County98's Learn as I Go Thread

[County98]

Finally got around to a pic of the lower grill installed. Matches up...kind of.

Use a size oversized on the sheetmetal screws. At least I needed to. I started by loosely putting on the lower side screws, then tilting it up like a hinge. It's a PITA trying to see and line up the holes and then fit a tool through the access ports. It works though, just needs a bit of patience.

[County98]

I jump around on projects a lot, in case you couldn't tell. If it starts getting tedious, I work on something else.

Decided to try my hand at polishing the rear window today. Came out much improved from before, but I rushed it a bit I think. At least I know my glass is usable, albeit a little scratched up.

3 stages, 4 if you count final cleaning. I watched a bunch of video's and settled somewhere between buying some high mocus stuff and the DIY version.

One thing I needed to get was a rotary sander/polisher. I have one, but it's a DA, so if I put pressure on it, it stops spinning. Went to Harbor Freight and picked up a straight rotary for $39.

Pic from way before in the thread. So much mineral buildup, the windows were almost opaque. AMAZ cleaner took off the bulk of it, but I always had ghost milky areas. Finally dawned on me it was probably sandblasted glass areas.

Stage 1 is a medium foam wheel and Meguiar's liquid rubbing compound.

Stage 2 is fine foam and Meguiar's liquid polishing compound.

Stage 3 is an Ultra Fine foam and Ceriglass Polish.

This is very messy, 2k RPMs throws polish and water everywhere. It's also a hell of an arm and shoulder workout.

Couple live and learn items, if (and when) I do this again for a final on all the glass, it's way easier with 2 people. The glass will get hot. Too hot and it's bad news. Keep a mister of clean water in a bottle and when the polisher starts dragging, mist the whole window with water and keep going. If I had a second person to work the water, I wouldn't have had to keep stopping and changing sides, etc.

Secondly, I found out watching videos DURING my stage 2 break was that pro polishers will sometimes spend an hour on the first stage. Makes sense, but I didn't know, so I probably did 20-30 minutes on each stage. The final would have come out better if I spent more time on the first cut.

Final product is still much improved from before though. Glass is useable and I'm happy with it.

Still need to clean up trim and clips, etc.

[tony66]

Great job on the glass restoration. I'm going to try it on one of my cloudy windows. Regarding stripping anodize from aluminum, Eastwood used to sell an anodize remover in a spray bottle. I used it about 10 years ago on my El Camino side window trim and it worked great to for stripping and then was able to polish with great success. There are some other DYI options that I didn't bother to try since the Eastwood stuff was cheap enough at the time.

About 10 years before I stripped the anodize from the aluminum trim, it didn't look all that great with fresh paint on the car. My solution at the time was to simply clean and spray a light coat of clear on the trim to give it a little more reflection / brightness. It wasn't the optimal solution, but it did looked better.

[County98]

Thanks, and I'll definitely check out Eastwood for it.

Didn't know about the yellow can Easy Off either. Now I have a new experiment to try, lol.

[County98]

Haven't done much lately, lots of storms and chores.

Finally got my Clarks order in though and thought I'd do a quick review on their trim insert. Overall, I'd give it a 8 of 10 maybe.

Looks nice coming out of package and came in a nice box.

Up close though, there's some manufacturing blemishes that I think could be avoided, and are probably on all of them.

The back shows where it was probably held during stamping and folding the edge.

On the front face, shows dimples in all 4 places.

Screws are countersunk chrome (or stainless). The issue I didn't know about that might help folks with mismatched parts is that my (non-corsa) panel had no countersunk holes. I knew about having to drill, but the countersink never crossed my mind.

I marked the 4 middle holes, drilled pilots, then started putting the trim on. After the centers, I just drilled and put in the screws. Whole thing took 20 minutes. BUT, my screw heads stick out a bit.

Overall, pretty happy and I'll keep it, just not perfect.

[County98]

One other easy thing that was confusing to find a straight answer to online was the body and Engine big grommets. I checked the assembly manual and it had a couple answers, but you have to jump around sections and it's not the greatest to be honest. I just may not be familiar enough with it though.

Anyway, Clark's has a grommet sheet that's free, so I threw it in my order and here it is if anyone needs some help.

[Project65]

I think you did a vairy nice job on the chrome insert. I’ve also seen some imperfections with some of the Clark’s parts.

Nice tip about the grommet sheet! Thanks

[County98]

Had a little bit of a red letter day today. Started the car for the first time! It runs (roughly), but didn't explode, so that's good.

No video, just a pic.

On the downside, I need to get a unisyn. I originally thought I had a driver side choke issue, but after snooping around some more, I don't think that's it.

Covering passenger primary makes her try to die, while covering driver primary makes her Rev up. Driver side exhaust is also MUCH colder than passenger side.

Pretty sure I have a base gasket leak (hopefully, easy fix), or I have a gummed up driver primary.


Ordered a unisyn and thick base gaskets for both sides of insulator all the way around.

She runs though for the very first time in all these years!

[Project65]

Congrats!

Explode? I would say internal detonation is better than external detonation for sure.

Nice looking engine!

[County98]

Forgot to post up the fuel line bending, before initial start up.

A little trial and error here, but easy job, just takes some tinkering to get the bends right. I have a couple different hand held cheap tube benders, but on my first go, I had a drawing laid out that had some nice clean 90 degree bends. That didn't pan out for me at all, every time I tried to do a 90, the tubing kinked. No big deal, but I wasted one of my 2 lines I bought getting the hang of it.

Re-attacked it only using bends of 45 degrees or less where possible. Made it turn out a little crazy looking, but still works.

I got 2 sticks of 5/16" fuel line from my father in law, whom I THINK got them at O-Reilly's. Already had a flare and nut on one end, so didn't need a flare tool, just the correct fitting.

Chased all over damn town looking for a fitting that would work, but no luck in small town, USA. Tried O'Reilly's, Autozone, ACE, etc. Finally ordered somewhat blind off Amazon and got one that worked.

Using the factory "T" off the old manual pump location with my new 90 degree fitting on top.

This is a rough hack of what the final looks like, just needed some massaging and getting it through the grommet and the grommet in was kind of a pain in that location. Just fought with it until it all worked.

And new body and engine grommets in.

[County98]

Today I did an experiment on what a straight polishing would do to my stainless rear window trim.

Couple caveats though...

I did not do any repairs to the trim. Mine is pretty beat up, but going with the survivor theme a little, I did not use any sandpapers to take out deep scratches, trim anvil and peen hammers to try to straighten out dings, etc. I just wanted to see what an afternoon of using a couple very inexpensive polishing steps would look like.

Trim repair is it's own animal, and I don't have much patience that way. AFTER you do any repairs though, this is a pretty easy way to spend an afternoon and clean them up some. I'd say that just like the window work, this took me about 80% of the way there, with more benefit coming from using more time and patience than I did.

YMMV.

I went on Amazon and got a kit of 3" wheels for a hand drill, and a 3 pack of jewelers rouges. Then I decided that it would be easier for me to control if I put the wheels on my old garage sale drill press and have both hands free to maneuver the trim.

You can start with a sisal wheel (compressed rope) to really take it down, but I started one step lighter with the denim wheel and a red (coarse) rouge.

NOTE- Only for the very first passes did I go "against" the spin of the wheel, then did step one again going "with" the wheel. All other steps were "with" the spin of the wheels.

Next was a medium yellow wheel and white rouge.

3rd is a fine wheel and green rouge. Final once over was metal polish and a fluffy buffer pad.

You will get this black gummy residue after each step, as it's compound and a little bit of metal coming off. I wiped everything down with a microfiber rag between phases.

After. I put an untouched piece of windshield trim up there for the before and after.

Again, I still have heavy scratches and dings, but it did clean it up pretty well for minimal effort and $30 worth of supplies.

[County98]

Got my Uni-syn and base gaskets in the other day. Pretty cool that the Uni-syn is made by Edelbrock, didn't know that.

I did indeed have multiple problems, but fixing a thing or two at a time while I learn.

So, after reading the books, and many threads...MANY threads...I learned that the assembly manual doesn't call for any base gaskets, just the insulators. So some use them, and some not. Bob Helts book recommends making an insulator sammich, with gaskets on the top and bottom. Made sense to me.

When new, or if you KNOW that the carb bases and intake are decked flat, then maybe not required. On an old aluminum motor with a brazilian heat cycles though, I think it's worth doing. In my case it definitely was...because I screwed up AGAIN and had to fix my mistake.

I didn't realize that even though they seem tough, the insulators will take an impression from the carb base, and if you don't put it on the exact way it care off, leak city.

First order of business was re-flattening the insulators. I just took a sheet of 600grit sandpaper, laid it flat on the workbench, and started scrubbing each one flat against the paper/bench. You can see the high and low spots work themselves out as you go.

End product is a slightly hazy, uniform profile.

Next up, I didn't want the gaskets to be a huge pain if/when I need to pull a carb (which it turns out I do), so put a thin layer of Syl-Glyde on both sides.

Put the sandwich on and evenly torqued the carbs to 30ft-lb, using a couple passes. It helped quite a bit, but didn't solve all my problems sadly.

[County98]

Took a little detour next. Got tired of asking my wife to come help me start the car for troubleshooting since I didn't have the accelerator hooked up yet. Took a couple hours and got that situated, though still needs adjustment.

Clark's sells a little kit that takes care of the whole linkage front to back. Pretty cheap, just new plastic, rubber, washers, and E-clips.

I had done new plastic bushings and blasted/painted the pedal awhile back, so I didn't need to hit that. I did need to re-bush and e-clip the down rod from the cabin to the long tube in the pan. After that, the next thing was the pan pivot about 2/3 of the way to the arse of the car. Mine looked like holy hell, and was tough to move.

Easy to take apart, only need a 9/16 and a pick for the old clips to pull it out. Took the crunchy stuff out and sand blasted the pivot, bolt, and skinny rod that exits the pan and heads for the firewall.

Blasted and laid out. I didn't even know there was a felt washer in there until I found the exploded diagram on the Clark's site. Only things not included in the kit are the bolt itself, the heavy steel washer on top, and the little accordian boot for where it comes out of the tunnel. Don't throw the old washer away.

All back together.

Last up was the trans pivot. nothing really special about it, a couple plastic bushings a e-clips. I know the photo angle is all wonky, but I thought it worth noting that the positive stop for the throttle linkage is molded into the trans housing. Didn't know that either. In truth though, there's a lot I don't know...yet.

Bottom of photo, you can see where I have the pivot a little bit off the positive stop.

Still have to do the linkage adjustments, I just freeballed it for now and threw a brick on the accelerator and set close to WOT in the engine compartment. Just needed to be a able to juice the skinny pedal from in the car.

[County98]

On tomorrows agenda if I get time, will be pulling at least the top off the driver primary to see if the idle circuit and venturi are clogged up. I think I just waited WAY to long from getting the motor back and installing. Years, I think.

I can get her to run, and can ALMOST get the tuning down, but whenever I really close in on getting the idle under 750 or so, things get bumpy. I can never quite get the carb sync down without DRASTICALLY offsetting the idle speed screws between the carbs. The driver primary mixture and speed screws seem to do very little if anything.

The new base gaskets did help a lot in getting thing going, but the driver carb just doesn't seem responsive at all when I'm trying to get the fine tuning down. My linkages may also be an issue, so those will get disconnected on both sides as well.

I know this has been hashed out pretty well, and I've read a ton of threads with great step by steps from all the major players here, so I'll use those.

Question though...I've never taken the carbs apart, they were rebuilt for me. I'll pull the top off to clean the 2 brass towers out with wire and carb cleaner, but can I also unscrew the mixture screw all the way out to blow some air though it without hurting anything? Is it connected to anything or just an external screw and spring?

[joelsplace]

It is just air and fuel passages. You can spray carb cleaner in and blow them out with compressed air.