IHADAV8.com - Turbo Buick Tech, and Nonsense
General => IHADAV8 Playground => Topic started by: Steve Wood on August 21 2013, 01:56:38 PM
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Back in the spring I installed an NGK AFX wb on my GN and a pair of stock height springs to get the rear up in the air a bit for more ground clearance between the house and the highway because the road was washed out in a couple of places on one side.
Shortly thereafter the wb quit sending data to PL/SM and was reading 16.0 and dropping to 15.5 if I revved it. Of course the digital side was reading correctly. Shades of the effing Innovate LC-1s of which I gave three away....one never installed.
And, I did not like the handling of the car with the taller springs at speed. Was not glued to the ground like it had been.
Add that I broke the converter and replaced it with a multi-clutch converter that I had on the shelf from a few years ago, and the car has to get good and warm before it will drop into gear without stalling or wanting to stall on initial impact. Seems typical of multi-clutch converters. No slip at idle even if they are stalled higher. And then the car smokes a bit like it has bad guides which is entirely possible after a lot of 6000 rpm blasts.
I did the intelligent thing and parked it and drove the other T that belongs to my son.
yesterday, I got inspired and went out to the shop, got my meter out, and decided to see what voltage I was seeing on the analog out and activated the thing with PL so I could see what it was reading and what I was measuring. Yeah, you guess it, it worked perfectly.
Charged the AC and went and hosed it off at the local coin carwash which was actually working today. Going to drive it to San Angelo this afternoon and change the springs this week end. Never can figure out cars so I may take up women again
Before I get that desperate, I will try to get Shimy to come fix the cruise control which has not worked in about 12 years and I may try putting a new starter on it which has been laying on the shelf since last fall...maybe.
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If Texas wasnt so far away I'd be there :cheers: but as usual you would have to tell me what to do :D
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I'm still old fashioned. After Thomas almost trashed the car at 115+ from an airbag blowing out, I reverted back to air shocks and couldn't be more pleased. NGK wb seems to be top of the line, trouble free for us. I do agree with the women comment but at our age we gotta be careful of cardiac arrest. Different kind of 02 sensor.
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It's usually a lot easier to tell someone else what to do that do it yourself! Or, it is getting that way :D I was thinking the problem is probably in the turnsignal wiring but I have not laid in the floor to find out. I looked today and am not sure if the turn signal switch will come out thru the small hole in the armored column guard and it takes a die grinder to cut the blind pins out to get it off...Fixed it years ago when the white wire coming out of the column broke up inside. Light is not turning on in the cluster when I turn cruise on so it would appear to be something like that.
Put a 100 miles on this afternoon...fo rgot how much fun it is to drive but trying to run the speed limit which is 75 mph is hard to do. Does not help that with the 145 mph speedo, it is about 3/16" between the five mile markers so you can be doing 85 before you realize that it has moved up.
I remembered that I had put a front sway bar on it when I changed the rear springs back to stock so that may have something to do with the handling. It was rock solid with the Eibach springs before I started changing things.
Air bags when you have a limited slip rear end don't do much...or they shouldn't. I had a set on there but had not tried any air in years so I cut the lines and pulled them off with the Eibachs. I would rather preload the upper arm a little.
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Stick the scanmaster in MPH mode, one of the speedo's goes spastic over 60 so that's our interim solution
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Have to move the sm to the top of the dash to see it. Rather have a head display
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if i had unlimited vacation and money, I'd have your back Steve!! :icon_lol:
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I know you would! :)
I need to fix the oil leaks again, fix a rattling tail pipe that I hear going from the house to the highway, and fix a slow leaking drag radial as well as the cruise and a new converter. Also try to figure out why it was to drift sideways when the boost comes on at speed. Maybe an alignment it has not had in 20 years would help? :D
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It seems like on these cars things always seem to go sideways instead of moving ahead with repairs. I fix my trip meter so it stops skipping, I break positive feed for my dash lights. I fix that and the original rad pukes on the ground when I let the car warm up. All the lines come off the rad but the lower oil cooler line. At this point I'm irritated so I just take the line to a hydraulic shop and have them make me a new one. Then I find out why the previous owner had some mickey mouse fan toggle switch hooked up. He had installed a new ground for the fans that was screwed into the plastic inner fender. I get that all fixed and realize....cra p this thing isn't charging and the volt light doesn't turn on when you first turn the key on....sigh back out the dash comes. This reminds me why my other hobby is drinking beer on the deck. That almost always goes the way one would expect.
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Aren't these old piece of shit cars fun!!??!! :)
I'm actually thinking about changing the spark plugs in GN #2, they haven't been changed since the early 2000's. But then again, I don't want this car to think I am pampering it and go all soft on me, yep I'm not changing em. :rock: :rofl:
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When that happens, I just pick a different car to work on for awhile. It's always hard to pick up behind another person's work. heck, with this GN, I bought it new in '86 and I have done so many things to it, that I don't know why I did some things. Twice, once a year go, I took a pair of side cutters under the dash and started cutting out everything that looked to be excess wire that I did not trim short when I first installed it. I noticed I ended up with a gray wire that did not seem to go to anything. Figured that out day before yesterday when I started to look at the wb's failure to work properly on the PL. I noticed that I was not reading fuel pressure...yep, gray wire was from the fuel pressure sender and I had not wired it back in after hacking out about ten pounds of bundled up wire. That is now on my to do list on that car.
The worst two were the T I bought to do up for my son in '99 and the Elky that someone had started a turbo buick conversion on.
I cut five alarm system remnants out of the T trying to find why the lights were not working properly. Had a pile of wire on the ground that I could not step over. On the Elky, someone had used table lamp wiring to add about ten relays for alarm, power windows, and door locks...none of which actually worked. I bought the thing cheap because he could not get the car to turn over because he thought the alarm was screwing it up and he could not figure out why. Out came the side cutters. And the alarm problem? Was fixed when I adjusted the ignition switch a 1/16" on the column so it made contact when I turned the key to start....
The Challenger? Had a fire under the dash that someone had "fixed" by using some twist on house wiring connectors on...then rats got into it and chewed up other wiring.
The jeep...well, nothing worked on it when I got it a few months ago, but it is so old and simple that I just rewired the thing the way I thought it should be wired, and it's good to go.
The Camaro? There was nothing wrong with it about three years ago and I decided to redo all the brakes, and install new harnesses under the hood. I got pissed off about something and have not touched it since. It was a great driver. I should burn the rest, put it together, drop the top and go cruising!
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Well with that perspective I feel much better about my car now. I used to have a couple cars I worked on at a time but i found the money got too tight and they ended up never getting worked on instead. Lol tried to focus my energy on just one and see if I can actually finish one. Then maybe go start another one. I did get to drive it around the block for the first time in 4 years even without a charging battery and it got me excited about the car again.
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Oh why did I buy a 5th car?
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because you did not have one of those!
A friend that I shared a shop with down in Houston bought and sold cars regularly. Usually he bought one, spent 5k fixing stuff he did not like and then sold it for a 3k loss!
He had a Buick Sportwagon for awhile...had a 455 Stage 1 in it....You could sleep a family of five in the back. I loved that car even tho I could not quite understand why. Don't think it was the flomasters because I normally hate them
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You could sleep a family of five in the back.
imagine if earlbrown had a wagon.. orgy on wheels :player:
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I started working on them just as the "electronic" revolution happened and have seen more and more of the younger guys have no clue on how to work on the old ones. They don't teach the basics anymore since you don't see them that often these days. I know some of you have no clue how to work on a carb of any sort but you're not in the business. I even worked with 1 guy with an L1 cert and he was my age and didn't know how to set a carb for idle or rpm. :O
When I get one of the older cars in I feel like a kid now since it's so rare that I get to work on something simple, unless it's a tractor. :hmm Almost wish I had decided to do something else for a living but after 30+ years of doing it I really don't know what else to do these days. :icon_redface:
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When I got this jeep, one of the many things wrong was no charging. I looked at it and thought this thing needs a GM alternator with a built in regulator and a volt light on the dash...so I cut out the old wiring, regulator, etc. Put a GM type alternator on it, added a small jewel light in the dash and wired it like it was a Camaro or Buick...
Guy was selling it because it would not start without pouring gas in the carb...saw there was no accelerator pump shot, rebuilt the carb and adjusted the linkage so it would lift the pump high enuf to let gas into the well and it starts like a clock. Older cars all basically are put together the same and you seen one, you seen most of them. Wiring is generally rotten so just cut and paste.
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I remember seeing a Buick wagon tow vehicle at BG - with a dual quad 455
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carbs???
if you cant plug your laptop into it... its considered "boring", lol
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carbs have always been tunable but the new ones with the screw in bleeds make it much easier
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I have been thinking about putting a power steering pump on it for about 15 years because it can get very hard to turn at an idle unless the rpms come up a little. I guess there is a valve that controls the pressure in the pump that is sticky or such.
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Pull out the welder to patch the truck.
Quick realize I have no gloves on. :O
I can only find one welding glove. :013:
Three quartes thru the patch the autodark helmet craps out. :013: :013:
Batteries are fresh.No idea where the other one is, shut my eyes and fake it.
Pull out the panel adhesive to attach some skin- its old but I chance it (3M).
Sun has gone down and the temperature plummets.
Now its midnight and the stuff isn't setting up very fast at all. :O :O
Hang light bulbs as a heat source around the patch after warming with the propane torch....
Sigh
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Finally set up- good thing, would have looked funny driving to work with a plethora of clamps attached.
Keep forgetting about using cleco's till after the fact.
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I took the Buick out last night. I had to go into the city for "work" so it was a good excuse to put some miles on it. So I changed the oil, dusted it off, drained the catch can, aired up the tires, grabbed the laptop and headed out. Why does it seem like this car needs a pre-flight check every time I drive it?
Also after having had concluded the oil change I determined that I had only driven the car 1498kms since the last oil change - in mid-May of last year! I used to drive this thing 14,000kms a year... :(
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Saturday, I went out to the shop to swap the back springs out of the GN and put Eibachs back in because I had the road graded from the highway to the house and don't have to negotiated wash outs anymore.
Figured it would take me about 20 minutes. Miscalculated how high I had to jack the differential up when I was putting jack-stands under the frame. When I popped the shocks loose and dropped the diff, the tires touched the ground before the springs came loose so they would pop out.
Being pissed off, instead of jacking the diff up and lifting the car until I could raise both jack stands another notch for the required clearance, I jacked each side up, one at a time until the springs were loose. Crawl out, pump the jack handle a couple of times, try it again...crawl out and give it a couple of more pumps...do that side and then repeat on the other side.
Bad enuf being senile but being mad really shuts down the thought process. Took me 45 minutes to swap them out when that is about as easy a job there is :(
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Steve if you really want to hate cars - I'll let you come help me put this 4l80e back in :icon_evil:
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That is the reason God made you young guys...someone needs to suffer!