|
If you still need that headlight part I'm parting out my 1997 Miata and have the headlight motor assemblies available still. I'd be willing to bet that the guy who did the electronics in that Manta had a telephone background. That's pretty similar, in concept, to how central offices are wired. FatCow fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Dec 18, 2013 |
#
?
Dec 18, 2013 16:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 05:18 |
|
|
Preoptopus posted:I think I do the exact polar opposite of what you do in the Automotive Field for a fraction. Just keep working at it and jump if an opportunity pops up. Get good at diagnosing poo poo. Parts hangers are a dime a dozen. When you get mountains of diagnostic work for hardly any pay you know you've made it  I haven't gone to a single school that wasn't through a manufacturer after I'd already worked on the brand. To be fair I did go to two years of school prepping to be an EE but not a lot carries over.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2013 16:59
|
|
|
I watched that and thought "that all looks pretty familiar" -- and then I went back to the start, and saw my office! I'll keep my ears peeled for things flying by with far too much horsepower. Thanks for all the wonderful pictures.
|
|
#
?
Dec 19, 2013 09:48
|
|
|
James Woods posted:In the meantime I need to prep my tertiary daily driver for the swap, incidentally one of my favorite little project cars in the world... Hah! Given all that thing has put us through I'm surprised you're still so charitable towards it 3 years on.
|
|
#
?
Dec 20, 2013 18:55
|
|
|
Loved your bartending thread, this one looks promising as well!
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2013 01:56
|
|
|
Ugh, I loving hate when people put music over the engine noise in videos.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2013 02:27
|
|
|
TheFonz posted:Ugh, I loving hate when people put music over the engine noise in videos. This is the only video I've ever found that does this well: Alfa Romeo Busso V6 SOUND TRIBUTE , Meravigliosa Creatura Wonderful Creature http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7nacFjssVo
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2013 04:18
|
|
|
TheFonz posted:Ugh, I loving hate when people put music over the engine noise in videos. So do I but what engine noise? The GoPro was mounted to the windshield so all it recorded was a lot of wind. I even tried recording the motor sound with a second camera in the cabin but you still couldn't hear it clearly. That said expect a big update soon. The tale of the four day brake job.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2013 05:11
|
|
|
TheFonz posted:Ugh, I loving hate when people put music over the engine noise in videos.  James Woods posted:So do I but what engine noise?  James Woods posted:That said expect a big update soon. The tale of the four day brake job. That sounds excellent since I can just sit here and read about it and not be involved in whatever mess that was!
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2013 05:47
|
|
|
Thanks Galler. You always got my back baby.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2013 15:56
|
|
|
This thread is amazing.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2013 17:09
|
|
|
I wanna hear more about the Alpina. Those cars for some reason just draw me in, I've only seen one in the wild but I've never gotten a good feel for how they drive/sound.
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2013 07:11
|
|
|
If you two loving comedians are done sucking each others dicks I have an update.McMadCow posted:Hah! Given all that thing has put us through I'm surprised you're still so charitable towards it 3 years on. Hey McMadCow, while you're still in London I need you to do me a favor. See if you can make it down to Jaguar Corporate Headquarters located at Abbey Road, Whitley, Coventry CV3 4LF and pretty please with sugar on top throw a brick through the loving window.  gently caress this thing.  Welcome to my home away from home, my bat cave, my tree house, a place where dreams take flight and wrenches get thrown in anger. Here you will see my menagerie of uncompleted vehicles.    My 81' C3 is waiting to get it's 350 resealed and interior swapped before I sell it and move on to a new restoration project. I will miss this car if for no other reason than that is was fitted from the factory with one of the biggest on board pussy magnets ever to come out of Detroit.    Hey we all know this little guy. It is having a surging issue with the throttle of the fuel injected M42 that we swapped into it that neither myself or any other mechanic I've put it in front of can figure out. Next step is a brand new MAF and failing that ECU. Don is convinced that the issue is related to exhaust back pressure and O2 sensors but then again he also eats racoons that he shoots in his back yard with a crossbow, so the jury's still out.     This is our NASA Spec E30 car waiting for paint and McMadCow to get back to the states so we can propperly break it on the track. If the 2002 doesn't get sorted out by the time my soccer mom wagon goes under the knife or if the swap takes longer than planned this will be my daily driver for a bit.  This we affectionately call the "Little Vato". It is a 79' 911 Targa P3 car that raced down in the Mexican leagues. I got it for a steal minus the drive train a couple years back from this shifty Korean broad down in LA who had a warehouse full of random car poo poo and 1990's video game consoles, cartridges, and accessories.   The original plan was to put a DC Electric drive train in it and race it in SCCA against internal combustion cars but the project got shelved when the hippies up in Marin county I was going to contract to source the motor and batteries flaked on me. Don has a line on both a 996 GT3 power plant as well as two Tesla Roadster drive trains so I'm up in the air at the moment as to where I'm going to take this thing.    The place could use a woman's touch but we only just moved into here from our old warehouse a few months ago and are still settling in.   Sadly this loving thing has been darkening my lift for the last couple weeks waiting for Don and I to embark on the most hosed up bullshit wrenching job of both our careers.  It's an 89' Jaguar XJS V12. It is designed by Formula 1 engineers and built by imbeciles. This is a contract job from the consignment shop I work at and was brought here to make use of our two post lift and fabrication equipment. I did the safety inspection on this thing a few weeks ago and despite being the best restored and maintained example I've seen outside of a museum in the last decade it had a few little quirks that needed to be attended to. This included new brake rotors and pads front and rear as well as a re seal of the differential. Unfortunately this car has the dreaded Jaguar in board brakes like on an E-Type. A car I once had a great desire to restore, that was until last Friday.  The first step was dropping the rear sub frame assembly. This necessitated the purchase of a table jack, something I've been wanting for a while anyway since it will be necessary for upcoming jobs like the Diablo head gasket and any number of other rear or mid engined cars we have in the pipe.   Day one was just supposed to consist of dropping the sub frame but already we hit a snag. Both of the trailing arm bolts were corroded to all hell and sheared faster than a hairdresser on Benzedrine. We knew immediately that this combined with the myriad of other obstacles we saw on the horizon once we got underneath it would at least double the time required for this job. What we didn't know at the time was that instead of the eighteen man hours initially quoted we wound up doing nearly sixty in the next four days.     This car was built with absolutely no regard for service. In fact, if I didn't know better I'd say that it was intentionally designed to make money in the service department but that would be a wise business decision. This is something British car companies were incapable of in the 80's.  You have to remove the loving hubs to service the front brake rotors. The car uses an esoteric combination of SAE, Metric, and Imperial fasteners, half of which are bound in place by bailing wire which doesn't exactly inspire confidence about build quality.  Day two we serviced the front end and diff while my Foreman Park, a former JAG in the USMC who litigates almost as well as he rebuilds engines, worked his magic at extracting and re tapping the trailing arm bolts with Grade 8 Metric hardware.  Once we'd undone the damage we did we began tearing the rear sub frame apart to service the calipers. This included long hours of sadness and pain as more bolts sheared, tools got stuck, fingers bled, and hearts were broken. In the end we got the rear end reassembled and called it a night. We could tell that re mounting the sub frame was going to be a bitch.   Day three consisted of Don and I contemplating leaving our families and joining the Foreign Legion as we did battle with the sub frame mounting. Twelve hours of prying, drilling, wrenching and swearing later and the fucker is attached and ready for the trailing arms to be connected and have the brake lines hooked up and bled. We were on the home stretch and called it a day since the showroom was closed Sunday and we wouldn't be returning the car until the next day anyway. Day four and Don and I both have murder in our eyes. We want this fucker out of here because not only are we at our wits end but we've essentially been working for free for the last two days due to under bidding the project from the beginning. Welcome to the wonderful world of Flat Rate ladies and gentlemen.  Re seating the trailing arms goes surprisingly smoothly despite having to re tap one of the holes again. Once attached we begin going over the car checking torque specs on everything we've wrenched and bleed the brakes.  As soon as this bitch was off the lift I told Don to sit shotgun and hold on to his dick. I'm going to take this fucker for a test drive and set in the brakes. Luckily the huge parking lot of the software company across the street was empty because people with white collar jobs are essentially attending adult day care and can't be bothered to come in to work within a fortnight of a holiday.  Like most British luxury cars first gear in the Jag is set higher than your narrator is now. Which is to say that it isn't exactly easy to do a burnout in one of these things. Though once I got it into second and gave it the beans at three thousand RPM the car came alive and the rear end made a wonderful amount of noise as I pulled it through my makeshift autocross course.  At the end of the day this car did the impossible and made me fall if not in love at least in lust with it again. It's an incredibly posh car with one of the best interiors I've seem come out of England. It's a pleasure to drive and despite the fact that it won't win any drag races it owns the highways as a grand tourer. I never really liked this body style when it was new or coming into adolescence, but now that the car has matured it is a striking example of British design. I just wish they'd put half as much thought into the serviceability of the car as they did in the brass and oak inlay in the steering wheel.  Don and I drove the Jag back to the showroom and promptly went into our boss' office and demanded raises along with more autonomy to run our department the way we see fit lest we gently caress off back to my shop to work for ourselves. He acquiesced to all our demands and we left with a cash Christmas bonus and parted ways for more that twelve hours for the first time in ten days. And now if you'll excuse me I need to conclude this jolly holiday tale and get myself to the bottom of a bottle of wine. James Woods fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Dec 25, 2013 |
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2013 09:05
|
|
|
A British Christmas miracle 
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2013 09:29
|
|
|
Ok I was jealous before but now I hate you. My dad and I had an '89 XJS Rogue edition, and I miss the hell out of that nightmare.
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2013 10:47
|
|
|
This thread is the best AI Christmas present ever.
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2013 11:20
|
|
|
I think the only mechanical devices to be found in Coventry that actually worked as intended for their design life were dropped by the Germans.
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2013 12:06
|
|
|
This thread fuckin' rules. May your drinks be merry, James Woods. 911 with Calvin livery 
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2013 12:19
|
|
|
God that Jag is GORGEOUS. I've thought about getting a 6-cyl model from that generation but the serviceability scares the hell out of me.
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2013 13:05
|
|
|
InitialDave posted:I think the only mechanical devices to be found in Coventry that actually worked as intended for their design life were dropped by the Germans. I'd object more to that but I work in electrical design 
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2013 15:06
|
|
|
Fantastic update, flawless narration and what a story. I never knew they put inboard brakes on any street cars.
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2013 16:03
|
|
|
James Woods posted:Welcome to the wonderful world of Flat Rate ladies and gentlemen. It's what sucks about the business, but at least you know now and won't make that mistake again. Too bad Jags are such a nightmare to work on because I'd love to own one 
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2013 17:28
|
|
|
meatpimp posted:This thread is the best AI Christmas present ever. This. Thanks for taking the time to post OP, loving it!
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2013 23:44
|
|
|
This thread is just amazing.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2013 05:42
|
|
|
Your acerbic wit brings these tails of dire automobiles to life, and for that, sir, I applaud the poo poo out of you. Seriously, double standing ovation; I'm clapping so hard my dick grew a little set of arms and is clapping too.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2013 06:29
|
|
|
God drat that post made my day.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2013 21:50
|
|
|
Holy hell this is amazing. The variety of bad rear end cars you get to work on... A few things. 1. Is that a fuckin' dana 44 center section I spy in the XJS? What exactly were they thinking? 2. I hate to be a pedant, but there's no such thing as grade 8 metric hardware. It's either ISO property class 8.8 (cheese, about the same strength as a grade 5) metric hardware or grade 8 SAE hardware. If it's metric threads and you need grade 8 strength, grab yourself some 10.9s or 12.9s. 3. Describe the issue with the M42 in more detail if you would... I don't know BMW EFI that well (if at all) but know my way around a few other makes and can truthfully claim to have solved a multi-year e21 electrical system nightmare within 5 minutes of looking at it. It was really simple, though, just needed a fresh set of eyes 
kastein fucked around with this message at 07:36 on Dec 30, 2013 |
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2013 07:24
|
|
|
Good place as any to ask, but how hard is it to get parts for 70s and 80s or even 90 exotics? That Diablo earlier had me wondering about that. Lets say you pick up a Countach or 512TR. Do new parts even exist still?
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2013 08:09
|
|
|
kastein posted:1. Is that a fuckin' dana 44 center section I spy in the XJS? What exactly were they thinking? Not a 44, IIRC, but the Jag diff was made by Dana for a few years.
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2013 11:22
|
|
|
It's possibly a Salisbury diff, the Salisbury company later becoming part of what is now Dana. I believe the XJS uses a relative of the 44, but there are different diffs used depending in the year. The Salisbury axle in Land Rovers is effectively a Dana 60.
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2013 13:36
|
|
|
slidebite posted:Good place as any to ask, but how hard is it to get parts for 70s and 80s or even 90 exotics? That Diablo earlier had me wondering about that. Lets say you pick up a Countach or 512TR. Do new parts even exist still? I can't imagine hiring a fabricator to custom machine replacement parts is any more expensive than buying factory Ferrari parts, so I doubt it matters that much...
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2013 22:23
|
|
|
James Woods posted:We want this fucker out of here because not only are we at our wits end but we've essentially been working for free for the last two days due to under bidding the project from the beginning. Welcome to the wonderful world of Flat Rate ladies and gentlemen. I read this and shouted "JESUS CHRIST!" so loud my roommate came in to see if I was ok. This thread kicks rear end so hard, and I love your shop.
|
|
#
?
Dec 31, 2013 02:11
|
|
|
Don't let the horrible design of the XJS dissuade you from an E-type restoration. Yes, they have inboard rear brakes, but, since it has wheel cylinders that are held on with 4 bolts, you can actually pull the cylinders & or brake pads without having to do that whole rear subframe drop. I managed to swap out all corners to stainless cylinders in a day, without a lift. The rotors, though will be a PITA. I was lucky to not have to do that based upon the mileage and condition of the rotors in the rear.
|
|
#
?
Dec 31, 2013 02:17
|
|
|
Legit question, got any plans for theDiablo head gaskets once out? I wanted a set for a wall hanging but found they were like a grand each new 
|
|
#
?
Jan 1, 2014 01:58
|
|
|
That was my life for years. gently caress. Just thinking about poo poo like that makes me so mad.
|
|
#
?
Jan 1, 2014 02:02
|
|
|
jamal posted:That was my life for years. gently caress. Just thinking about poo poo like that makes me so mad. Was it really that great before that though?
|
|
#
?
Jan 1, 2014 16:58
|
|
|
kastein posted:Holy hell this is amazing. The variety of bad rear end cars you get to work on... I'll take this one since it's my ride. The issue is twofold and we're 99% sure they're related. -First of all there's the surging at "idle". When there's no gas on and the car is in neutral, idle surges from 850 to around 3K continuously on about a 2 second cycle. -Any throttle input *at all* goes WOT. Huge pain in the rear end in slow traffic. We've tried several fixes, including a new throttle position switch. -We've used a MAF from an M20. The M20 MAF needed some dodgy homemade wiring adapter to work, but it was a partial success. The engine idled correctly until it reached operating temperature, but at that point started to surge, albeit at a much less violent rate and level. A small amount of throttle stopped the surge and returned the idle to normal. Throttle response seemed to coincide with the amount of pedal, ie not WOT for any and all gas pedal. *Drawback: ran EXTREMELY rich. poo poo gas mileage and black smoke out the back under heavy throttle. Seemed to be about the right amount of power, though. -Proper M42 MAF. Fast and violent surging at idle. WOT engine screaming at any and all throttle input. Power is great, and so is the fuel economy. We estimate ~35 to the gallon. Also, burnouts everywhere. So obviously we need to fix the throttle control and idle surge. I'd like to keep the good fuel economy and burnouts.
|
|
#
?
Jan 1, 2014 22:49
|
|
|
The answer to any and all 1980's/90's BMW fuel injection problems is Megasquirt.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2014 15:58
|
|
|
Moxie Omen posted:The answer to any and all 1980's/90's BMW fuel injection problems is Megasquirt. Never, ever, ever modify a not working fuel injection system. You'll end up with the same thing, now even more broken. Its better to fix it first, then modify it, otherwise you're chasing demons you may have made worse.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2014 17:27
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 05:18 |
|
|
DJ Commie posted:Never, ever, ever modify a not working fuel injection system. You'll end up with the same thing, now even more broken. Its better to fix it first, then modify it, otherwise you're chasing demons you may have made worse. This is sage advice from someone who has apparently also been on the wrong end of this one.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2014 18:07
|
|
