippity-whap-whap-whap-whap-tweedle-thumpity-thwack-etc** AGAIN!! I get out and sure enough, the BRAND FRICKIN' NEW $33 BELT HAS WRAPPED THE FIRST TWO RIBS OF ITSELF AROUND THE FUGGIN' FAN CLUTCH!!! About five minutes of some embarrassing screaming and cussing and stuff at the top of my lungs on the side of a middle-of-nowhere desert road later, I manage to salvage what remains of the belt (four out of six ribs is better than the two ribs I was left with when the first one shredded itself), start it up, and look at it again.

The alt, P/S pump, tensioner, and A/C clutch pulleys all have the belt lined up just where it should be and it's tracking in the correct grooves; the smog pump, crank, and water pump all have the thing moved forward by a bit, the water pump more so than the others. When I first got the car, the previous owner had bypassed the A/C and smog pump, and the belt on there had the same kind of fraying on it to the point where, just like the belt that's on there now, it only had two surviving belt ribs out of six. Soooooooo ... either my crank pulley is FUBAR because the idiot prior owner boogered it up, or I've got the wrong water pump on there (jeez, back to that theory again) because it's not spaced outward far enough to let the pulley line up. Also, I've always thought it was weird that I've had to get a weird belt size for this car that isn't listed ANYWHERE - 88.2", when the stock belt size SHOULD be 91.5" - so I've often wondered if they substituted junkyard pullies and/or accessories onto this thing, thus resulting in the kind of that I have to presently endure.

Watching it from any angle, NONE of the pullies have ANY wobble to them at all right now. The crank and water pump both track perfectly straight and smooth. And I can't exactly tell from eyeballing the pullies, themselves, whether the water pump is too far in or not. The ONLY indication I have about how this thing is aligned is the way the belt tracks on there right now. Sooooo, at this point I'm looking at potentially blasting away another $45 or so on a new frickin' water pump to make damned sure I have the right one on there, without any idea whether or not this is going to solve my friggin' problem.

I'm going to measure each of the pullies tomorrow and hopefully someone can find it in their heart to measure their stock pullies and tell me if mine are odd-sized or not - if they're not odd-sized, then maybe the brackets holding the accessories on are all weird or something, I dunno.

Screw this business. I'm done with this car for this weekend. I'm having me some rum n' Cokes tonight and parking this bish tomorrow and refusing to even look at it until next weekend. Putting the car in Time Out. Letting it sit and think about what it's done, how bad it's been. It has at least done one thing for me: see the new Rule #3 in my sig.