Congratulations to Jim Stabe, who has announced he is officially finished with his wide-body MGB/Corvette project. 17+ years!
I met Jim and the project about 4 years ago.
Congratulations to Jim Stabe, who has announced he is officially finished with his wide-body MGB/Corvette project. 17+ years!
I met Jim and the project about 4 years ago.
Sealer Time!
Top coats - most are flat black but a few are satin.
Satin on the left, flat in the middle and matte on the right.
Satin comes close to freshly Armor All'd plastic, flat comes close to black phosphate. Matte was an exact match to meh.
After 5 or 6 years of fabbing on a makeshift table that was originally outdoor patio furniture, we had an unwanted piece of 1/8" thick steel sheet show up at work. I was able to convert the sheet into a top and shelf.
And I actually finished something on Blitzy!
First was riveting the MOAB bracket onto the air filter box.
And a small mod to the snorkel adapter thingy so it would not rub on the filter element.
And then the snorkel adapter thingy was caulked + riveted on - and my large, difficult to package, GM-based air filter box is ready to go back in the 944 once the engine bay is red.
Sunday's trip to the boneyard resulted in a set of 2 trunk latches from 2000ish Honda Accords. These will become my hood latches. Also a collection of clips off various air filter boxes. I needed 4 in order to latch my fuse block (see next posts). I brought 2 styles of clip home. The wire ones are off Ford cars and the "leaf spring" style were off a 5 series BMW. Most of the BMW's did not have stainless clips but this specific year/model did. As you will see I ended up using these for my fuse block.
So it was on to finishing the mounting/BRACKETRY for the fuse block.
The basic box and its pass-through into the footwell of the 944.
Adding the BMW stainless clips to the BRACKET.
Now the BRACKET and clips are welded into the 944 cowl and the GM fuseblock is secure!
I finished off the day with a little de-modding of the hood/trunk latches. I took off the electrical switches and trimmed some small pieces off that I did not need - because lightness.
I am continuing along with my hood latches. Making prelim plans, figuring out how to actually measure where they will be in cramped 3D space on the 944.
First up were the basics for the brackets for the female sides of the latches. These are sandwich/nutplate style brackets that will have +/- 1/4" adjustment in fore/aft/up/down.
Then I used some magnets to hold the male side to the hood and dangle the female sides and make sure all this would fit where I wanted them to go.
That all went well so then I knew I could permanently mount the male sides to the hood.
Then there was a couple of iterations of ways to try and measure where in 3D space the male latches end up with the hood fully closed. A cube of plumber's putty was very helpful.
Now I have what I think are the correct measurements to centerline of the male latches and some reference points on the 944 that will allow me to build a simple jig to position the female halves and weld in their brackets. Stay tuned.
After machining up my little locating jig I checked for fitment. Looks like I'm pretty close - the aluminum pin to the side of the male half of the latch is just a teensy bit lower than the latch. Given all the weird stuff I went through to try and measure things I think it came out really well. I'd rather weld things in a tad low than high. So the next step is to swap to a longer pin that will let me located the center of the female latch with the center of the male latch. I'm ready to go for it. Things are so cramped in this area that I doubt I could un-weld - so I'd better get it right the first time!
I did one last double-check on the position of everything and then tack welded the bracket into the 944. And I even remembered to hook up a temporary release cable so that I could unlatch the latch should all go well.
On my first close there wasn't a click noise, but after moving the latch up 1/16th of an inch....
Clicky!!!! (And even better - un-clicky so I could open the hood again.)
1 side down, 1 side to go.
Kind of a nerve wracking moment, right?
Yes it was!
The other latch is finished.
Action shot of the jig:
This one made the clicky noise on the first try.
I finished up all the various places in the engine bay where I had fresh metal, cleaned, scuffed, primered and seam-sealed it all.
I'm hoping to convert this engine bay to red next weekend. It's very sobering to look at all that white - those are the areas that I modified. Don't try this at home kids! Next time I will just body swap a 944 shell onto something. Same amount of welding just less BRACKETS!
"Red! (Yeah!) Paint it red, green ain't mean compared to red."
In reply to Sparkydog :
Looks great in color!
Before:
During:
After:
Prepped the car for the next motor stuff.
A final review session on Saturday afternoon.
Going in 6am yesterday.
Annnnnnnd now there's dozens of new things to do! One bite of the elephant at a time. One bite of the elephant at a time. One bite of the elephant at a time.
Sparkydog said:"Red! (Yeah!) Paint it red, green ain't mean compared to red."
Nice spray booth - I like how you just ran the back wall right off the windshield frame. Smart.
I see rattle can lids in the background. Did you rattle can the whole engine bay?
You're spot on about "one bite at a time". I look back at my own build thread and get overwhelmed at the amount of work this stuff takes, and I didn't even cut out my whole engine bay in the process. 
In reply to Mezzanine :
4 cans of red rattle FTW!
+1 on making the car a part of the booth
This past weekend I had plans and high hopes to get about 5 things done and was thrown for a loss on just about all of them. The only thing I DID accomplish was to solve an unplanned problem with the EGR tubing. I forgot that I had a motor from a 96 Camaro but exhaust headers from early 00's. The EGR tubing looked like it mated up until I actually tried to make the connection and then slowly started to realize that the tube wasn't quite long enough or bent correctly. "Fixing" this consumed a couple of hours and was the thinnest metal I have ever welded with my Hobart. Power setting on 1 and wire feed on about 10 - even then I had to hold the tip back about 1.5 inches and go really slow to avoid blow throughs.
In other news I ordered a GM to Mustang power steering hose kit from JEGS/Borgeson that was $67 of poor quality and confusion. But after sleeping off my grumpiness I've decided that about $40 of that money was spent so I could learn what will be required to actually connect the rack to the pump.
I'm about 95% complete with all the mechanical items that need to be working in order to run the motor in the car. I should be ready in about 30-45 days due to family vacations and other Summer fun stuff. That means I'm getting ready to switch over to wiring and electrical things. As a reminder this will be the PCM/VATS/BCM & wire harness off the donor 1996 Crammit.
I have a couple of wiring questions already. In order for the motor to run, (but not worried about driving yet) does the PCM need these?
If anyone is reading this build and familiar with Porsche keys from the 80's, do the iginiton and door keys for my 944 look normal or severely worn? What I mean is this key looks like it has very little sophistication - only 3 bumps for tumblers. While a GM key of the same era would have 5 or 6 bumps on the profile.
Sparkydog said:I'm about 95% complete with all the mechanical items that need to be working in order to run the motor in the car. I should be ready in about 30-45 days due to family vacations and other Summer fun stuff. That means I'm getting ready to switch over to wiring and electrical things. As a reminder this will be the PCM/VATS/BCM & wire harness off the donor 1996 Crammit.
I have a couple of wiring questions already. In order for the motor to run, (but not worried about driving yet) does the PCM need these?
- "MIL Lamp Control" input. Circuit 25 brn/wht
- "Clutch Anticipate" input. Circuit 69 gry coming from the "Clutch Anticipate/Cruise Release Switch"
My admittedly limited understanding of GM PCMs is that those items should not inhibit starting and running of the engine. MIL lamp control is just that, whether the MIL will turn on. Necessary to pass an emissions test and for knowing when there is a problem, but for a first start, I wouldn't worry about it.
Someone else can correct me on this, but I believe clutch anticipation is the computer "knowing" when you're about to push the clutch pedal in to disengage a gear and commanding a minor, temporary increase (1-200 rpm, a second or two) in idle speed to help prevent the engine from stalling when clutching in. Not exactly necessary for running and driving, and many auto-to-manual swaps I've seen on, say, Grand Ams omit this particular circuit and just set global idle speed a little higher to compensate.
Thanks Left Ventricle!
I thought I'd post up a bunch of words today - to catch you all up on where I'm at with wiring.
My only goal (for now) is to be able to fire up the motor and get it to (eventually) run without fault codes. How many circuits could possibly be involved (not counting the actual engine harness) - like maybe 10, no?
Except that there's always those few wires that have the same color... so then a guy needs to make sure he's using the correct wire of that color. Which leads to needing to confirm pinouts and connector names. (BTW Thanks again Al Gore because I would be helpless without the internet. I don't know how I would have easily found all the information without it.)
So out barfs all the wiring schematics and connector pinout charts and I proceed to start solving which of the 10-ish wires I need. But along the way, new mysteries are created - such as terms like "2nd gear start","skip shift", "BCM Data link" and "passkey II".
At this point in time I feel like I am actually ready to connect up the 10-ish wires I really need, but in the process of correctly ID'ing them I now have a spreadsheet with just over 60 circuits that are involved - most of which I will need to have functional in order to both start, run and monitor (instrument cluster) the engine.
I should also mention that I am dealing with:
It should be an interesting weekend and I expect that smoke will escape from my head as I try to prevent smoke from escaping out of the wires.
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