its amazing how good of shap that lower rad core support is in. you amaze me with your quarky appreciation for the odd fox box platforms. im sure you will turn it into a gem!
Well, there is a bit of damage hiding on the bottom rear of the passenger side of it, but nothing I wanted to mess with. This is a car that is going to get DRIVEN, so I wanted to make sire things were sealed/fresh.
Truth be told. If I didn't have the '83 TBird, I'd be building up another 80-82 Box TBird/Cougar XR-7 in its place.
Been going in circles this past few months trying to work between several projects.
This one needed to get the K-member mods done and I accomplished that. (Pic of it in primer)
Relocated the FCA mounts inboard 3/4", since I was going to use the SN-95 arms, and the stock width between the control arm mounts was the same between the LTD and the Mod K-members. I was going to have fender contact if I tried to leave them as-is.
I talked myself into thinking that I needed to clean up the engine bay before I dropped the drivetrain back in the car, so I needed to address that, and got it knocked out this past weekend.
I need to remove a bunch of un-needed wiring and do a few more things, so it wasn't a bad idea to strip everything out.
I hit it with a couple rounds of scuff and clean with some grey ScotchBrite pads and treated any remaining corrosion areas with some Corroseal.
The primed and painted it with some Seymour MRO paints.
Next task is to get the drivetrain back in the car and out of my way in the garage.
No matching kilt, but I do have a couple others. I need to put some padding on some of the cage bars in the rear, and I was thinking of getting some matching material and seeing if my wife would whip up a few covers that match.
I wish I'd kept the AC on the Tbird when I did all of the IC stuff, etc. Guess I'll wait until I do something different with the drivetrain to worry about it.
It would be driven a lot more over the summer. I get stuck in traffic too much back and forth to work and don't want to hassle with getting cooked trying to get there. The LTS has been getting a bunch of use this summer.
Tested the fuel pressure and it was good. No need to drop the tank to find a pinched return.
I hooked up the laptop and started to look at things. Almost immediately I saw the MAP gauge stuck at "100 KPa" or ambient. It wasn't reacting at all. SO I grabbed a length of vacuum tube and bypassed the in-situ feed to the ECU and sure enough it was reading properly. The MAP signal hose to the ECU had gotten pinched when I reinstalled the seat after chasing the power issue.
Found the problem and put it all back together and the car is much happier.
Now, back to my other project and hopefully I can get the roof wrap sorted out soon.
New pump is installed, but the car runs like doodoo.
It appears to be super rich. When I pulled the fuel pressure regulator reference hose off of the intake, the idle smoothed out a bit.
I didn't get a chance to check the fuel pressure yet, but should be able to tomorrow. Hoping that I didn't somehow pinch the return line between the tank and the body (would be hard to collapse it though.)
I'll need to toss the laptop on it, to see what the WBO2 is showing.
It's possible that if the fuel pressure is correct. the car was tuned under a weak fuel supply and now that it's getting a healthy dose, the tune is off. This thing doesn't "learn" like the stock EEC4 stuff.
We'll see I guess. I don't think anything else broke/failed when the pump went.