So I have actually been doing things since my last update, including playing a full round of “Let’s Have Gastro”.

Last week, the cerium oxide turned up, so I dragged Narry up to polish the windscreen. Blue tape on the inside is to make the scratch easier to find when the outside is covered in stuff.

I spent ages on in, with moderate success.

To be fair, the photos are deliberately unflattering. It’s not perfect but it’s MUCH less obvious than it was, both from the outside and when you’re inside.

Then a couple of days wasted with my head in a bucket, before moving onto Blagna. It started running badly the other day - stuttering at light throttle and sometimes hunting at idle, which I assumed was a vacuum leak, or maybe a dying MAF sensor.

So I figured this would be the opportunity to (finally) get around to replacing the rear cam cover gasket and hopefully find the other problem while I was there.
.

The original gasket between the two parts of the manifold is a rubber coated metal one - I’ve never seen one that wasn’t re-usable, but this car has a garbage aftermarket paper gasket.


So that was good to find, and an easy fix using the original gasket from Narry’s old 3.0 engine.

Onto the cam cover…
This is the “new” gasket that had been fitted by a gronk. No shortage of wrong and missing bolts on the way to this point either…

The cam cover was trashed by the bolts being stupidly over tightened and flattening out the edge. I had a go at panel beating it back into shape but gave up and just grabbed the cover from Narry’s 3.0.

On the bright side, the plugs were new.

I also touched up the terminals in the distributor.

Interestingly, it ran better but not correctly at first, but progressively improved over about 10km - I assume the ECU is relearning (or unlearning) how to deal with the lack of vacuum leak.

Suitably encouraged, I decided that it will be the car I drive to Mildura on Wednesday.

This lead to the spontaneous decision to fit the struts out of Batman for their stiffer springs (pastel green = Dobinsons??). Added bonus is that the struts themselves are newish Sachs, rather than the original 200,000km old struts that I removed.

And then when I realised that Batman has a set of 294mm 380 front brakes, it meant that I have a spare set… so they went onto Blagna at the same time.

And then I decided to fit the 380 wheels with the taller 215/55 tyres rather than the 235/45s on the Advanti wheels.

All of this was a huge win.
The rattle over bumps has gone, the car sits heaps nicer on bumps, the gearing is slightly taller, the speedo is within 1kph of being perfectly accurate and the brake pedal is much firmer. I haven’t actually “tested” the brakes yet, but I am sure they’re not a step backwards.

Added bonus is that it spat out a pair of excellent 276mm rotors for Narry.

The Chinesium tyres are definitely a step backwards from the RE003s, but I will buy a pair of 215/55 RE003s ASAP and put the cheap tyres on the rear.

Started the day by slapping the old struts into Batman, then took the dead 380 to the scrap yard. $245 was almost exactly half of what I paid for it, so there’s a lot of cheap parts left over.

Back home, and with a bit of help from Ballast I swapped the rear shocks between Blagna and Batman. Again, a clear step forward, although not as dramatic as the front.

Then a bunch of indecision over the rear tyres. Ended up swapping the 235/45 tyres from the Advanti wheels onto the 380 wheels. They are a bit oversized, but not ridiculously so.

Batman looks terrible with 16x6 wheels and 205/60 tyres… It won’t stay like this!

6 days later

Blagna took me to Wentworth (north of Mildura) for the last few days of last week.
I was out there servicing for mates in their Mitsubishi Challenger at the Sunraysia Safari.

Ran perfectly. Fuel consumption was pretty ordinary on the way there - sitting on 8.7 litres/100km when I was hoping for something in the 7.x range.
I filled up with 98 octane at Balranald because it was only a tiny bit more expensive than E10 was in Yass…
Fuel economy quickly dropped to 8.2l/100km.

Anyhow, the rally went well. They finished 13th outright and 1st in class.

And then it ran beautifully on the way home. A bit over 1500km round trip.

Random photo: three nuns in a bubble car seems like the start of some tortured joke, but it was actually something I witnessed.

.
Anyway, the other thing I have done is to buy another manual wreck. Raced up to Marulan this morning to collect it. It’s a pretty nice car in a lot of ways, but the engine is dead and the clear coat is very Magna.

Despite some guilt about scrapping a straight, rust free, and generally tidy car, I am just going to strip out the parts I want and scrap it.

Even though it is not going to be here for long at all, I still managed to give it a name. I was chewing over some sort of abbreviation of “grey and blue”, as a description of the colour and eventually tortured it into “grube”… and this quickly turned into “Hans”…

Hopefully Hans will be stripped and taken to the scrappy before the end of the week.
The seller also has another manual TF that I will probably go and get when Hans has gone…

bags naming the next one in that colour super hans.

Solid but not crazy day pullingHans apart today.

Unexpected bonuses are a full set of Kings lowered springs on newish shocks (they’re only Pedders, so not much of a bonus there), 1500kg towbar, and new headliner.
The latter two parts will make their way onto Blagna when I have/find/make the time.

Clutch looks serviceable, so Hans’ manual bits will be used to convert Nan back to a functional vehicle when I have/find/make the time.

In another country your skills would net you BIG dolleroes in a team of some sort....

7 days later

Hans was taken to the scrappy. They messed up and overpaid me, so I got a ton of Magna bits for $43!
I don’t know if they will pick up on it or not. Usually I would have sorted it out, but the dickhead boss screwed me over a few years back so I’m gonna to let it slide.

And then…

This came from the same seller as Hand did (notice the front bumper was from Hans originally).

It’s a TF ALtera, which is the same spec as Narry: 3.0 auto, power windows and the weird second glovebox where the passenger’s airbag would be. This one has ABS, which Narry doesn’t.

It has 180,000km on the clock, but apparently funs badly, possibly related to the fact it was converted to manual in the past?

It also stinks of mouse/rat piss.

Fundamentally, it’s a parts car. If I can get it running for little/no money, it might be used as a khanacross car … but probably won’t.

I should have wrecked this one and kept Hans, but it really isn’t a drama - Magnate is also straight and rust free with shit paint, so there’s nothing about Hans that Magnate can’t do.

    Bodykit from Batman sold.
    I blathered about doing this for a couple of weeks before deciding to advertise it at a “make it worth my while and see what happens” price.

    It sold quickly for my asking price, so the car owes me hardly anything now.

    I decided to make Batman look like an earlier car using the parts from the dark green car (which will obviously require painting).

    This included making sure the early TE/TF taillights fit into the TJ body - they do, even though they look terrible with the TJ bootlid.

    6 days later

    Yeah… this is Fragna (free + Magna. Clever, yes?).

    Quick trip to Adelong (about 30km south east of Gundagai) and I was very happy to learn that the owner had found a key.

    I was prepared with the tools to remove the ignition switch/steering lock, but I was VERY pleased the I didn’t have to grovel around in this revolting nonsense.

    Classy work on the negative battery terminal.

    The interior was nearly as revolting as the Lancer coupes, but at least it wasn’t full of rodent poo.
    Definitely something about displaying your life skills through using the world as an ashtray, terrible hygiene, and excessive energy drink consumption.

    The contents of the boot were no better.

    There’s dozens of these ocky strap things?!

    Anyway…

    The good news is that I put a new battery in, and it fired straight up.

    It’s a 3.5 litre one, and should have the tunable plastic case ECU.

    It even seems to be quite straight under the grime.

    So… I will try to sell Magnate (the orange one) as a cheapy road car, and Fragna will be the spares car. They’re both remarkably straight but the 3.5 , white paint and revolting interior all tip the favour to keeping Fragna and selling Magnate.

    A manual 380 was advertised locally so I went and bought the gearbox this morning.

    Turns out that the seller is a Deputy 4 Hour person and decent human, so I ended up buying the “unknown condition but in pieces” engine, the wheels and a few other parts while I was there.

    He actually offered me the whole car for only marginally more money but it will surprise nobody to hear that I have way too many cars and just couldn’t justify dragging another one home…

    When I got the parts home, I discovered that the engine is actually a 3.5, so I am assuming that the 380 was used as a donor for a Magna or Pajero/Triton/Challenger.
    This is obviously a bummer, but it is still a useful 3.5 and the price was low enough to not be a problem.

    $7.60 worth of cans and bottles from Fragna.

    Magnate went to a new home today.

    A pretty solid profit in percentage terms, but much less impressive in dollar terms!

    Anyway, I have a bit more space now, and the money will go towards registration on the green Mirage.

    4 days later

    I have a problem don’t I? 😁

    The kids have renamed Fragna to Stinky, which I think is perfectly reasonable. Used Stinky to flat tow Gus (the dark green one) up to the shed to see if I can get Gus running.

    While Stinky was there, I dropped the filthy black engine oil and replaced it with the used oil out of Blagna. 🤣

    Onto Gus… the fuel pump was definitely dead but I wasn’t keen on wading through the piles of mouse and rat poop, so The Boy and I donned the hazmat suits and cleaned the junk and pooh out of the interior.

    It actually came up pretty well - FAR better than I expected.

    Onto the fuel pump, which is under the back seat. The inside of the tank was clean, with a small amount of stale fuel in it, so I just topped it up with fresh petrol.

    Then I forgot to take photos but it now has a new ebay fuel pump in it.

    Onto the engine…

    This car was originally an automatic, and has been converted to manual… poorly. First checks were for fuel pressure and spark, which is passed on both.

    It kind of fired half heartedly, indicating that it didn’t have anything seriously wrong, but wasn’t going to start.

    Swapped the front bank of injectors with some spares, and it sounded more promising, but still didn’t start.
    Swapped the rear bank of injectors, with requires the top half of the intake manifold to be removed.
    Discovered some more low quality work, including a stripped thread in the lower part of the intake manifold… felt a bit silly putting a helicoil into an engine that might be dead in a car that is probably going to be scrapped, but I couldn’t ignore it either…
    …and it’s not any more silly than the time we spent cleaning the interior…

    With six replacement injectors, it fires but won’t run. Occasionally does a weird thing where it runs VERY slowly - like firing once a second for four or five seconds…

    So yeah, then I ran out of enthusiasm and decided to look at it later.

    Cam timing checks out (and appears to have a brand new timing belt).
    Injectors are firing nicely.
    Still won’t run.

    Kind of feels like the ignition timing jumps around - sometimes behaves like it is too advanced, other times like it isn’t.

    Swapped the distributor with a spare, and no difference. I am now wondering about the crank angle sensor - the wiring has been poorly routed, and it is fairly likely that it got messed up when the timing belt was changed.

    Also wondering if it is possible for the crank pulley to be installed incorrectly.

    Maybe tomorrow if I have time/motivation.

    When you say brand new timing belt, not suspiciously new indicating it may have been an attempted repair after it broke and valves/pistons smashed?

    • Spac replied to this.

      I said that I would only spend the morning on it, because I have so many other things to do.

      Swapped the CAS: no change.
      Drained the fuel from the tank, replaced with new 95 in case the old fuel in the tank was more stale than I thought: no change (and the Falcon is running perfectly).
      Took all the plugs out, cleaned, dried and regapped the: no change.
      Swapped AFMs with Candi: No change to either car.

      Plugged the code reader in: no faults reported.
      Triple checked cam timing, plug order and distributor rotation: no fault found.
      Reseated every connector I could find: No change.
      Discovered the ECU wasn’t bolted in and consequently the body wasn’t earthed. Fixed that: No change.

      Eventually, out of frustration, I swapped to another dizzy … and it immediately started up and ran nicely!


      When I say “ran nicely”, the engine was happy but the water pump howled and there’s a loud tick from the thrust bearing.
      But it runs and drives quite well, so that’s nice.

      I am still going to wreck the car, but now I know that the motor is fundamentally healthy… and is earmarked for a Mirage.

      Was a hard fought win, but got there in the end! As you may have guessed, this took more than just the morning!

      Because the Magnate is sold, we needed a car for the offspring to drive in Sunday’s khanacross.
      The Girl and I “prepped” Candi - literally just fitting the fire extinguisher and swapping the lowered Bilsteins for the black Magna-fied Blisteins.


      Side note:
      Pulled the CAS out of Batman to try in Gus. Removing the front pulley ended up turning the engine over… which revealled an intact little end playing peek-a-boo through the hole in the sump…

      There goes any hope that I might be able to reuse the pistons from this engine!

      14 days later

      Started pulling Gus apart.
      Amongst other delights, the gearbox had no oil in it, a bunch of bolts were loose, and the firewall had been hacked for the clutch master cylinder… (photo is flattering)

      Pretty unmotivated with wind, hayfever and anxiety, so I didn’t get all that much done.

      Still, progress is progress. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish stripping it on Friday and take it to the scrapper early next week.

      Another low motivation day. I need to get off the merry go round that is my employment situation.

      Did get a reasonable amount done in stripping Gus.

      Side quest was to partially repair the rear bumper, mostly to see if it was going to be a viable option for Batman.

      Answer is “probably”.

      I decided to pull the seats out of Stinky and plonk them in Gus, just because scraping Gus is a good opportunity to ditch the gross interior that is in Stinky.

      Side quest #2 was to try the grey fabric paint on Gus’ sun faded seats.

      First coat.

      A few coats later…
      Interestingly, the colour comes out with a green tinge and is too light, but gets better as it dries.

      I am part of a shit-talk Messenger group with a few non-Volvo mates. This comment was the highlight of my day.

      I should have been pulling the last few parts off the wreck ahead of scrapping it.
      I sort of got sidetracked with removing the interior from Stinky so I could put it in Gus when it is scrapped … and then decided to put the carpet from Hans and the seats from Gus into Stinky, partly because it keeps Stinky drivable but mostly because it is a safe place to store the interior parts…

      Of course this all burns up a bunch of time, including cleaning the dash and door trims.

      But now being inside it doesn’t feel like you’re trying to get hepatitis.
      So I got a bit motivated and washed it.


      Came up alright, considering how neglected it has been.
      No shortage of crap to clean off, but there was a bunch of stuff on the sides of the car that didn’t want to come off…
      Took me a little while, but I worked out that it is rusty swarf from completely trashed brakes - plenty of it on the wheels, but it must have been pretty special to end up all down the sides of the car…
      Hopefully it will polish off.

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