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Pig: '79 242 16vT

Wow, those do look nice in there Harald.

Reminds me I need to get back on the seat project on the wagon some year.

I do like that steering wheel setup better than the other one. The dish on the old one was just funky when I drove it.

Oh it has the same offset on account of a quick disconnect I installed. Works really well for my build other than the stalks being at a weird distance from the wheel. It's fine. Just fine :-P

Digging the Bertone "real Corinthian Leather" door panels! I'll go the same route on my 242.

So what did that driveshaft / universal joint issue turn out to be? Are you running the Aerostar output yoke on your T5? Or did you try to fit the 4 cyl. Turbo FORD massive yoke on?

Hehehe, the Corinthian Leather thing never gets old :lol: Always makes me think of Jersey for some reason. There are some on ebay for relatively reasonable money. Just keep in mind that the rear side panels are different between the Bertone and normal 2-doors.

As for the slip yoke I'm running the Aerostar one with a trans "counterweight", essentially a tuned mass damper in the form of a chunk of iron encased in a bracket and a bunch of rubber in between. It helps a decent deal but not enough for what I want this car to do so I'm going with the big 1330 MASSIVE deal. Wish me luck!

it's like a dang Silver Spur in there.

Like a sir.

Time to wrap the dash in leather

This has crossed my mind. Don't tempt me more.
 
I have a full set of chrome lined GLE vents, clock, and glove box that would add to your already beautiful interior. Let know if you’re interested.

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Don't even pretend that I haven't notices and it hasn't bothered me. Once the BMW is fixed I'm going shopping for stains.
 
Not all that much has been happening as of late with this car. Been focusing more on getting the last bits of the BMW figured out. All 242 work has either yielded no results or made things worse, which, you know, frustrating.

1. Figured out my dog doesn't like this car

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2. Put a Culberro-rebuilt T-5 in an attempt to get a VSS 2 channel in order to have working traction control. MS3x does not want to recognize a signal faster than 2300 Hz, so basically there is no signal past 80 mph. Inconvenient if I'm drag racing...and the vibrations are still there. It also necessitated adding a Dakota Digital box and an extra VSS conditioner box. That was very expensive. Ended up replacing my trusty Summit shifter with a Hurst, which I didn't like. Replaced that with a new Summit shifter.

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3. Went drag racing. It was slow...slower than power figures from the last dyno day would suggest, but everything else at the drag strip seemed slow by about the same margin. Turns out new Summit shifter is garbage and does not like keeping the selector rod in its linkage. 90% of my runs were scrubbed and no good launches were achieved. Ran out of patience eventually, turned the boost up a bit to 15 PSI, and managed a blazing :eyeroll: 14.3s at 104.9 mph.


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4. Post drag racing, jacked the car up and was greeted by a collapsing (or rather freshly broken in?) near new poly motor mount. This put the corner of the cylinder head firmly against an air conditioning line. Gonna make some spacers out of this here 3/8" aluminum stock to resolve. Notching the valve cover is also in the cards. Also tempted to do the MikeP passenger side motor mount mod at the expense of my stock oil cooler. That stuff is not needed anyway...right?

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Okay so a few things happened since June. For one, I'm ditching the stock location intercooler and am in the process of mocking up an angle mount down low and up front:

<img src="https://liam821.com/h/242/Jun-Aug%202021/1.jpeg" width="900"</img>



Motor mount was really yoinked :omg: Replaced it with a Yoshi mount on a 10mm spacer. Everything is good now.

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Net up, the driveline was driving me nuts. Spent some time realigning the driveshaft by spacing things up and down and adjusting the pinion angle accordingly. Shortening the BNE torque rods all the way just did the trick. Also installed an Aerostar slip yoke, modded a T56 trans mount, and got installing. The car feels actually Liveable to drive now. After how many years of T5 misery, this felt like a breakthrough!

<img src="https://liam821.com/h/242/Jun-Aug%202021/7.jpeg" width="900"</img>

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Went to a new local car meet. Donuts were a theme:


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A heat wave came around. It was 100-120 for a week so I mostly sat around feeling hot and uncomfortable. My neighbor's truck:

<img src="https://liam821.com/h/242/Jun-Aug%202021/14.jpeg" width="900"</img>



Went on to do some adjustments to the rear axle and found this. Still haven't fixed anything; just hose clamped the parking brake cable because I could not be any less bothered...

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Found some speakers that would sound good and fit the Bertone door cards without cutting anything. Filling and sealing the door cavities made for an incredible boost in sound quality

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Fatefully, a couple weeks ago, feeling pretty good, I decided that it was time to turn the boost up. According to my logs, the car is making Somewhere in the 415 bhp range at 18 psi. Nice. Fatefully, also that weekend...

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<img src="http://speedhunters-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/12163801/2021-Donuts-and-Drip-Urban-Outlaw_Sara-Ryan-Speedhunters_307-1200x800.jpg" width="900"</img>

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Then...

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Oh well. That would wait. Aug 4 we went to Alaska for a week to visit Quin and Andy (and Mark, nice to mee you!!!) and fix their ****boxes. Great times were had.

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Things got slightly out of hand again. The engine popped a couple weeks ago on my way back home from a meet. Only got around to investigating last weekend. Turns out that what I thought was a head gasket failure on cylinder 1 due to a fuel pressure drop event was not quite the cause of failure (still a concern, but one that I’m going to kick down the road until the weather gets ugly and the garage gets a bit cozier).

Turns out three factors are at play that need to be addressed:

Cause of engine failure was a broken injector driver for cylinder 3. Thankfully bottom end is mostly fine. There was enough accelerated wear for compression on it to drop 15 psi, and for the hole to drain oil much faster than the others. See the second picture. The fix was pretty straightforward. There was a spare MS3X expansion card on my shelf so I popped that in. Almost magically, the injector pulses normally again.

Leaky intake valve in cylinder 1. This should have been fixed before I reinstalled the head 2 years ago. I’m a dingus that forgot he got the engine a bit too toasty on the first start and didn’t double check for leakage when it was apart the last time. The local cylinder head shop ground the seat again and we are back in business.

eBay turbo has axial shaft play. Having dealt with catastrophic turbo failures in the past, I decided to do a partial exchange with the ebay vendor for a billet/BB version of the same turbo. There’s a Borgwarner S252-SXE waiting in the shelf, but the manifold for that thing is still in R&D and I don’t want to go through the process of adapting it to the current manifold just to have to cut and weld a bunch of components shortly after. Bolt-on is the way to go for now. I’m also curious to have a more or less direct comparison.

While I'm in there, a Pro-vent goes in, the Yoshifab catch can goes out, and a PC680 battery takes place of the big ol stocker.

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