Progress Thread HeHateMe gets bent

[QUOTE="CarMichael Angelo, post: 9111676, member: 162211"

Knowing what I know now, I'd D/A the hell out of the strut toweres, and prime them in an etching primer, then cut away the disposable part of the existing fender aprons.Then Cleco in the above panels until I got them to fit as good as I could. Then I'd paint the towers, prime and paint the inserts, and rivet them btches on there.[/QUOTE]

Awesome....are you free 2 weeks from this weekend! @CarMichael Angelo?

One reason the car has sat for 2 years is I got remarried and have had a bunch of (as the government would say) deferred maintenance on my house I have had to get done.
The 2nd is I know to get this thing right, most of the underhood wiring is jacked up. Either my POS rush/temp job or old cracked and crumbling :poo:. I don't mind wiring...it doesn't scare me. It's just tedious, especially to make it look good and hide it, but not make it nightmare to service. (Like put the solenoid, fuses and relays inside the fenders) I think I am going to go with just a quickie black paint job now and get the wiring done.

I have come to the conclusion I will just sell the 302 complete from intake to headers to raise funds for the heads for the 351. When I get it sold and yank it out, I may, at that time, do the JB Weld filler. Plus, I bought 100 rivnut inserts and I haven't used enough of them yet.

I'd probably spring for the frame rail covers. That is just a good place for stuff to fall down into and either rust out the frame or lose nuts and bolts.
 
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It only took an hour, but I feel like this project moved forward about a year today! I was able to use a magnet to fish the lock washer and nuts in to mount the MSD. It's about 3/16 off the fender apron and the fuse box mount just clears the top of the MSD box by about 1/2". Now it's time to stock up on solder and heat shrink. First I have to do a diagram. I already labeled every wire on the fuse block.

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I'm trying to wrap my head around all the :poo: I cut out back Labor Day weekend. Luckily I have a wiring diagram, an EVTM, and I labeled most of the stuff as I have identified it. Now to setup my fuse box. I brought out the GIMP and started making a diagram. I can't believe a program like GIMP is free.

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Damn, I just noticed my screw up above...both fuse 9 & 10 go to Relay 1. :stupid:

SO I started a new job, took a significant cut in pay with the hope it would pay off. It couldn't be worse than the previous 10 years without a single iota of increased pay. My leap of faith was rewarded. I got a HUGE raise after 2 months. Went from $10k down to $10k up compared to the old job. I was truly blessed by this opportunity.
So, EBAY is thy name! And Amazon. And Corral. And FEP. Ok I am a shopping whore. Not much work is getting done, but I have a bitchin set of parts. To which I added this beauty last night. I hate Ebay's make an offer. If I am intoxicated and make a crazy offer I don't think they would take and they take it. In a week or less I will be the proud owner of:

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I will get rid of the digital gauges I have. I guess I can fabricate a plate with the new plasma I just ordered or get a custom one from Florida 5.0 or whatever they are called. I was thinking I could either put my small gauges on this, oil, water, gas level, volts and then have a real tach and speedo, or put the tach and speedo on this and have room for a bunch of 2" gauges. Oil, water, volts, gas, fuel pressure, O2 and get rid of my pillar pod. HMM, I'll have to get to wiring so I can swap out the C950 for the HP EFI and wire this :poo: up and read the instructions at some point.
 
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Congrats on the raise! Hope to see more progress now!
Well, I am looking at quotes of $6k to $9k to replace ALL of the downstairs flooring with luxury vinyl planks. So I have to hide $500 purchases here and there! I really want a set of heads for the 351. AFR185 or TFS 11R 190, but I can't hide $1700.
 
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Well, $2950 1/2 down payment was made on some hand scraped maple luxury vinyl plank flooring. About 1500 sq ft. Pretty much all the downstairs except the hall bath, laundry room and master bath. They are tile. Scheduled for 1st week in July because my wife and stepson are going to Nashville for a concert. She works at home for UHC, so that lets us take her computer and desk down without interrupting her work.

So purchases are on hold. BUT, last weekend I did score something at Pull a Part. I got the PWM fan controller off a Fusion for $6.95. The good Made In Germany one, not the Hecho en Mexico one. So now with the HP EFI, I can set up and run my Contour fans with PWM AND not need 2 relays. I can now use the 4 relays in the fuse box for all of my needs and not need an auxiliary relay box. I have to figure out where to mount it now. It was mounted to the Fusion fan shroud. The Contour fan shroud doesn't have a flat spot to mount it. So I am thinking of mounting it by the MSD box.
 
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Well, the digital dash may prove to be the last hurrah for a while. $6000 for flooring and now I went and got rid of the 2007 Avalanche that wasn't awful but the build quality was less than stellar. I got a still brand new 2017 Ram Crew Cab Big Horn. It's the 3.6 V6 and 8 Speed. It sure could use 100 ft lbs more, but so far in 300 miles in town and on the interstate my avg mpg is 22. And with Gas going up, that beats the hell out of the 14.5 the Avalanche got in town and the best it would get on the highway was 20. I feel like I got an awesome deal. Ram had all kinds of factory rebates on this thing and the dealer had just installed a bed liner and paid to activate the Nav system. I guess hoping someone would buy it during the Holiday weekend. On top of that my salesman said if you want some steps for it, my father in law has a 2017 and saw the power folding steps and got those and took the factory chrome ones off. He'd sell them for $150. So I got the truck Friday night and the steps today. Took a big longer to install because Ram didn't include rivnuts in the rear locations...only the front. Not sure why. AND they are HEXAGON rivnuts. WTF? I have round ones that didn't grab in the stop sign shaped hole. But some nuts bolts, fender washers and part of a distributor wrench, I got them on. The rear driver side mount took almost 2 hrs. The other 3 took about 30 minutes after I figured out how to mount the back mounts.
I really like this truck. It has pretty much everything except leather.

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I went to Pull a Part about a month ago and got the PWM fan controller off a Fusion. Since I have the fancy smancy HP EFI, I am going to use PWM to control my Contour fans. I was going to use the Fusion fan because the PWM contoller mounts right too it nice and clean, but the damn fan in a Fusion is wider than my radiator core.

So I've gone out there a bunch of times and looked at the engine bay....where to mount this box. I even looked up dimensions of a C6 fan because it uses the same controller and again mounts to the shroud nice and neat.

I finally said today, no the Contour fan fits my radiator like a glove...find a place to mount the box. So I pulled the fan out and found on the bottom a perfect place to mount it. I had to drill one hole. When I go to put this back in, I am going to use some blue Loctite just to make sure these screws don't fall out.

Now I need to solder my fans to the power leads of the PWM box and put it back in. I'll probably clean and paint that left fan motor cover while I have it out.

Slow progress is better than NO progress.

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After thinking it over...and over...and over...because let's face it, I aint working on it....I decided to ditch the PWM fan control. I am half tempted to order a carb and put it back carb'd and drive the hell out of it. But for now it's still going to be EFI, just not spaceship complicated. To that end I am also not putting in the Digital Dash. I am going to sell it. New Vintage makes a direct fit gauge cluster that's blue like I like. I think it's the same style as @CarMichael Angelo put in the Gila Monster, save it is direct fit. I might even get the matching AFR gauge and replace my LC-1 digital gauge on the pillar pod.

So with the simplification in mind I started to work making fan harnesses to go to my relay/fuse center. Yesterday. I bought a nifty little solder station on Amazon...oh maybe a year ago, for all the soldering I have to do. It had a tip assortment so I put the fat one on. I cranked it up on high. And attempted to solder 2 10 gauge wires together. I waited and waited and waited and it would never get the wire hot enough to wick the solder in. So, I said I need more power. So I went to Autozone and bought this cheesy ass piece of :poo: Dorman 100w gun. FAIL. Took that :poo: right back and got my $19 back. Well, I lost $.50 in the gas to make the 1/4 mile round trip twice. I ended up using a micro butane torch I had....but that was less than optimal. It burned the insulation and I knew sooner than later it would burn my fingers. SO I went to Lowes and found a good old weller 100/150w gun. AND I read the instructions. All this time on dual wattage guns I thought the first click of the trigger was low and all the way was high. NO. It's the other way around. Having the right tool made the job much easier today.

I then covered my harnesses and my power feed cable in this nifty split loom nylon braided stuff I got, at least 3 years ago! (I hoard up parts) I finished that off with heat shrink and it looks pretty damn good. Now if the heat ever breaks so I can put a table and stool over by the front of the car and start soldering the fuse center in. It was 92 in the garage while I was out there. Too hot for me.
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Wiring is daunting. The biggest part, which I lack, is thorough planning of where and how everything will route and connect. I have labeled all the existing wiring and I have labeled every wire coming out of the fuse center. I even have the diagram a few posts up of what goes where so far. I need to further look at the factory diagram to see where Ford put what. Then comes lots of solder and heat shrink. And a wiring diagram. In triplicate. That thing will get uploaded to Google Drive and One Drive....I am not losing that. Not like the Holley C950 wiring diagrams I made. In a book. That my brother borrowed without asking. And just ripped the pages out and set them on my car. And didn't tell me. Until I asked where my frigging notebook was. By that time those pages blew away or I might have even thrown them away, not knowing they were out in the wild.
 
Keep at it man. I somehow missed the truck update, congrats on that. I am going to lease a new Ram come spring for pulling our camper. Im looking forward to daily driving a new vehicle.

I love it. Big Horn...pretty much everything except leather, sunroof and the hemi. The V-6 is great for a daily driver. It gets 24 at 75mph on the highway, unless there's a headwind or a .5% grade. It is pretty gutless with only 269 lb ft. But the twin cam variable timing setup sounds pretty nice when you get on it and it spins up to 6k....it will scoot. It also scoots on past the gas pump. On my way back from Texas last month I filled up and the range to empty was 621 miles!!! In town it usually says about 540.
 
I've got parts of three days to play with the 85. First things first if anyone is awake. Can you take the fenders off a Fox without taking the front bumper off? I don't really want to take both off right now and keep up with all the hardware. I just want to take the DS off to make space to get in and route all of my wires.
 
Yes, as I said in chat, now let me add, if you have good paint, heck if you have any paint on the car, tape up the front door edge and the edge of the bumper, an extra pair of hands would be nice, note any shims and where they went.
 
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Well, this never happened today! Maybe in the morning I'll decide if I want to take the nose off or just work in place. It would prob be better to have the fender on so I make sure I route everything where it will be out of the way.