in place of R2: 
using the dead R2's base as an
adapter plate. Or buy: 
This car was also purchased for its parts, primarily the engine (for that mythical genset I want to build) and the Euro headlights. For some reason, I thought it was a non-turbo 300D until the day I showed up with the car trailer. I guess I can't read, but it was too late to back out then. Besides, the headlights were something I wanted.
The State thinks this is a 1971 vehicle. I don't know why, as I've found plenty of 1972 date codes printed on parts inside.
The car had been parked in a yard for several years. The house was foreclosed upon, and the car was abandoned there. The new owner wanted it gone, no surprise. Oddly enough, two different people I worked with are neighbors, and had independently told me about the heap since they knew I had some old MB's. The procurement process was lengthy, mostly because this was not very high on the new owner's priority list, and because the State had to get involved to declare the car abandoned. We settled on a price of $100 (my suggestion) since a very ratty similar car (but gasoline, and driveable) had sold at a local lowball dealer for $200. I might have been able to get it for less, on a just-make-it-go-away basis, but I wanted the paperwork too.
I don't know what I'm going to do with it yet, as it doesn't have the motor I wanted. One fellow here suggested I just bolt any random turbocharger to it and crank up the fuel, I ought to be able to eke out the few more horsepower I want that way, assuming it runs. The manual transmission is a plus, since I wanted to run the generator in 3rd gear to get the RPM's up a bit.
My wife was not too happy to find this sitting in the driveway. (I hadn't told her about it, since until the very end I wasn't sure that I'd actually be able to get the car.) She thinks we have too many cars already...
Somebody's been messing around. The heater plumbing is kaput, the (new-style) alternator is held in place with twisted 10-gauge wire, and all the valve cover (and related) piping is missing. (There are four 1/2" open boot connections in the area: valve cover, boot just before throttle plate, and two coming out of a fitting at the rear of the intake manifold.) The throttle linkage across the top of the motor isn't there. Also, the clutch drops to the floor and stays there. On the plus side, the heater fan works perfectly. The wiper motor works, and seems to have three speed settings on the stalk switch, rather than the two I am familiar with.
So, what do I have? Anybody familiar enough with what I've got to say just how much of the original 200D is there? Any thoughts on the suitability of this (240D?) motor to driving a 50 kW generator? Or should this be a fix-and-sell project? There is rust in the body, and plenty of dents.
I pulled the radiator and fan belt this morning, and turned the engine over with a wrench. No problem, some hissing and the cam turned. So I pumped the (leaky!) primer until I got fuel coursing around, hooked up two spare deep-cycle batteries in parallel to the car, and cranked her. The salt shaker got red, with about a 60 A draw, and then it cranked very slowly, with about a 350 A draw. The glow plugs go out when cranking, by the way. It did manage to cough a couple of times, but didn't want to start. I'm going to have to get a better battery situation if I want to start it that way, or maybe fix the clutch and tow-start it. And fix the primer pump, and probably purge the tank, etc...
Not sure what I should do with it. I don't know that a 615 motor will be usable for my genset idea. And the car needs just enough TLC to get back on the road that I don't know that I could recover my investment that way. Side mirror is gone, radiator looks shot, tires pretty crappy, etc. OTOH, the interior is quite tolerable.
"Dads! MBZ 200D. Safe, homely, durable, reliable, slow. Stick. Easy to work on. Perfect for your beginning driver. Make offer."
I had a small panic when the knob wouldn't shut the car back off, since I had no cooling system. But I just yanked on the levers on the IP and it shut off fine. I didn't have to rip off the fuel line. Obviously the linkages are out of whack.
Nobody has a clue what a 616 head on a 615.915 motor means, in practice?
So I'm probably off to the U-Pull again, to get an alternator plug off the '78. Also, the bottom pivot of the alternator is rubber-mounted and a bit wobbly. It looks (by eye) like the alternator support off a 617 will bolt on, which is a lot stouter. I may try this too.
I also need to get a Suburban bucket seat, for the BIL. FWIW, all five Suburbans I looked at were gassers.
Of invaluable help was my vintage 1971 Chilton's, Professional edition. Lots of good info in there, including distributor curves and a lot of stuff about the Hydrak(ula). Also manual and auto tranny rebuild information. But the wiring diagrams were what I needed today.
Now on to the radiator. And then the clutch. Then maybe I can get that heap off my trailer.
It may be that the heater was all disconnected because they had the radiator full of stop-leak. I'm hoping so, anyway.
I have also wedged rubber stoppers into the cut hose bits that used to go to the heater core. A stirrup of inner tube helps hold the stopper in, when clamped under the hose clamp that's holding the hose to the stopper. Really crappy arrangement, but enough to allow the car to run for now.
Which I did, for the first time since I got it. It idled well for several minutes, and never got very warm. Dunno if the thermostat is a little open, or whether an idling 615-oid just doesn't develop much heat. Regardless, I was able to play with it. (The alternator is working, yay!)
Interesting throttle arrangement. I'd always heard that the tube from the throttle butterfly to the injection pump was for idle speed regulation, but near as I can tell, it's the only means of varying fuel amount. That is, it's reacting to manifold vacuum much like a gasser would. The throttle pedal revs the engine nicely, and is only connected to the throttle butterfly. The only connection (currently) to the injection pump is the vacuum line. The ought-to-be-there mechanical link across the top of the engine is missing, and I'll need to fabricate one. (I have a too-short link from a 123 that I can extend.) Anybody know how long it ought to be, and what its purpose is? The shutoff and idle speed cables also don't work, big surprise.
There's also a 1/2" open fitting on the boot to the intake manifold. Unfiltered air enters there. Anybody know where that ought to be plumbed?
Guess I next ought to work on the clutch. If that were working, in theory I could drive this heap off of the trailer. That'd be nice.
The vintage Chilton's is being very helpful. In it were the length measurements of the three throttle link rods, of which I have only two. So I'll be able to fabricate one out of the 123 link I have, and maybe a framing nail. Love that welder! Tomorrow I anticipate putting back the Goo'd bracket, and making the throttle link. All that'll then be left (towards my goal of driving off the trailer) is the clutch hydraulic failure.
Thanks, Marshall, for the snippet of injection pump documentation. It clarified how this pump works. (Completely differently than what I'm used to.) FWIW, there is a rack damper spring in there, but it is internal, and non-adjustable. In fact, the missing throttle link is what is responsible for engaging the damper at idle.
Have fun with the clutch!
I'm hoping it's not too bad. I have a spare slave cylinder laying around somewhere. Filling the brake reservoir shut off the brake light, but didn't do anything for the pedal to the floor clutch behavior.
...potted the whole bracket in a big wad of Goo. The stuff didn't stick very well to other things, but it did stick to itself, so maybe the potting job will hold.So far, so good. I hooked the bracket back up this morning, and now the engine can be started and stopped from the dashboard knob! The Goo job seems stout enough to hold up.
So I'll be able to fabricate one out of the 123 link...Also went well this morning. The 123 link was about 7" long, and the Chilton's said it ought to be 12.1" long, so I went down to Smelly (123 woods car) and grabbed one of the door lock link rods, and cut about 5" of it out of the middle, and cut the 123 link in half. Then I welded the three pieces together, and ground the welds down, and painted the rod. Looks good, and works well. With that link in place, and some minor adjustments here and there, the idle speed knob on the dash now works well.
The car starts easily, idles well, and revs nicely. Oh, for a working clutch!
Looks like tomorrow I'll attempt to drive it off the trailer! Then maybe get out the shopvac and pressure washer and start to remove a lot of the squirrel residue, and maybe hose out the nasty-smelling trunk too.
Heady times!
This morning I cleaned the non-interior of the car, removing all the maple seeds and grunge I could from the exterior crevices, engine compartment, etc. The trunk got a thorough hosing. I scraped off the nasty window tinting (man, never do tinting yourself!) too. I took the car for a short drive, and it performed well. Got it up to about 65 MPH at one point, and no problems. Steering was tight. Didn't seem gutless at all, either. I just wound it out to the shift pips on the speedometer each time. Handled the washboard just fine, and was very torque-y. I only downshifted to 3rd going up our steep hill, and was doing about 25 MPH because of the washboard. The car held its speed, and was even able to accelerate once past the washboard.
The temperature needle rose about halfway to what ought to be normal on last night's bit of foolery, but after the wash this morning it never moved at all, even though the hoses were nice and warm.
The brakes still need some work, I'm hoping a good flush will do it. I only did one brake during the clutch episode, and had run out of fluid. I'm going to clean out the interior next, and then if I've got any sense I'll let it sit while I decide what to do with the car.
It ran great, IMHO. I kinda hate the idea of parting it out, but the rust is probably terminal. (But not for awhile yet.) It really would be good as a boy's first car, for the few years it has left. But my boy's only two!
I also reshaped (heat gun) a length of 1/2" tecalan I nabbed at the U-Pull yesterday, and hooked the two open holes in the breather system together. I hope they're happy together! And I installed two wiper blade assemblies from the U-Pull 116, which are the correct shorter length for the 115, and removed the 123 blade assembly I had there to protect the glass.
The door latches (strikers) got shots of WD-40, and they are now all operating properly.
I suppose tomorrow I'll clean the front seat area, and try to work on bleeding the brakes if I can remember to buy more DOT3 today. After that, assuming it goes well, I'd say the car will be in shape enough to drive anywhere, ignoring the legal issues. (Licensing, insurance, outside mirror.)
I'm starting to wonder if this might be a good WVO-mobile, I've been wanting to play with this, but didn't want to risk the Chicken Wagon since it's currently our backup sedan. There's lots of trunk room in the Frankenheap, I have an extra intact 123 fuel tank that could maybe sit in there. And if I put the other radiator in the heap I could run the fuel through the transmission cooler fittings for fuel preheating. Maybe I should grab the electric fuel pump off the 280SE at the U-Pull, I'm sure that would come in handy for filling up or something.
Got sidetracked at the passenger door switch, the dome light is always on (unless switched off), and the door switch was disassembled. Ditto with the glove box light. So, both of those are being repaired now, the glue should have set up by tonight. I haven't bled the brakes yet. But that's next after the interior lighting is straightened out. The hardboard back panel of the driver's seat was off and all curled up, so I soaked it down and am pressing it flat, with newspapers to soak up the water. We'll see if that goes well or not.
I'll have a new project soon, I just won a 40 kW genset for $404. Unknown condition. Propane-fired 6-cyl Hercules engine, Kohler 3-phase generator. Ought to be a nice mate to the Frankenheap's engine, if I go that way.
The glove box and interior lights now work properly, and all that is reassembled. The seatback panel is gluing up now, and ought to go back in tomorrow. I probably need to go through the instrument pod (lights, mostly) once too. But otherwise she's nearly done.
Anyway, it worked well, and to dress it up for the party I'd tied a small toy chicken where the missing hood ornament ought to be. Didn't get much comment on it though. Disappointing.
It was dark enough on the return trip to turn on the lights, not that we really needed them. Hmm, the instrument lights are out, as is one low beam. More work!
A fun incident happened on the return trip: We entered our driveway to find a deer in the flowerbeds. My wife hates this. A lot. So I lit out after the deer in the car, honking the horn and revving the engine madly as we raced through the yard. The deer doubled back on the access road around the house, and so did we. We bounced along having a great time terrorizing that deer. My wife enjoyed it ('cause of the deer), and my son enjoyed it ('cause we were driving through the yard). I enjoyed it too. A great time was had by all.
Except for the deer.
The hacked-in floor shifter was completely missing the reverse lamp switch, but I had an extra and screwed it in place. Not wired in yet, of course. I wonder where the old column shifter switch is/was? I had to use the jigsaw to cut the hole in the console plate a bit larger to make room for this. Another bit of butchery had the emergency flasher switch screwed into a hole in the side of the console, by your knee. The knob was also missing. And there were two plugs in the holes in the faceplate of the console, where I suppose that switch (and something else?) ought to have been. I moved the flasher switch to the console plate, and moved the metal cover to the hole in the side, but I'll still need a red-dot knob I guess. I thought I had a spare, but no. The flashers do work, if you have good strong fingernails and can pull it out.
Using alligator clips, the Hirschmann works properly with the Alpine stereo, so I'm in the process of splicing wiring and physically mounting the Hirschmann. The Hirschmann is a lot quieter than the Audiovox was.
I've bypassed the length switch provisions, so the Hirschmann is full-out or full-in only. Though I have the dash switch, it doesn't match the other controls in the 115 and offers little value in a non-convertible, besides being more work. (Antenna whistle is noticeable in those, so just-enough antenna extension is desirable.)
The yellow nylon rope that was holding up the muffler is gone. I welded some 1/4" wire to the tailpipe, and bent some hooks in it. A couple of standard rubber donuts (used) finished the job.
The rock pip in the (Euro) headlight has been filled with clear epoxy. Not as invisible as I'd hoped, but it's watertight at least.
I had a set (3-1/2) hubcaps laying around, in brown, which are now on the car. The bent fourth would work well enough for this POS, after a bit of hammering, but it's missing three of the four spring clips. I guess I'll have to come up with some, or another cap.
The car is pretty much done. Still need another headlight bulb (R2 base, #7951?), and an outside mirror head, but otherwise it could be licensed and driven. If winter came I'd have to hook up the heater core, I guess. Certainly not a problem right now. I suppose if puddle season came along I'd need to flatten some beer cans to cover the holes in the floorboard corners. Wouldn't want to get a road-shower!
Maybe I'm not that done after all, but I'm tired.
While there, I noticed that the check strap mount had rusted away from the rest of the door, which explained why the door would open so far even with a mostly-intact check strap. So I got out some scrap sheet metal (from an old microwave, 0.022" or about 25-gauge) and had at it. I smacked the metal back into rough plane with a BFH, and then bridged over the rust with the metal, using my MIG welder. I made quite an ugly mess, but it's in the hinge area and behind the interior panel. It's also plenty strong enough. A little rattle-can black paint and I was done. Should last a year or two, easy. I also bridged over a rusted through place down where the bottom of the front track for the window attaches. That's a bit stiffer now, but the whole bottom of the door is pretty bad through there. The rubber seal doesn't have anything behind it along the bottom of the door. Good enough for now, I guess. I had to install a new plastic moisture barrier. As with almost all older cars, some bright boy has figured out that it must not be necessary and has removed it. Which is completely wrong if you don't want the fiberboard door panel to turn into mush.
I put in an entirely-intact check strap from my spare parts pile while I was there. It was intended for the Ebola Fishtank, but I suppose I can find another one sooner or later. I hate pot metal...
The hubcap from the care package was even the same color (but less faded) than the three good ones I had on the car, so I don't have to hammer my fourth one into shape. So now it's looking fairly presentable, if brown caps on a gray car can be described that way.
The 200D behaves well on the freeway. Plenty of power it seems to me. I wouldn't call it underpowered at all. Certainly not over-powered, of course. It was able to hold speed, and even accelerate, up the hill west of Spokane. It's a bit noisy at speed, but I do still have holes in the floorboards, and the panel under the driver's side of the dash is missing. There may also be an exhaust leak, I've not looked for one yet. Also there's plenty of wind whistle, but I have a lot of sharp metal edges that aren't normal.
One scary thing was that as I got off the freeway I heard a nasty-sounding intermittent squeaking. Which I found was not coming from the front of the engine, as in water pump or alternator, but the rear of the engine, around the injection pump area.
Y'know, I'd been meaning to check the OEL level in that thing... After the inspection I headed off to the nearest qwik-ee-mart to buy some overpriced oil. Damned thing took most of a quart! But the squeaking stopped. Dunno what permanent harm I may have done it, but it was stupid. I had just forgotten to do this, I should have done it when I first thought of it instead of putting it off. There's a reason they switched to engine-oiled pumps shortly after this car was made!
Also out were the courtesy light, and the trunk light. All these had been working recently. The door switch had popped apart due to failed rivets, I was able to screw it back together, and now the courtesy light works again. The trunk lamp was just corroded, jiggling it brought it back.
While I was at it, I unfroze the heater valves. Liberal doses of PB Blaster loosened them right up. I flushed quite a lot of packed dirt and crap out of them too, as they are open to the elements. They move easily now. Maybe too easily, it could be that they'll leak. We'll find out when I finally get around to plumbing the heater back to the engine. Someday.
I think the car needs new motor mounts, I'm getting a lot of intermittent motor-buzzing-on-frame-rail sounds. Maybe later.
It blew warm air at me on the way to work, and doesn't seem to be leaking. Even the (very loose) heater valves. All the heater controls act as they should.
You take a working heater pretty much for granted these days, but just try driving a couple of weeks in cold (and getting colder) weather without one to learn to appreciate it.
The to-do list is getting pretty short these days. I still want to switch to my less-good radiator, and do a cooling system flush and refill. And maybe weld up some of the holes in the floor. I need to sew up a couple of passenger seat seams. And if I trip over some non-etched side glass someday... But today she just entered the realm of a practical daily driver. Ahhh.
The coolant level was low on the Frankenheap this morning. I'll give it one fill-up, before I assume that the heater core is leaking. After all, there could have been a big air bubble in there. There were no signs of external leakage, and without the heater plumbed in there had been no coolant loss.
It's also eating brake fluid, on the rears. I know I've still got some work to do there.
Nearly 200 miles on this (first) tank of fuel, and it's still well above 1/2 on the gauge.
The car's been a pretty good daily driver this last month. I'm 320+ miles into its first full tank of fuel, and we're still a bit above 1/4 on the fuel gauge. Good mileage I think, but not stellar.
On the plus side I got the 'new' temperature gauge installed. I swapped the °C face from the broken gauge onto it. The trick to removing the needle was to use two spoons to pry up on it at the shaft. I put the probe into a pan of boiling water and stuck the needle back on at the 100 °C mark.
On the minus side one of the front brake calipers is leaking badly. So I stopped by the U-Pull and picked up (off the ground!) a caliper from the 240D (123) that's currently there. (That was easier than liberating one from my 123 parts car, as I knew the calipers were loose on the ground at the yard.) I hope it will substitute. The leaky caliper currently has Kroil on its to-be-removed fittings, and I'll try to tackle it Tuesday.
Finally, I'm on my way. Putting in the block heater itself was easy at this point. Cripes what a PITA this was. I don't ever want to do this again. But if I have to, I'll know to get out the big guns immediately.
But I'm not done yet, because as I start to reassemble the motor it turns out that the throttle linkage now runs smack into the block heater. Crap. But I was able to bend the linkage into a big curve so as to sweep over the top of the heater. It seems to work right, but a real test is still some time away.
Of course I'm still not done, because the episode with the weed burner had partially melted the tecalan hose from the throttle butterfly to the injection pump. Not something you can do without, unless you want no throttle, or maybe a runaway engine. I cut out the mangled section of line and replaced it with a section of metal brake line, which fits snugly inside the pipe. I hope this will work.
And since I was there, I removed the alternator pulley and moved the spacer washer from the back, where it was putting the pulley out of the correct plane, to the front where it merely keeps the nut from running out of threads at the back of the shaft. This little annoyance has been bothering me for awhile.
Out of time. More tomorrow morning (I hope).
I did plug in the new block heater, and I could hear the gentle sizzle of it operating. At least that has seemed to work out. I still have a brake caliper leak, and I really need to do at least a bit of welding so I don't lose the front bumper, but all things in time.
The car drove to work just fine.
The car feels 'right' to drive again.
I also wired into the car a cheap Harbor Freight battery charger, hooked to the block heater's short extension cord. This is wired in turn, via a relay, to the blower fan's low speed. So, now when the car is plugged in the blower comes on low automatically. All that remains is to rig some kind of heating element in the air intake plenum. That, and actually hook up a small battery charger to the battery while I'm at it. I bought one of Harbor Freight's small battery tenders for this purpose, but that'll come last.
To mount the relay I took a spare 123 relay box and found a spot between the battery and the fuse panel where it would fit. I hammered two slots into the inner fender wall with a small cold chisel for its mounting ears to tuck into. (Just like in a 123, but less cleanly. And without the mounting screw on the other side. But good enough for this car.)
The relay isolates the motor power from the car so that it doesn't power up the 'ignition' while it's at it. The blower motor, and its speed controlling resistors, are available right on the top of the firewall above the brake booster. It couldn't get easier than this!
At lunch time the car just got its second full fillup, at just over 400 miles. I calculate it at 26.1 MPG. This is a mix of driving, but probably not more than 50 freeway miles. Mostly commuting to work, and lunchtime errands. The needle was again on empty, and the light never came on (but the bulb's good). Just over 15 gallons, at $2.25 per. It'd be nice to know what the 115 tank is supposed to hold.
The (replaced) temperature gauge was reading about 70 °C today. I don't know if it's right, or whether the termostat opens a bit early, or whether it's supposed to be down there. I'll shoot it with the IR thermometer some time to find out about the gauge.
I removed the air intake cowl in order to determine how to put the heating element in there. I used a 2" hole saw to cut a hole in the firewall through which I will fit the element. The heating loop needs to be bent around some to fit in there without getting too near anything, especially the don't-fail-me-now fan. I may need to rig some supports too, because the heating element is 'soft'.
But I ran out of time, and put the wiper blades back on temporarily, leaving the cowl open.
It's still getting the air duct too hot near the element, however. I think I have to spread out the heating element over more area, it's too coiled up right now. Maybe I'll cut the mounting flange in half and loop it down past the fan (but not too close!) and mount the other end on the other side of the car. I need to maximize the airflow across the element, right now too much heat is wasted, and is building up in bad places.
A dark day, however. While milling around the front of the car I found that the 'good' Euro headlight had eaten a rock, and was shattered! The chrome surround was holding it all together and I hadn't lost any pieces, but she's no longer pretty. I took out the lens (pieces) and epoxied them back together. How nice. And I thought the little rock pip in the other side was bad. I know you can, theoretically at least, get new glass lenses for these Hella lamps. I did so when I destroyed the Euro lens on the Unimog. The Mog 'dealer' was able to get it via the Hella part number cast into its mate. The price wasn't even too bad for the Mog part, but I wonder what this would run to if I were to fix it.
On the plus side, since I had the light all apart I took a look at fitting H4 bulbs into the R2 fixtures. (As you may recall, I'd stolen an R2 bulb from the Unimog in order to get the car on the road. R2 bulbs aren't too easy to come by around here, and their performance is nothing to write home about anyway.) Near as I can tell by eye the flange-to-filament spacing is the same for R2 and H4 bulbs. The inter-filament spacing looks to be about the same too. It would make sense that this be so, as the R2 bulb is the parent of the H4. The mounting ears on the flanges are different, however.
So I took my severely burnt-out R2 bulb (normally I'd throw away old light bulbs, but I've kept the bad R2's for experiments such as this) and de-soldered the mounting flange from the bulb base. With a little bit of reaming the H4 bulb then fit through the hole in the flange and the top of the H4 bulb base snugly wedged into the flange. A little bit of filing and the three H4 ears then had slots in the R2 flange to drop into. Voila! The H4 bulb is now sitting in almost the same plane as the R2 did, inset into the fixture only by the thickness of the R2 flange's sheet metal. (Not far, that is, and substantially less than the filament's dimension on this axis.) I had to nip half of the two smaller ears off the H4 bulb's flange in order to fit the spring collar of the fixture over the bulb assembly. Putting both the R2 and the trimmed H4 bulbs into the Euro fixture yielded similar views of the filaments in the reflector. Applying power to both bulbs on the bench resulted in similar light patterns on the wall. The H4's was brighter, of course.
The H4 is now what's in the car, if it proves out at night I'll be able to return the R2 bulb to the Unimog. As they burn out I'll probably convert them all to H4's. Those are commonly available around here, unlike R2's. They're brighter, too, and are available in higher wattages if you want to go that way. I later found that halogen R2 replacements (HR2's) are available through Daniel Stern Lighting, but the adapter flange, though a bit time-consuming to create, will be less expensive in the long run. Had I found these HR2's first, however, I'm sure I'd have just bought some.
Use H4: in place of R2: using the dead R2's base as an
adapter plate. Or buy:
Some quotes from Stern's site:
| H4: | These 2-filament bulbs with P43t base are for high/low beam headlamps and Cibie BiOscar fog/drive beam lamps. Fun facts: The H4 was the world's first 2-filament halogen automotive bulb. It was introduced in Europe in 1971, and was used in many millions of European and Japanese headlamps starting in that year, but wasn't legalized in the US (where it was designated HB2 or 9003) until over two decades later, in 1992! |
| HR2: | H4 halogen bulbs on P45t base. Upgrade your vintage European headlamps to modern-car light levels! These updated halogen bulbs fit and work correctly in all 1950's through 1980's European high/low beam headlamps originally equipped with tungsten R2 bulbs. Light output is much higher, life is much longer. |
Got about three inches of snow overnight, though it's not frozen to the car since temperature is just at freezing. While the block heater was running (why not, after all?) I fabricated a rough elliptical tube out of galvanized sheet metal (flashing left over from the SDL's belly pan fabrication) to encase the plenum heating element. This should cut down a lot on the radiant heat getting parts of the car too hot. I shaped the end of the tube into an elbow pointing at the fan blades. That should also shield the blower motor itself, as well as the fan blades, from 'seeing' the hot element. The other end is just open. The tube is slotted to go over the element, and two ears are welded to the tube to bolt to the element's base. About the time I was installing this assembly into the car, the entire engine was noticeably warm to the touch. The block heater seems very functional.
With the encased preheater in operation things stay much cooler in the area. The windows became warm enough to melt the snow as it fell, and there was no longer a bad 'hot' smell inside after extended operation. There was much less waste heat in the air cowl area, and though the element is getting hotter than it did indicating somewhat less airflow across the element, the net effect is positive. I think this heat shield will be very satisfactory. I plan to button the air cowl back up next. Then, on to other things!
Time will tell if this didn't work. But I needed to get ready for work, so I put the grille back on and replaced the wipers. I was really pretty wet and cold by this time as my coat was soaking through. BRRR.
Now I've got to find another caliper that fits. Needs to be cheap, but it can be in need of a rebuild since I've already got the kit.
Examining the brace first, I found that the captive nut from the 'frame' had pulled out of the frame, taking a divot of frame sheet metal with it. I wire-brushed the nut and the area, and pressed it back into the hole. It fit well. Using a magnet to hold it in place I tack-welded one side in with the wire-feed MIG. I then removed the magnet and ran a bead around the whole thing. I then ground the weld down fairly flat so the brace could bolt back on right. Voila! That at least was easy.
The other end of the brace, the main bumper hanger, was in much worse shape. Battery acid and road salt had pretty much eliminated all sheet metal in the area. The bumper was well bolted to this flange, which was just hanging out in space. What I did was to wire-brush the area, then wedge the bumper into approximately the right position. I then took some scraps of thick sheet metal and welded them between the flange and the remaining sheet metal in the area. It's not very strong, but it's certainly better than what was there. The bumper itself flexes more than the mount does, so I'd call it a success.
It should be noted that the other side of the bumper mounting is mostly rust-free. The lack of a battery in the area helps, as does the oil coating the area got from the oil-bath air cleaner located just above. There's something to this 'English undercoating' thing, methinks!
The final step was to weld the already-had-been-welded-by-somebody-once end of the brace back onto the flange. I bolted the one end back to the frame and bent the other against the flange, then welded it back. Whatever metal the other end used to bolt to was long gone. The final step was to rattle-can some black paint all over the place. There, done! All the welds are fairly crappy, because I am not a good welder. But on this car it hardly matters, and this is all out-of-sight stuff anyway. I didn't want to have the bumper drop off the car in a pothole someday, and I needed some stable metal in the area for when I add the auxiliary lighting.
Remaining to weld on the car are the great gaping holes in the fronts of the rocker panels. The visuals are disturbing, and there is road noise coming in them. I'm also worried about splashing. I've got some sheet metal (microwave oven covers) I can put over the holes. Classy!
That glass was difficult to get out. I hope I have better luck installing it.
On the way to work the braking was much improved! It pulls a little to the new side now, so I may go ahead and swap out the other front caliper. Or at least bleed it again. Regardless, I'll go over the other side of the car's brakes next.
At the U-Pull today at lunchtime, besides picking up some commissioned items for fellow listers, I found a few goodies for myself. Main items are a set of Kangol seat belts for the rear seat, a brass radiator (rather than the aluminum/plastic one from a 123 that's wedged in there now), and a thermostatic clutch and fan. The latter ought to slightly improve fuel economy. The seat belts will be nice in that I can then move the baby seat to the back, for the odd times when I've actually got the kid with me in my work-commute car. The original radiator, by now determined to be completely kaput, was returned to reclaim the core charge for this new one.
Speaking of fuel economy, so far this second tank of fuel (now at the halfway mark) is beating that of the first tank. As an experiment, and to help clean the cobwebs out, the first tank was driven mostly in third gear. This second tank I'm upshifting to fourth at anything over 30 MPH (most driving), much as you would with a gasser. (I do floor it at all times until I reach cruising speed.) It may be that this diesel, with a throttle butterfly, exhibits some of the gasser tendency to consume proportionately more fuel at higher RPM's with the same work level. One theory is that this is due to the work required to pull a vacuum against the throttle plate.
Or maybe it's just happier being driven. Or maybe it has something to do with the bottle of Chevron diesel injector cleaner I dumped in it. More time will tell.
While I was there, I replaced the duct-taped broken vacuum line to the injection pump with one from the U-Pull 220D, and I replaced the vacuum line to the brake booster with the U-Pull 300D's, which has taps for accessories. (I'm working towards getting a cruise control installed.) I rigged up a vacuum gauge off the tap so I could see it as I drove to work, as I wanted to keep an eye on the vacuum level to see if the pump is good. All appears fine, the vacuum pumped down to 24" over several seconds, and nothing bad happened on the way to work. Braking was perfectly fine, the caliper change has removed most of the pull during braking. The gauge would dip when the brakes were released, which is to be expected.
I did notice that I need a new tie rod on one side, one of its ball joints is a bit loose. Next time I go to the U-Pull I'll see what I can liberate.
The other project this morning was to wash the filthy seat belts I got. A bucket full of soapy warm water did the trick, and they're hanging out to dry. I can install them tomorrow, I think.
I must add that while I was working on the Frankenheap this morning, I had plugged in the preheater system. Not only was the block nice and warm by the time I went to work, but the car was all lukewarm inside and the windows were totally clear.
The only thing better would be an Espar or Webasto fuel-fired preheating system. That would work anywhere, but would probably cost more than the $35 I spent on this system.
One bad thing is that I found the rear footwells to be small lakes. Obviously this car leaks in the rain, which I had suspected for some time. Oh joy, another project. For now I've pulled the rear carpets.
At the U-Pull today at lunchtime, besides picking up some Christmas presents for my brother, I found a few more goodies for myself. I picked up a fuel sender, so that I can clean it out and make sure its low-fuel lamp contacts work. Then maybe swap it in later. I also got a tie rod, from which I can steal an end to replace my loose one. And, a really ratty set of US headlights, in case I ever want to sell the Frankenheap but keep its lights for the 250C. I think I've also got a warning buzzer, which I hope to rig to the lights. (I've already left them on once.)
I'm still eyeing that rear glass with defroster grid...
Today I also got eBay notification of winning auctions for an actual "200D" 115 trunk legend, and two euro headlight glasses. $42+ for all three items, shipped. Those will go a ways towards dressing the old girl up. I believe I will keep the glasses in reserve, the existing broken-and-glued rock-eaters can continue to eat rocks this winter.
I plugged in the preheater system after I was done working on the car, to run while I got ready for work. It got to run for less than an hour, and it wasn't enough to fully clear the windshield of ice. I think the 900 W air heater is a close match for the engine block heater, in terms of running time per effect. Both want to run for more than an hour (but less than two) to have maximum effect. (I should have plugged in the car while I was working on it, but I needed the extension cord for the work light I was using.) I cleared out a garage bay, so I'll be parking inside for awhile, and oughtn't need the preheater then.
The next project might be the driving/fog lights. But nothing more will be done for a little while as we've got to prepare for the holidays.
...I got a quote for professional installation (all parts supplied by me) for $150! This from the glass place that the local dealership farms their jobs out to. Maybe I need to learn to do this myself, eh?
The euro bumper supports are just sheet-metal "T's" sprouting out of the front of the car, with holes in each side of the top for the bumper bolts. Using scrap steel, I welded a stout "C" shape to the inside rear edge of the T, set back a bit so that the bumper would clear. The ears of the C face forwards, the bumper itself sits in the channel. The T's flex from side to side a bit more than I'd like, so I welded a brace to the other edge of the C. The other end of this brace goes under the aforementioned radiator support bolt. The bracing results in the whole bumper being much stiffer than before. I hate lights that jiggle.
This operation was repeated for the other side, then I applied a little bit of rattle-can black paint to the welds and bolted the bumper back on. The result is four nice stout little ledges to which I can bolt lamps. Two above the bumper and two below.
The other day I went on the freeway with the car, and the road slime was unbelievable. I really needed the windshield washer, but no dice.
But soft, what liquid over mine foot gushes? It is the frog, and truly it is but done.In the evening I had a few extra minutes, so I removed the leaking washer pump. These rubber 'frogs' are always leaking, and are no longer available, so I'm told. (Pity, because it's a pretty cheap-looking part. Ought to be a couple of dollars or thereabouts.) As usual, the skinny neck where the tube exits is rotted in half. The rest is in pretty good condition, though some small cracks are starting to form in the main body. I decided to glue it up so that it would be dry by morning. I cut some strips of bicycle inner tube, and used rubber weatherstrip cement to glue them over the cracks, and around the skinny neck. I also glued 'flashing' strips down the neck and onto the body to bolster the joint. Over all this I potted the joint in Shoe Goo, for strength, and set it aside to dry.
With the Dremel, I was able to gouge some ratty screw slots into the rusted screw heads that retain the rear fog lamp lens. With some 'crunching', these badly rusted screws came out of the plastic. Inside, it was in perfect condition, reflector and all. The bulb is intact and making good contact, yet the rear fog does not work. I guess I get to chase wiring problems. I used two drywall screws to replace the nearly-dead screws that were there. I may try some O-rings to keep corrosive crap out of the screw shaft holes.
Neither nozzle would deliver water to the windshield, big surprise. With the hose disconnected, the frog could pump water all over the place through the tubing. The driver's-side nozzle was only slightly clogged, a session with a dental pick cleaned it out. The other side was a mess, and was really clogged. It was difficult to work on while on the car, so I removed it. The trick here is a piece of hard tubing of the right size to push upwards from below. The tubing compresses the mounting ears, and the thing pops right out of the hood. I used some washer cutters I had, which are sharpened tubes in a range of diameters. I just picked the one that fit best.
On the bench, I can see that the plug is a bit of steel! Somebody was trying to clean it out and broke off a needle in there. I messed with it for awhile trying to pick out the obstruction before giving up and liberating a spare nozzle assembly from my junkbox. (It had come off my wife's 450 SL when it got a heated washer nozzle upgrade, and seems to be an exact match.)
With this taken care of, and the tubing flushed of old crap, the washers then both worked. A quick session with the dental pick aimed the washer streams, and I was done. Except for the leak.
Finally, I removed the still-leaking frog and dried it out. Then, I cut the collar off of the plastic tube so that it could be inserted into the hinge of the pump mechanism from the other side. Then, I glued the tube into the neck using weatherstrip cement, assembled the pump and reinstalled it. I didn't replumb it because I need to let it dry first. I plugged the water hose with a fat nail so all the fluid wouldn't siphon out. Later today, or maybe tomorrow I'll reconnect the tube and see how it goes.
...Did try it out, and got my feet wet for my trouble. I had tried to only lightly glue the tube into the neck, so that it could be removed if necessary. But that leaked, so it was time to bring out the big guns. Also, the tube kept popping off and geysering the under-dash area with nice blue wash. When I got home, I removed the frog again and sluiced out all the moisture with acetone and blew it dry. Then I potted the whole tube joint area with Shoe Goo. That'll hold! (I did it at night so that it would be dry enough to install in the morning. That tube's never coming out again, but I guess it doesn't really need to, either.)
Not everything always works out properly the first time, as should be obvious by now. The fog light wiring cleverness is one example. The virtual ground for the new fog light relay works well on my wife's SL, because the only fog lights are relay-controlled. However, on this car I didn't disturb the existing fog lights, so they act as a virtual ground when the high beams are on! This means the auxiliary fog lights come on with the high beams unless the original fog lights are on. Bummer. This morning I cut the virtual ground lead from the fog relay and inserted a diode, so that the high beams can't backfeed the relay through the old fog lights. All fogs are then on when they're switched on, and the auxiliary ones go out when the high beams are on. Now the lights all work properly.
...Except for the rear fog, so I took another stab at that. I checked more thoroughly, and indeed found +12 V back there when the rear fog was switched on. But the ground to the lamp was defunct. I dug into the wiring inside the trunk wall, and found a rusty ring terminal lying loose. I reconnected this to a nearby screw, and then the rear fog light worked again. I pulled the knob off the light switch and found the rear fog illuminator lamp burned out, so I replaced that too. Now the fog light system works perfectly. I reattached the lens using two O-rings under the screw heads, maybe this'll keep the new screws from having their shafts rust like the old ones did.
As a final touch, I dumped in a bottle of water sequestering agent (alcohol) that I picked up cheap at the liquidator's. This to match the bottle of injector cleaner I used already. That should finish off the car's snake oil regimen.
On the way to work I actually cleaned the windshield, and it worked! Finally I can see through this muck they spray on the roads. If only it would stay on the roads and off the cars...
It worked out well enough, though I didn't get the thing perfectly placed before it started to set up enough that I couldn't shift it anymore. And there's a crease down the middle. It'll do, however, especially considering that it's half decomposed already. And it does dampen the thrumming of the hood when it's manipulated, so I think it'll help cut some noise. This would have been much easier with the hood off the car and lying flat, but that's a big pain to do. If it had been a new liner, I think I might have gone that way. (Unlike the liner I put in the SDL, this car's hood won't go vertical, which was of considerable aid when doing the SDL.) I spent too much of the glue's working time fighting its dropping off the hood, and not enough positioning it. Vertical or upside down orientation would have prevented this. This job won't last very long because of the state of the foam, but it was easy and cheap to do, and I don't care that much either.
Yes, the new auxiliary lights are real POS's. While leaning over the engine to install the hood liner, I pushed against one of the new lights. SNAP! Broke clean off the base. What garbage. I knew they were cheap, but this is ridiculous. However, I actually had two sets of these (the original package fell off the shelf and broke a lens, so I replaced it at the next sale), so it was no biggie to swap lamp housings. At this rate, however, my spares won't last long! I definitely need to stay out of the automated car washes now.
Anyway, I disassembled the heat gun and removed the heating cartridge, which is a metal tube with the ceramic-mounted heating element inside it and a fan stuck on one end. I took a 10" section of 2" exhaust pipe I had laying around, and stuck it through the 2" hole in the firewall I'd made in the first place. I angled the tube and inset it so that its delivery end was well into the plenum so that the supplied heat would be taken up by the fan. I welded two washer 'ears' on the tube to line up with the water heater element mounting holes that were already there, and bolted it down. As a trial, I slipped the heating cartridge into this tube and turned it, and the rest of the car preheating system, on.
Letting it run awhile I felt around in the plenum, and as I'd feared the car wall off the end of the pipe was getting kind of hot. So I removed the pipe and cut the end off at 45 degrees, then I welded the cut-off piece over the end so that the exiting air has to take a turn by bouncing off the end of the pipe rather than the wall of the car. This causes the hot air to be aimed directly at the fan, which should prevent undesirable heat build-up.
I buttoned up the system and ran it for an hour or so, and it worked very well. The heating cartridge is still just sitting inside the tube, it will need to be secured better. Also, shrouding of the wiring needs to be done, it's too exposed. But this is all just simple mechanical fooling around that can be done with nothing more involved than having the hood up. Also, if this system fails it is very easy to get at to repair.
The original reason for using a down-rated water heater element was because it should take getting wet inside the air plenum. However, due to the exhaust pipe shroud in this version, the more delicate air heater of the heat gun is well-protected. I don't expect environmental issues to cause a problem, unless it's vibration.
The new used euro headlight glass came too. Though they are Hella like what's on there, the shape is subtly different. The originals are more rounded across the front, the new ones are flatter. I haven't tried mounting them to see that they really fit. That'll suck if they don't.
Since I was in the area, I finalized the air plenum preheater. After considering it overnight, and even though I really don't like the effect, I came to the inescapable conclusion that the best protection and mounting for the heat gun guts was the heat gun case itself! What cinched it was finding that the inside diameter of the plastic nose of the gun matched the outside diameter of the exhaust pipe segment. So I reassembled the heat gun, forced the nose piece onto the pipe, and then attached the nose piece (bayonet lock with retaining screw) to the heat gun. It's very solid, but it sure looks hokey. Works good, though. I used it this morning to good effect. We're having a cold snap, and it's well below freezing even in the garage now. Outside it was 8.8 °F when I left for work. (For insurance I threw jumper cables and a snatch strap in the trunk, to go with the boots, overalls, flashlight, tools, and gloves.)
The only remaining unfinished part of the car preheating system is the battery charger. I have it, but space is getting limited in the area. I think I can combine the guts of the two battery chargers into one box. Unfortunately due to the way the circuitry worked out I can't use only one to do both jobs. I'm going to think harder about this, though.
This was very tedious, there were a lot of holes. I didn't try to restore the correct (and complex) configuration of sheet metal in the rocker panel area. I just covered the crack/hole from the inside with one piece of metal, and then covered over the bottom of the rocker to keep water and dirt out. Some hammering resulted in a presentable profile to the new metal. The remaining time was spent tying this all together so that it was (I hope) watertight from the outside. I did leave a drain crack at the trailing edge of my new metal.
There were also two holes in the door sill on top, so I removed the door to gain access, and covered them up with strips of metal.
With this done, I buttoned up the car again. This entailed painting all the welds, putting back removed trim strips, both inside and out, gluing back down the sill cover, putting back the door, etc. I also put in a new U-Pull plastic splash shield to replace the one that was missing. All of this work took all day, dark-to-dark. Very tedious, but I hope worth the effort when it comes to drying out the interior of the car and cutting out drafts, dirt, and noise. It should extend the life of the car a year or two, easy.
It became obvious that I needed to put in large strips of new metal here, since the rusty metal was too rotten for clean welding, but the microwave oven lid is just too hard to work with, and really is too thin (0.022" or about 25-gauge) for easy welding. So I caved in and went to the hardware store to buy some 16-gauge weldable steel sheet. This stuff is much easier to weld cleanly into place. Also, I'd used enough microwave oven to be able to advertise the fact!
Once back on the project, I put in two strips that took me down to the beginning of the rocker panel. By then, it was dark again, but I'd gotten enough done to feel some small sense of accomplishment. There's a long ways yet to go, though.
I started a number of small fires inside, btw, from residue of the firewall insulation. A small can of water was useful to douse the area from time to time to keep from destroying the car! That'd suck.
The firewall, at least, I now consider to be more than well repaired so far as strength goes. It's almost a job to be proud of. Good thing, because the rest of the welding won't be, I think.
I was only able to get this far, plus do some wire brushing and cleaning of the rust back along the floor corner before I ran out of time (it being a workday and all). This side is going to take much longer to do, that's for sure. Days, easily. I hope to be done by the next weekend, though.
So that I could drive the car, I threw the carpets back in to cover the hole, and installed the other plastic splash shield I'd gotten at the U-Pull. The old metal shield is badly rusted, so I think I'll be going with the plastic one. I had to use the heat gun to un-bend the shield, since it had come from the crunched side of the car I got it from.
With this auspicious start, I began bridging the crack in the sill with new metal, starting at the rear. I was able to get two strips installed this morning before I ran out of time. The welding beads don't look too bad, even where they tie into the heavy (and rusty) seam at the bottom. I used a lot of wire to burn out the rust along the bottom before I sealed it up. (I don't know how 'sealed' it might actually be, but it's certainly strong enough now.)
From here, though, it's going to get slower as there's a lot more missing metal as you run forwards in the car.
There's still quite a lot left to do on the outside, since I have to close up the holes into the rocker panel area. And there's a lot more hole than rocker, I think! There's a good chance I'll be able to finish on Saturday, though.
It's still wet, so the towel was put back over the remaining holes in the floor for my drive to work.
I filled up again at lunch, 440 miles and exactly one month since last time. Still only getting 28.6 MPG, I really need to look at the thermostat and cooling fan to see if I can nudge it up a bit...
I also welded in a strip of my microwave oven material to form the first of the bottom of the rocker panel curve at the front of the car. This thinner metal, though a pain to weld, is thick enough to do the job, and bends into a relatively smooth curve much easier.
There was one setback: I was underneath the car pecking away with a small hammer on the U-channel that goes under the floor, dislodging (by vibration) all the dirt and rust that was in there and letting it fall out of the holes that are there to keep it drained. A whole lot of crap came out of there, more than should fit it seemed to me. Then I noticed light coming out the drain hole. WTF? I got out and looked in the car, and found a hole cratered in the floor. Apparently the channel clean-out came a few years too late! The floor was rotted away above the channel, and had only been held in place by the asphalt covering. So I pulled off chunks with my fingers until it got solid again. Now I've got another hole to repair inside the car, so I'm not done there. I went to the store to get more black paint, and another sheet of thick metal. The thin stuff is too hard to work with for this kind of repair. (Flat, rusty, no curves required.) I shouldn't need very much of it, but it never hurts to have some extra on hand.
That and the crater in the floor.
I'm just about out of shielding gas (again!), I expect to run out tomorrow or the next day. I've got a bad habit of building up weak spots out of bead, much as you'd fill in a hole that you accidentally punched in the sheet metal (of which I do plenty!), and that really consumes time, which consumes gas. (And wire, of course.) I need to break this habit! It's so much less expensive (and probably faster) to just splice in a little snippet of new metal...
I then cut a big piece of microwave oven lid to fit this hole, and trimmed it to size. Next I bent it into the rough shape required, and wire-brushed off the paint from all the edges where I will be welding. (Cleaning off the paint is the worst part of using used sheet metal.) Time was getting short, so I just spot-welded it in place to keep the rocks out of the open hole. I'll weld it into place properly tomorrow.
Unless I run out of gas halfway through.
The empty bottle sits nicely in the car where the passenger seat used to be! I'll fill it up again today at lunch.
I do still have to put the car back together, of course. But I've been driving it all along, and I drove it in to work today. (I had the day off, but I needed to come in to get money to buy my next car[s] this weekend.)
But the baby powder stinks enough (pew!) I didn't try it again to see if it was better. On the way to work this morning, I think the wind noise was less, as it seems more equally distributed left and right than before.
I also used some more rubber strips (and weather strip glue) to tie together a couple of tears on the bottom seals of the doors. Considering the age of this car, the seals are actually in very good shape.
I pulled the (cracked) ring hood ornament (no center) from the new 115 parts car, and epoxied it together with a center star (from another hood ornament) that had been found in the Frankenheap. I used JB Weld, of course. The result looks perfectly passable, especially if you don't look closely. Because the star was pinched into the divots in the ring pot metal where the original star came out, it should be fairly secure, provided the epoxy holding the ring back together doesn't let loose.
I decided to spend the afternoon at the U-Pull, and grabbed the front three motor mounts off the 220D that was there. (About $5 for all three, in decent condition.) I had to pull the hood and the engine to get them, but that was pretty easy at that point, using one of their portable hoists. There was a new '75 450SE there from which I got an intact (though mildly corroded) trunk star.
Today's fillup yielded 30.7 MPG! Finally I broke 30, and this was no doubt due to several extra freeway trips into town. Which extra mileage is also responsible for it only having been three weeks since the last fillup instead of a full month.
With this done, it was off to the U-Pull again, to pick up the clutch master cylinder and the not-quite-fully-decomposed driveline center bearing support off the 220D hulk. I expected to notice that the new mounts made a difference.
Wow. Yeah, it's different! It transforms the car, and raises the priority of dealing with the remaining noise problems, namely the wind leak and the driveline center bearing support. With those tackled, and if it had cruise control, there'd be nothing preventing this car from being suitable for a long road trip.
I also picked up the seat covers from the upholstery shop. They'd stitched closed both open seams ($20), but they'd forgotten to renew the stitching (like quilt stitching, really) that runs down the middle of the seat panel, which ties it together and to the loops that poke through the cushion to be fastened below, keeping the whole plane taut. Rather than mess with this, I'll just get my sister-in-law to help me using my Mom's industrial Pfaff sewing machine to run a couple of stitches down these. This should be relatively unskilled labor, as opposed to closing up actual seams.
Yeah, the drive to work was quiet. On the way home I'll pull off the duct tape to see if it comes back. Should be pretty easy to narrow down. I may have to play some games with RTV and waxed paper to get a better seal. (The seal is intact, but probably hard and gapping. It looks good, but obviously [!] is not working well.)
The list of wanna-do's is getting kind of short, but so is the season for driving a winter beater! Soon it'll be time to move on to a different (and better) car.
The wretched things break off if you even look cross-eyed at them (though this morning's mistake was probably a bit much to expect any light to survive), I think they're all half glue by now.
I'm lucky that I didn't break the glass, I don't have any spares and it doesn't glue back together all that well.
I glued (using rubberized fabric repair cement) a canvas patch behind the crack on the top of the bottom passenger seat cover. This had actually punched through the fabric backing of the Tex. I then experimented with a vinyl patch repair kit I had, but the results weren't great. The repair, though complete and more or less the right color, is not really that strong, the crack kept coming back when the cover was flexed. It also looked a bit cancerous. Maybe more experimentation later will help.
I then reassembled the passenger seat. It's loads of fun to reattach the covers! I took some 1-1/2 foot long wire (leftover welding wire) folded it in half and threaded it through the loops on the covers. These ends were then poked through the holes in the pads, so that once the cover was partially in place the wire could be pulled to bring the cloth retaining loops through the holes in the pad to where the plastic retaining clips could be reinserted. Not really much fun, and kind of hard on the hands since you're in there fighting for turf amongst the seat springs.
I glued the one small tear on the back of the upper cover (where the seat back panel tucks in), rather than try to sew it back shut. It's small, and not too obtrusive. I think it'll hold. The complete seat was then set aside to dry.
The chrome trim strip that runs down the passenger side door sill interior was shot (mostly off, and all bent up), and I had earlier procured a replacement at the U-Pull. To install this replacement was a real PITA, since I had to remove the B-pillar trim, the rear seat bottom, and the side kick panel. (Which required in turn partial removal of the wind lace both front and back and the speaker.) While I was there I noticed a small rust hole in the door frame, so I welded that shut. Getting this all done and back together took a fair amount of time.
Extra fun: I had assumed that somebody had swapped the two seats, because the adjustment handles were on the outside, and because the tear on the passenger seat bottom cover corresponded exactly to where the worst wear on a driver's seat usually is. So I tried to swap them 'back'. No, that doesn't work! The seatback adjustment knob then runs into the center console tray. Obviously if there had been a swap in the past, it was more elaborate than just bodily swapping the entire seat. More than I wanted to mess with, so I just put the driver's seat back, and reinstalled the passenger seat too.
The carpets were put back in to finish it all off. Remaining for this year are the driveline bearing support, installing the non-fogged replacement side windows, and the clutch cylinder.
I estimated that I didn't have time this morning to also swap the rear door's windows, as that is a much bigger job, but I did remove the door panel, etc. in preparation for next time.
The worst part of this job is partially removing the glued-in window channel liner without ruining it. There is a screw for the rear quarter glass behind it, and I don't think you can rotate the sliding window the requisite 90° to remove it without pulling the lower guide (metal) out, which requires that it also be detached from the liner. Incidentally, the manual is wrong in that it says that the door weatherstrip must be pulled out in the area of that quarter glass retaining screw, but you don't need to (and shouldn't!) do this. Mine tore when I tried to ease it out of the channel, and I was rather peeved to find that I didn't have to do this anyway. I glued it back together so there's no real harm done.
Anyway, it went back together pretty straightforward but the window cranks noticeably more difficultly than it did before the operation, no doubt due to the abuse the window channel liner suffered at my hands. While I was there I vacuumed out the interior of the door to remove the water-retaining (rust-inducing) detritus. I also made a new plastic sheet to cover the access hole, since the original was missing. (How unusual!)
All that remains to do before it's about time to park the car until next winter are the driveline bearing support and the clutch cylinder. It's kind of too bad, because the car is finally becoming very pleasant to drive. But next winter it'll be very nice to use.
Before I got started on the driveline, I shot all the relevant bolts with PB Blaster. I also used a cold chisel to matchmark the two driveline halves. (I do learn, eventually!) The rear half of the driveline was fairly easy to remove. I removed the three mounting bolts to the flex ring, the two holding in the collar, and the brace for the spring return on the parking brake. Two pipe wrenches served to loosen the nut on the driveline itself. Then it was just a matter of prying and pulling to slip the shaft out to the rear. No real problem there. I left the front half in the car.
With the shaft out, I was able to drive the decrepit center support off the driveline by tapping with a hammer, after removing the circlip of course! Upon examination, the bearing from the car was in much better shape than the one from the U-Pull. It rotated quiet and smooth, versus the hard dry bearing sound from the other. (Though not yet ruined feeling, it was close to the edge I'm sure.) So, I used a wooden drift, a hammer, and an anvil to drive both bearings from their support collars. The 'good' bearing came out OK, with the seal only pressed in a little bit in spots. It wasn't damaged. The 'bad' bearing came out hard, and got its seal ruined in the process. No great loss, of course.
Anyway, I gently pried the seal out of the 'good' bearing, and then cleaned out the bearing with brake cleaner. Then I worked moly wheel bearing grease into it and pressed the seal back into place. It now felt like a new bearing. A bit stiff, but very smooth. I drove the bearing back into the support collar, using the 'bad' bearing as a drift. It's good for something after all! I used glycerin to lube the bearing edge to ease its passage into the rubber-coated collar.
The driveline was a bit harder to restore than it was to remove, because the collar was now a part of it! Still, with judicious wiggling and prying it was able to slip back into place. The splines were cleaned with brake cleaner and then lubed with the moly grease before reassembly. At this point it went back together easily, with the marks lined up! I left the big nut somewhat loose, as well as the two collar mounting bolts.
With this back in place I started the car and put it into gear. I revved it up to freeway speed, and everything was OK. Leaving it idling, I went under to check the exhaust system for leaks. None found, so I stopped the engine and then went back under the car to tighten up the driveline bolts now that they'd (in theory) settled in.
With the car up in the air and moderately warmed up, it was finally time for that first oil change! What a mess, this car has the same wretched oil filter system as the 107 gassers do, which dumps used oil all over the place when you take it off. I wanted to at least dump out the oil filter since I wasn't replacing it (I didn't have a new filter element). The topside oil sucker doesn't work on this car either due to the small dipstick, so I had to do it all the old-fashioned (messy) way.
I ended up fairly black when I was done, but I put in about six quarts of Delo 400 oil, which brought the level up to the full mark. (Or maybe a bit above.)
This all actually took somewhat less time than I'd anticipated, so I decided to tackle the clutch cylinder too.
First I disassembled the 'new' one I'd bought at the U-Pull. In part this was to learn by doing, since I had no idea of the condition of the U-Pull part. It came apart easily enough, and I found that it was full of goo (some kind of sediment). I washed it out with brake cleaner, and it cleaned up nicely.
Now that I wasn't afraid of the guts of one of these anymore, I removed the deteriorating one from the car. It was a PAG rather than an ATE, but otherwise looked very similar. It also had some sediment in it, but the telling feature was that one side of the lower (pressure) seal was shaved-looking, and soft. A smoking gun! Having looked at both of my candidates (with another one in reserve in the other 115 in case I really ran into trouble), I decided that the U-Pull one was the way to go. I cleaned it even more thoroughly, but I had difficulty putting it back together. (The plunger got wedged in the cylinder bore and didn't want to move.) My mistake was in not using brake fluid to lube the thing before reassembly. Instead I used brake cleaner. Bad idea. Going back together the lower (pressure) seal caught on the lip of the retaining circlip's groove, and got a tiny chunk torn out of it. Aaaargh! This was just as bad, or maybe worse, than what had happened to the original one due to wear. Particularly disheartening since the seals had otherwise seemed in pristine shape.
Close examination, however, showed that the lower (pressure) and upper (leak capture) seals were the same part. (Though different than the parts in the PAG cylinder.) Obviously the job of the upper seal was less strenuous than the lower, and I think its only job is to reclaim any leakage that gets past the first seal. So, I pried both seals off the plunger and swapped them. Then I gently reassembled the cylinder, but this time used brake fluid to lube the parts before reassembly. The thing slipped together without incident, and seemed to be in good shape afterwards. At least the cylinder was free to move now.
With the cylinder thus 'refurbished', I reinstalled it in the car. That was easy enough, but now there was the small job of bleeding the clutch cylinders again, via the brake bleed screw. I'd done this before, but it was very messy. And it was again! I had a lot of trouble with the tubing popping off the clutch bleed nipple. Eventually, however, I was able to get the clutch bled. I did run through a small bottle of brake fluid doing it. Then I tightened up the bleed screws, and tried it out. The clutch pedal felt better than ever, and the brakes even still worked.
Finally it was clean-up time. I got the car on the ground, and drove it up and down the road. No problems, it worked fine. I went inside to eat (it was just going on noon) and clean up, then it was time for the real test.
I drove to a couple of stores, and the U-Pull (to return the unneeded driveline I'd bought earlier). On the freeway the car behaved itself very well. Quiet and smooth, well, for it anyway! The intermittent thump from the driveline during start-off was gone, as was the minor driveline vibration at speed. The clutch behaved perfectly every time.
At the gas station, at 475 miles on that tank, and again almost exactly a month since last time, it even turned in its best-ever mileage: 32.1 MPG. Not bad at all.
It's too bad that once I get home with it the car is going to get parked until next winter. It's finally in pretty enjoyable shape, but I've got lots of other car projects to tackle, and the weather is definitely improving. We're done with salt and snow. It seems that whatever I'm driving is whatever I'm fixing, so that's how it's got to be.
The quartz clock made by VDO for cars of this vintage is unusual when compared to the quartz clocks we're all familiar with. The ubiquitous quartz clock movement has a quartz crystal all right, and an electronic divider chain, but it drives a stepper motor and small gear train at 1 pulse per second. Very efficient, and very cheap. This VDO clock, while still using a quartz crystal and an electronic divider chain, drives a high-speed synchronous motor and a longer gear train. It resembles the common wall-powered clock of years gone by more than anything else.
I put the battery charger on the car while I was working on the grille. As its tick-tock clock had stopped running, there was negligible current draw, and the battery only took a minor amount of charging. Not true of most newer cars left alone for that amount of time, and it won't be true of this one either once it gets a working clock. Easy enough to disconnect the battery during off seasons, though.
While there I cleaned up the attachments of both grilles, now they're both pretty secure, and the Frankenheap's 'new' ornament looks pretty good. I also removed the extra parts that had accumulated in the 115 parts car's trunk, it's only keeping the parts that it needs to go back together. When complete, the neighbor buying the car will have his own Frankenheap. One that looks a lot better, though. As the Frankenheap is now in pretty good shape, except cosmetically, it makes some sense to off the parts car. Especially since:
As soon as I'd removed the tick-tock clock from the dash it started ticking again. When I powered it on the bench, it began working correctly. Wretched thing! I gave it to the neighbor for his $100 115 car (our former parts car). With any luck his car will work out as well for him as ours did for us, though that clock may give him trouble.
However, it did start right up after I'd had it on its preheater system for about 20 minutes. And that was only to attempt to dry the inside of the window so I could see out of it. (A lot of internal condensation due to the leaking rear window.)
Two of the four glue joints on the hood star failed, so I took it off and brought it in for more gluing. This time I made the wads of glue bigger. We'll see if it helps. Really it should be silver-soldered or something, but I've never done that.
I moved the baby seat from the 450 SL to this car, and while I was installing it I noticed that the rear-window defroster, a cheap Chinese fan/heater thingy, now looks like it had been made by Salvador Dali. Completely melted into wavy shapes due to the sun beating in on the rear deck where it had been stored all summer. Not only the housing was wiped out, which maybe I could have corrected and/or lived with, but the blower's squirrel-cage fan was destroyed as well. Not a total loss, however, as I then got out the other one that was unopened in the trunk, and used the dead one's power cord to lengthen the new one's. This will allow better routing of the cable. (The dead one can supply a motor, a switch, a lighter plug, and a heating element to the junk box. Around here I keep [Use? I wish!] everything but the squeal!)
I also made a little sheet-metal bracket that wedges behind the seatback to help hold the fan in position. It used to tip over so its feeble jet of barely-warm air went nowhere useful. Memo to self: next spring when putting the car away, put the fan someplace else!
...On errands today (such as getting license tabs for it) the car behaved well. It was even snowing most of the time, but no problems, and only a little fishtailing going up the hill. The relatively poor interior lighting (only one dome light) is not great, as is the lack of a real rear window defogger, but otherwise it was a pleasant trip for us all. I think my wife is a little surprised that this car is as nice as it is now. The functional (!) heater blower was very useful on this trip, we had a lot of interior fogging.
I also removed the flasher unit and went through it. It got a good cleaning and greasing of the switch contacts, and a resoldering of all the components since I was there. The hardest part is getting the case back together. The knob slides the PCB back and forth, and the case has part of the track in it. The trick seems to be to pull out the knob before putting it back together. It still took several attempts. It's working, but it will take some time to prove whether or not its intermittent problems are gone.
And, since I had the console apart, I took a look at the wonky shift knob. It twists, and it shouldn't. With enough disassembly I was able to get it all apart. I also disassembled (for comparison) the spare shifter I'd put in the trunk. Examining both units, it became clear that the problem with the car's shifter was that the main plastic bushing was all hogged out. There's supposed to be a roll pin (about the size of a #18 drill) that holds the slotted bushing on such that the shaft doesn't twist in the bushing, but this was all crunched in allowing quite a bit of twist, and had sharp edges that were chewing up the bushing allowing even more twist. Unfortunately, the good bushing and pin from the spare don't fit the shaft, and the shaft itself is differently shaped than the original. I can put the good shaft in, but it is much straighter than the one that was in the car, and puts the shift knob in a suboptimal place. I'm experimenting with building up the hogged-out slot in the old bushing with Shoe Goo. I don't have a lot of hope that this will be successful. Other options are to just use the new shaft and live with the mispositioned knob, or to bend the new shaft to be more like the old.
I modified an HP 18 V 2.25 A switching power supply wall wart (from an inkjet printer) to supply the fan power for the preheating system. This should free up the battery charger to then be used to charge the car's battery, which was the final part of the preheating system's original concept. The fan system right now eats about 2.25 A at 13.8 V, so the switcher ought to be able to do the job if the voltage can be reduced. It's small enough to tuck into the battery charger case, and was only $2 at the thrift shop.
I've modified the output voltage of several of these wall-wart switching supplies, one can often do the deed just by poking around with a modest-valued resistor, placing it in parallel with each one in the back end of the supply. (The idea here is to perturb the value of the voltage-setting feedback resistor a modest amount, and see if the output voltage changes.) I didn't manage to get anywhere with this, so I sought out this document on small switching power supplies, and the associated UC3842 Application Note, as this supply seemed to contain one of these chips. (I couldn't really tell as the chip is buried under glued-down heat sinks but, it was an 8-pin DIP, and I found +5 V on pin 8 relative to ground [pin 5], so it seemed to be a match. +12 V was on VCC [pin 7], and there was a RC network on pin 2, the voltage feedback pin, which was also at 2.5 V which, according to the App Note, pretty much confirms that this is the chip.) Tracing out the components, I eventually figured out which two resistors set the output voltage. The high-side one was marked 100k, so I bridged a 200k resistor across it and found that it would drop the output to 15.xx volts. Experimenting showed that nothing smaller than 150k in parallel with the existing resistor would allow for the supply to work, and this value ends up putting out 14.8 V no load, which is probably close enough for the purpose. It's just to run a fan on low anyway, the fan's already got its own hefty series resistor to accomplish low speed. If I wanted to get closer to 13.8 V I could probably mess with the low-side resistor too, but that would almost certainly require removing SMT components. I soldered the 150k resistor in place across some through-hole component leads, avoiding messing with the SMT parts altogether, and glued the wart back together.
The Shoe-Gooed shifter bushing came out better than I thought it would. I used a Dremel with a cutting bit in it to buzz a new slot through the blob that filled the old hogged-out slot. A #18 drill was a near perfect fit through the shaft's hole, so I used it as a placeholder for the to-be pin. The excess Goo that was inside the bushing didn't interfere with the shaft, nor did the excess on the outside prevent the bushing from going into place. Next, I grabbed a nail from the scrap bucket that seemed to be about the diameter of a #18 drill, cut off a length, and shaped it to length and fit using the grinder. That took a little while, but I didn't want to steal the roll pin from the spare shifter mechanism. I don't see why this solid pin won't work as well as the old roll pin, provided it fits snugly. It's not like the pin can escape once it's in place, so its lack of spring-grip shouldn't be an issue. The Goo build-up that is in the old ruined slot seems fairly stout and didn't immediately crumble away during testing, so I am hopeful. I greased everything and installed it in the car, then I reassembled the console. The shifter works, at least with the car off, and no longer has that extremely disturbing twistiness to it. Feels pretty good, actually. The pull-up for Reverse is much more crisp and definite now, and should eliminate the old 'am I in first or reverse' quandry that I've been having. It ought to be particularly helpful for my wife, if she ever were to drive this car.
I put the to-be fan power supply outside to chill, and after an hour or so I plugged it in. It didn't power up for many seconds, it may be that this will not be a good choice for the fan supply. It may have had a cold-start problem from the beginning, or perhaps the modifications induced it. More research is required, I'll leave it out overnight and try it again in the morning. It's supposed to be particularly cold tonight.
... On the road today the car behaved itself well. The 'wheel bearing' noise was gone, so it was just the two loose lug nuts. The turn signals behaved every time, the lock-up seems to be gone. (I still have to fix the weak detent, of course.) The feel of the shifter is much improved now that the slop is out of it.
I used the $5 thrift-shop portable Sony CD player (with tape adapter and both wall and automotive power cords) that I bought a little while ago for the car. It worked! The Alpine was a little rusty on the tape slot at first, but eventually got with the program. Tunes!
Thinking about this more, I'm not comfortable with leaving the battery charger connected full-time, mostly due to the potential for transients cooking the diodes. So I grabbed a big 120 V relay from the junk box (my last one) and hooked it into the charger so that it opens the output circuit when power is disconnected.
I installed the switching power supply into the battery charger case, which was a tighter fit than I'd thought, mostly due to the power plug attachment sticking out farther than I'd realized initially. I buzzed a hole in the back panel for the strain relief output of the SMPS to poke out of. I then found a wall-wart power socket to put into the car so the SMPS can be unplugged easily. (Partly because the plug end from the SMPS has an LED in it, so I didn't want to cut it off.) Then I put it all back together and tested it. Success! The battery charger puts about 2 A into the fully-charged battery of the car, which is what I wanted. (An temporary overcharge condition to warm up the battery too.)
The final preheater schematic: Illustrator PDF GIF. There are four separate 110V-powered elements to it, five if you count the extra relay in the battery charger. It's a busy circuit, but it surely does work!
Arrrghhh! Sitting in the car I looked up and found a huge hole in the headliner, right over the visor. Mice. Wretched little bastards, I need to put out more poison I guess. That headliner was in nearly perfect shape before this. The interior was the only halfway decent thing about the car. (That and it runs so well.) I also did some wasp killing, but that's normal for a stored car.
Pulled the studs from this tire, and also found a staple and a nail in it. It leaks air, so it's off to Schwab with this one, too!
The return fuel line looked the worst, and messing with it showed seepage through the braid, enough to drip. I was unable to loosen the clamp screws, but I could pry the ends off of their fittings, clamps and all. The hose was brittle, no surprise, and tore in half on one end. I replaced it with some new 5/16" line I had, and two good salvaged clamps. (The old clamps were too far gone to reuse.)
The feed line, which is an odd reduction size of rubber, also looks like it is seeping. I don't have a new piece, but I found the crappy "cigar hose" that I took off this car, it had cracks in one end but not the other. (I had to do some serious excavation in the trunk to find it.) I cut off the good end and used it instead of the correct (and custom) rubber piece. It wasn't quite as snug a fit as it should be on the big end but the band clamp cinched it down anyway. Jalopy time! I needed two more clamps, as the originals were too rusted to reuse. I drained the tank into a boat gas can before I put on the 'new' rubber; there wasn't that much fuel left in it, maybe a gallon or two. (I'll have to be sure to take the 1-gallon can of diesel with me when I go to fill it up in case I run out on the way there.) I left it up on the stands while I went in for breakfast, I'll see if it has any leaks when I return.
...No leaks.
I boxed up all the 'enhancement' parts I found in the nearly-full trunk, such as cruise control, etc., and labeled it for ease of future location in storage. I deployed all the rest of the parts into the more-or-less correct parts piles. It has been far too long that the trunk was unusable because it was full of crap! I also rearranged the trunk light wiring clips on the hinge, they were all bunched up and the wire was slack and vulnerable to being caught on things.
I then completely emptied the trunk and vacuumed it out. I also washed the trunk mat. The trunk floor is not in good shape, there are a number of through holes. While the mat was drying I assembled the tool kit I'd been collecting for the car, and put it in its plastic case. (Wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, jumper cables, and a tow strap. I think I'm missing 15 mm and 19 mm wrenches, but am otherwise covered. Could use a pair of wire cutters too.) I then put the few items back in the trunk that belonged there, and it's a real improvement!
The speedometer is squeaking, I need to get right on that before something breaks.
The other donor had its original headlamps entirely removed and replaced with a row of four Blazer (aftermarket) driving lamps! They are chromed metal, a bit rusty now, but the glass and reflectors were in good shape. The car didn't have any low beams as a result of this surgery, near as I could tell. The lamps were also extremely flimsily mounted, I can't imagine that the operation could have been considered satisfactory, except perhaps monetarily when compared with buying replacement factory lamp assemblies (for whatever reason). Anyway, though they're a bit past their prime, and really no better than the HF lamps I already have, they are metal, so I'll probably swap them out at such time as the HF lamps need attention again. Having four I'll have spare glass lenses for the two I'll put on the car.
At 15 °F the heater is having a hard time keeping up. (I still don't think the thermostat is quite right.) The insides of the windows are icy from all the moisture that's not yet been cooked out of the car from its long hibernation. I put the space heater in for overnight, and cracked a wing window.
The freeze/thaw cycle has frozen all the doors shut, and the ratty rubber door seals are tearing up. Sigh. I need to repair that, then spray the area with silicone or something. Shoulda done that earlier!
Still have done nothing about the door seals, or the preheater. Or the leaky rear window for that matter.
I also removed the battery charger/fan power supply from the preheating system, and found that the stupid SMPS (switch-mode power supply) is indeed no longer working. I'll probably have to find another one. At least I can still put a space heater inside, but that's so inelegant...
...Yes, the car is completely fixed by just the slave cylinder. It's a vast improvement in driveability. I'll just hang on to the other parts for now.
The door is rusting badly in the weatherseal channels, the stuff will barely stay in place as it is. Oh well!
The door light switch had also gotten wet inside and wasn't reliable anymore, so I disassembled and cleaned it too. I may have installed it last time with the drain hole up rather than down. Removing it was difficult, as it had started to rust into place. I broke off some chunks of the flange. I greased the hole to prevent further rusting and to ease reassembly.
The rear door my son usually uses was really quite messed up, and the latch was prone to freezing up. I took the door apart, and found that yes indeed the vapor barriers were non-functional. I removed the latch and solvent-tanked it to remove all the old gummy gritty lubricant, then blew it dry. All the moving bits got a nice coating of M1 5W20 from my oil can, whereupon it all started working much nicer. Reinstalled, and with the striker adjusted a bit, the door now works perfectly. The vapor barriers are also glued back into place.
As an extra bonus, I found that the reason the inside door release wasn't working is because the latch has a child safety switch, a small sliding (when cleaned and lubricated!) button on the latch plate. Who knew? This was in the wrong position.
...After sitting out in the cold all day at work (no noontime journey) it got in a pretty good cold soak: never above freezing today, windy, and probably about 10 °F when I went to start. I had to glow twice, and crank for several seconds each time to get it started. Really I just needed to glow some extra the first time, but I don't have a lot of arctic experience with this type of system. Fortunately the weenie battery was up to it.
In this kind of weather it takes a good long time to heat the cabin. When I got home I measured the head temperature, with the gauge at about 80 °C the IR thermometer indicated about 150 °F at the sender. At least one is reading wrong, but they're both lower than they ought to be, which would adversely impact cabin heat, fuel economy, and engine longevity. Time to install that new thermostat!
We'll see in a bit whether this fixed the problem or not.
...Well, it doesn't really read higher on the gauge, and the IR thermometer says it's maybe 10 °F hotter than before. I guess that's an improvement, but I do believe I need to block the radiator in this weather, I think air cooling is working too effectively!
The new SMPS may be a bit weak for the load, it tends to cycle on and off quite a bit coming up, sometimes until the heat gun is manually cycled off to let the blower start running first. I was worried that at 1.8 A it was a bit small, the one that came out was 2.25 A. I'll keep looking for a bit bigger one, 3 A would be ideal.
The blower motor sounds much smoother already. Oh, and a beefier extension cord mitigates the preheater cycling at startup. I also cut a piece of cardboard to cover the radiator, perhaps that will help cabin warmup time. We'll see.
I bought 15 mm and 19 mm wrenches for the toolkit at the pawnshop today. Pretty much completes the set of tools for the trunk. Unless I think of more stuff to put there.
Once I got it started again I ran it to the station and filled it up. Left it running on high idle during the fillup, didn't want to risk a shutdown so soon after getting it going. I also left it running while I picked up my boy, over an hour late. (Good thing it happened where it did rather than on the freeway, and before I picked him up rather than after.) When I got the car home I put the charger on it to complete the replenishment. I really need to replace that primer pump, and I ought to look into the lamp situation. (I'd like to retrofit a lamp-test function like the newer cars have, all it takes is a diode and a resistor.)
Diesel: Tastes better than gas!
I tightened the trunk latch, which was starting to come unscrewed, and greased it. It was starting to get sticky, like all the other latches. It seems better now.
I tackled some of the under-lamp rust that is setting up shop on that side. It really needs a welding session and some ham-handed body work, and some new undercoating. Maybe later. I just ground, poked, scraped, and painted. Now there are drain holes!
Interestingly, next to the 10086 fog lamp is an empty 4 W bulb socket. The car's harness doesn't supply power to it, however. I'm guessing it is for parking lights in countries where the city light is not suitable.
...At NAPA, as expected, no joy. Will probably have to flange up something in the dead bulb's base. Probably an H3, I have some yard-sale bulbs that were cheap enough not to lose any sleep over.
The mailing list coughed up this for Neglin bulbs, but I couldn't find this one. Only eight bulbs, and nothing that matched the part number or was even close.
Another suggestion was to look here, thence here, and thence here, here, and here. Very interesting!
Also very interesting for possibly re-plating headlight reflectors are some of the smaller kits from Caswell.
I measured, and the (transverse) filament should end up about 29mm from the bayonet flange.
The fan clutch from the 116 appears to be very well made, it's put together with screw covers and circlips which might mean that it's more repairable than usual. I had a good look while wire-brushing off the grunge. Even if it never fully couples at all the parasitic coupling will probably be good enough given that this car just isn't driven in high summer. I'll definitely keep the old fan around, just in case!
...Yes, it scrapes a bit on acceleration and bumps. When I looked, it had shifted a bit, so I'll need to put some spacers in under the radiator.
...Yes, that fixed it.
The seats and carpets are also very nice. Bamboo, or nearly so. But I don't think I need them. I'm thinking about going back for the rear door and trunk seals, if they're as good as the fronts. I wonder if the hood from this 114 will fit my 115? Fenders? I seem to recall that the 114's engine compartment may be longer to fit the 6-cylinder motors. The car is largely dent- and rust-free, it seems a shame to let it go to waste. Whether the Frankenheap would ever wear these new parts is another interesting question.
...Today at lunch I went back to the U-Pull, and the car had been picked some more: the windshield was gone, the console had been removed (but not taken away), the speaker grille was gone, etc. But, my hood was there as was the rear door and trunk weatherstripping, and it was all in very good condition. So I grabbed it all. $31.
Turns out a 114 hood can almost fit in a 115's trunk, if the hood safety catch is removed and you don't care about scratching. (It couldn't go through the rear door into the back seat.) The thing needed to go in an additional inch to let the trunk close. So I tied it down with a bungee instead. When I got home I put the hood away with the other parts. The donor car has definitely been repainted, but in the same color.
Looking at the fenders, their condition wasn't sufficiently good to make them worth the removal. They're certainly better than mine, but they're not perfect: some small dents and some rust at the bottoms. So I think I'll leave them, the removal not being a trivial task. (We're talking two removals and one reinstallation. And, as always, paint. Just not worth it.)
...It didn't.
Time to weld! I removed the seat from the car and then took off the seatback panel. The seat back has what I would call 'ribbon' springs, versus coil or serpentine wire, and one was broken where it took the sharp bend from the rear of the frame to mate with the main ribbon that spanned the back in that area. The broken end had worked its way past the main ribbon and dug a hole through everything. Fortunately it was able to wedge into its proper place due to the location of the break, so I didn't have to rig anything to hold it in place. I soaked a small towel and worked it between the spring and the pad, and draped towels and rags over everything to protect the seat. I used the wire-feed welder to weld the broken spring ends back together. As is usual, I don't trust a welded spring to hold, the welding heat ruins the temper. So I got a strip of scrap mild steel and bent it around the joint, then tacked it together. If the spring breaks again right there that should hold things together enough to keep the broken end from going on another journey of discovery. (Ouch!) The rivet had failed on one of the two center vertical channels that also help support the headrest, so I ground it off, repainted the area, and pop-riveted it back into place. Then I reinstalled the seat back cover and put the whole thing back in the car.
That noise leak at the driver's window is probably caused by door misalignment, but I've already messed with that about as much as I can. (Recall that I had to weld the hinge area of the door back together, so the geometry is automatically suspect.) So, I rolled the window down, took up the rubber mallet, and started whanging away on the window frame to drive it closer to the body. It's closer now, so I'll see if it's less noisy later this morning.
In a mood to make a difference, I then stripped off the old trunk weatherseal. Though tattered at the sealing lip, the main body was still intact enough that it came off in only two pieces. After wiping down the channel and the replacement (used) seal I ran a bead of 3M weatherstrip cement along the channel, then tucked the seal into place. The trunk is relatively hard to close now, it takes a fair bit of slamming, unlike before. I've left the trunk open for it to dry in place while I get ready for work.
...The stud noise still seems pretty strong. But if I lay my jacketed forearm up alongside the trailing door edge it goes away, so it's not coming through the glass.
Unfortunately there is a fair amount of rust along the door bottom. Not enough to prevent the seal from attaching like on the front doors, but more than I'd like. Sad. I wonder if I should go back and get those other two doors at the junkyard? I hate to invest another $45 in 'maybe' on this car, plus it's just more crap to store. The front doors are clear losers, especially the driver's. But the rears...?
Now that the 'new' seal's had a chance to take a set from yesterday, the trunk closes much better.
So I had a close look at the window, and the outer lip of the rearward window channel liner (right by my ear) was pretty much gone. I took some tin snips and cut off a long narrow strip of foam rubber from one of the dead weatherstrips I removed yesterday. (From one of the better sections.) I glued this in the window channel in place of what was missing. (Probably fabric, originally.) While that was drying I noted that the outside glass wipe strip was very bad as well, so I removed the aluminized trim strip and pried off the wipe. It was very rusty and decomposed. The top lip of the door's window opening was also getting very rusty, so I wire brushed it, masked it off, and rattle-canned it gray. I set up a radiant heater to help it dry. The fuzz on the wipe I removed was mostly still there, but peeled back from its proper spot. I used weatherstrip cement to glue it back into place. This won't really last, since the fuzz is decomposing and the wraparound cloth that it used to be attached to that held it in place is gone, but it should be better than it was, at least for awhile. I can always glue on a foam strip later. (Or better yet, find a good used wipe to replace it with.)
I wire-brushed off the worst of the rust on the wipe's metal spine and painted it black to try to slow down the general decomposition in the area. I put it in the oven to dry, I don't really want the paint on it to fuse with the paint on the door!
The wipe and trim strip installed uneventfully, except for the wasp that was living under the scrap wood I was going to use to drive the wipe back on. Fortunately he was cold. The window goes up and down rather stiffly, the foam strip may be a bit too thick. Oh well!
...Yeah, that got it. Now I can hear the skritching from the other side of the car, whereas before it was masked. Good, just in time. I filled the car on the way home, it got 30.5 MPG this last most-of-a-tank, it was probably summer fuel and of course there is the thermostatic fan clutch to help out... I wanted to put it away with a full tank to minimize water buildup. Mission accomplished. I parked it down below in storage and emptied it of everything, then popped the hood and opened the battery cutoff switch. I boxed up the good used weatherstrips in the trunk, and threw the nasty old ones in loose. (I may want to cut some more filler pieces from them.) I put the burned-out fog light bulb in the trunk too, it'll have to wait until next time. I put the rear window heater in the trunk, it won't melt in the hot summer sun that way. I hope.
It's ready to wait out the time until next winter.
At lunch I got it licensed.
The clock has pretty much stopped working. Again. And the rear floor is wet. Again. We had a lot of rain recently, more than an inch. Either it was enough to power through the seal job, or the freeze/thaw opened it up. Sigh.
The mud was either accumulated detritus from the trunk, or else had started to work in from the small holes at the leading edge. Either way, it wasn't good to have there.
I'm just about out of shielding gas, I'll probably run out tomorrow.
In the evening I pulled the clock, and found that the reason the hands were getting misaligned and that it finally stopped running was that one of the plastic gear axle nubs had snapped off. I've dealt with this before, on my 560 SL. I got out a small drill (PCB type) and drilled (carefully, by hand) down the center of the axle. I then cut a piece of wire and pushed it into the hole. Insty-hub! The clock face prevents the new axle pin from backing out of the axle. We'll see if it works, but at least the clock can be set again. The most puzzling aspect of the problem was that I had to drill out the brass rivets that hold the front plate onto the plastic locating feet. Screws are too bulky to put it back together, so I stitched wire through the holes and crimped it down. Seems to be holding good enough. The plate is locked into position by plastic pegs that are still intact, the wire just ties the plate to the pegs.
As always, getting these quartz clocks apart and back together again is the worst part. The bezel is crimped on. I've got the crimp bent to the point where the bezel can be snapped on and off with a little judicious twisting and pushing.
The clock is powered on the bench right now to make sure it can run. A non-functional dash clock really bothers me, for some reason.
Flush with success, and faced with a little extra time this morning, I
tackled the fog light. By eye it looked like a standard H3 bulb would
have its filament in about the right place if its flange was perched
on top of the barrel of the (dead) Neglin 10086 fog lamp. I broke the
glass out of the base of the Neglin and cut the wire of the 50-cent
garage-sale H3 to length to reach through the center pin of the bulb
base. I opened up the solder hole and put the wire through, then
clamped the flange to the top of the barrel. A hot soldering iron
secured the flange to the barrel, and attached the wire to the power
nub. I oriented the filament the same way as the stock bulb. (Or so
I think.) I had to do a little filing in order for the composite bulb
to fit into the socket, the barrel fits into the socket pretty deeply
and the H3's flange is a little larger than would fit. Fortunately it
was only a little excess solder that prevented the bulb from fitting,
otherwise I'd have had to file the flange flush with the barrel all
the way around. Unfortunately, the next time this burns out I'll need
to unsolder/resolder to replace the bulb. That's not too convenient,
but unlike most of the assholes around here I only turn on the fog
lamps when it's foggy enough to require them to improve my ability to
see the edges of the road. That's not a lot of hours in a year!
With both stock Euro bulbs thus replaced with commonly-available US
bulbs I put the lamp assembly back on the car and tested it. It
worked fine. Success!
...On the way home it was apparent to me (when parking in front of the
garage) that the H4's don't have exactly the same low-beam pattern as
the R2's, the upwards right-side 'wing' is much muted with the H4
bulbs. I thought I'd noticed this with the one earlier replacement,
and this second confirms it. Probably this is due to slight
unavoidable lamp geometry changes, the H4 doesn't
have exactly the same filament structure as the R2, though
the structure is very similar. (The major apparent
difference is in the orientation of the high-beam filament, which
can't explain low-beam differences.) It's a minor enough difference
that it's certainly not worth putting up with all the other ills of
the R2 just to get the 'wing' in all its original glory.
Mounting an alternator to it could be interesting, however.
I really need to get rid of the complex electronics, no matter that
it's small, and go to a second battery charger (simple linear) type
circuit. I only need about 3 A. A transformer and some diodes
will do it. Sadly, looking at the schematic I again see no way to get
both a battery charge and a fan supply function from the same power
source. (The existing battery charger.) An isolated second
supply is required to avoid back-feeding the car's electrical
system under all circumstances if I want to use the existing blower
low-speed resistor. I have a couple of 12 V 20 VA
transformers that came out of some desk lamps that I put into the camper. In parallel that'd be 40 W, or
3.3 A at 12 V, so that's in the right ballpark. And I
already have them. Two transformers would also tuck into the existing
battery charger box easier than one larger one, so I think I'll look
into that. I'll also need a bridge rectifier (four diodes versus
two), these transformers are not center-tapped. The most difficult
aspect of this will be the mechanical, naturally.
...Today at lunch I bought some screws. About $6 for a bag of
miscellaneous #6 hardware. (I bought boxes of washers and nuts, and
an assortment of screw lengths. I'm always short of nuts, so many
extras sounded like a good idea.) I also bought a screw-mount bridge
rectifier at Radio Shack, about $3. Sure it's going to cost me $10,
but if this works out I'll be done messing with this thing. I should
have done it this way in the first place, but I was excited about
using the cheap small lightweight surplus power supplies instead of
'big iron'. Well, big iron pretty much always works unless you kill
it, whereas complex electronics do not.
...After work I cut and drilled six sheet metal brackets, and fastened
the two transformers together. The brackets all have 90° bends to
make feet for mounting to the case. Tomorrow, perhaps, I can install
the assembly into the case.
So I had to take it all back apart, because the leads were on
the wrong sides of the transformers and wouldn't reach otherwise. I
flipped them over in the mounts and reassembled, including rewiring.
Miraculously, the bridge rectifier seems to be unharmed. Can't say
the same about the LED that is (was) in the plug to the rest of the
car. I guess I can live without that. Though running behind, I
managed to reinstall the thing in the car and try it out.
It seems to work, imagine that. We'll see if it holds up with time,
that was a pretty severe stressing the parts got.
So I had another switching power supply stored in the trunk, a Samsung
that's rated at 12 V and 3.5 A, or 42 W. I clipped it
in the circuit and even though it was about 15 °F outside it
started right up and ran the fan noticeably faster. I measured, and
it was making about 11.5 V at 2.8 A (32 W), which is
tolerable. If only it doesn't have a problem with extreme
environmental conditions. I guess I get another session to rip out
the transformers and install this thing. Joy.
At lunch I went to the U-Pull and got an AC compressor for the 190D. This was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and
the only tools I had with me were in the emergency kit I'd made up for
the trunk. It became apparent that I am short a few tools. I really
need a set of Allen wrenches and a 1/4" wrench for driving the
screwdriver bits. A larger crescent wrench would also be a good idea.
(I managed to borrow such a wrench from a helpful Russian, it only
took a second or two to loosen the big AC hose. The yard is always
full of Russians and Mexicans, those guys still know the value of a
dollar. Hard to talk to, though.)
Needed to pump up the front tires and add brake fluid. Stupid slow
leaks.
...After work I glued the light housing back together. Shoe Goo,
naturally.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Today was very snowy, so my original plan of doing some welding was
off. Instead, I got out the defunct $20 weed whacker I'd picked up in
November (for potential use as a tiny auxiliary generator) and took it
apart. The big trick there was that the centrifugal clutch assembly
unscrews from the shaft, it doesn't pull off. Another difficult point
was removing the large speed nut that holds the recoil assembly to the
plastic housing. I ended up breaking the nut so it doesn't grip so
tightly any more. It turns out the only thing that appears to have
been wrong with the motor was that the recoil start spring had come
loose inside, it wasn't even broken. I managed to get it all back
together and then the thing would turn over normally. I didn't try to
actually start it, though, so there may be more actually wrong.
Friday, January 11, 2008
One of the cheap nasty POS fog light housings was falling apart again,
so I replaced it with the (broken and glued) spare housing.
Replacement was made more difficult by a frozen ground screw that
broke off. I ended up having to drill a new hole for a new
self-tapping screw, which was a festival of pain in itself. (Finding
a screw, and a drill that was sharp enough to go through metal.)
Somehow the original hole and screw seems to have becomed hardened
(it is right up against the welds) and wouldn't drill out.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
That steaming POS switching power supply in the preheater system is
really starting to piss me off. Click-click-click-click-click... It
won't start up in the cold, which naturally is when you want it most.
This morning it never did snap out of it. And the temperatures are
predicted to keep dropping all week, we're headed for single-digit
temperatures. Definitely territory where an ungaraged diesel can use
some help.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
I pulled out the preheater system power supply. (No fun, it was
13 °F outside.) It looks like I can fit the two transformers
into the case where the SMPS was, but I need some long thin screws to
go through the transformer mounting holes. I cut some sheet metal to
serve as brackets.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
I installed the transformer assembly into the battery charger case.
That took an hour, nothing lines up when it's all freehand cutting,
bending, and drilling. I had a little more time left, so I then wired
it up and plugged it in. BRRRR-ZAP! Oh man, did I make a mistake.
(Nothing like working in a rush!) Somehow I'd confused the
transformer primaries with the secondaries and wired it up backwards.
I was putting 1200 V into the bridge rectifier, not 12 V!
It's rated for only 400 V.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Another two days and $10 shot to hell. I thought the preheater was
working kind of feebly, some of the heat was even escaping out the top
of the air intake grille and the airflow inside, though warm, was
barely detectible. So I got out the meters. The thing is only making
about 7.5 V while pushing 1.7 A, which is only 13 W, a
far cry from the 40 W I expected. I opened it up and checked,
and both transformers are pushing current. They're just less capable
than the printed rating, imagine that! Either they were crap to begin
with, or I killed them. Back to the drawing board, regardless.
Monday, January 21, 2008
I pulled out the preheater system power supply. Again. (No fun,
again, it was another 13 °F morning. They predict that we're
headed for maybe 20 degrees colder in the next few days, so I need to
get this taken care of.) I then removed the new transformer system.
Sure came out easier than it went in! I restored the AC wiring to its
former configuration and slipped the new SMPS into position. Easy. I
cut off the cable and soldered the connector to it. I then put it all
back into the car and plugged it in. Everything worked, no problems.
It's so cold that even though I put a space heater into the car while
I did this (to take the place of the preheater) none of the ice on the
windows melted, even in the hour the heater was running. Brrr! With
the preheater restored and helping (and set on high), the ice finally
started to melt.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
6 °F this morning. Not much to report, except that the
preheater (which is functioning properly) was unable to dent the frost
on the glass. I put the little space heater inside the car too.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
5 °F this morning. That is all.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
9 °F this morning, a warming trend!
Friday, January 25, 2008
12 °F this morning, the trend continues.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Heavy snow today. Took out the power and snowed in the 2WD
cars, such as this one.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
The car's been snowed in for a week or so. I did do some shoveling
behind it this morning to prepare for getting it out now that the
roads (and some of our driveway) are plowed, but there's lots more to
do. And more snow is expected.
Friday, February 8, 2008
More snow undid all my good effort, but this morning I finally managed
to fully dig out the car, in spite of back pain. It started easily,
although both front tires were nearly flat from their slow leaks. I
did manage to forget protocol and drive off with the car still plugged
in, but it seems to have come unplugged with no harm done. Stupid,
stupid, stupid!
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
I managed to knock a fog light off in a snow bank in our driveway.
Same one I've broken several times before. Are those things ever
cheap pieces of s**t, not to mention being mounted down in harm's way.
Maybe I should spend more than $8 per pair? (I have some fogs off a
BMW in the trunk, should I ever be motivated to upgrade.)
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
I remounted the repaired fog light. Again. I used some grease on the
screws, they had started to rust to the point where they didn't want
to turn. I also went to the back fog light and cleaned up the
connections so it would work again.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
I put the car down below. It's time to stop driving it, in favor of
the 380SL. (I still need to do some welding,
however.)
I also put the battery on charge, since that was convenient. I hadn't disconnected it while down in storage and the clock takes its toll.
...At lunch I picked up the wheel. They said the leak was due to peeling chrome and that there wasn't much they could do about it, it'd already had bead sealer applied. Nuts.
...After work I painted the end of the wrench black with the new can I picked up at Ace Hardware. (Cheaper than at Lowe's, but much less of a selection. Everybody has black, however.)
..The tire shop called. He said this wheel had the exact same story, and offered to show it to me. Sure, says I, so I dropped by and had a look. The entire metal wheel was chromed, inside and out. Where the chrome breaks over the outer lip of the wheel, it's apparent that small fractures (or gouges) in the chroming at the edge of the rim have over time let corrosive salts and/or water get under the chrome layer. Damage creeps in and along, eventually undermining the bead seal area. Then it's game over. I had him put the tire back on and I took it home. Assuming the disruption at the shop didn't make it worse, I guess it's not so bad that it would hold air for a week or so before needing to be pumped up again.
I'd always thought they only chromed the face side, leaving the rest alone. Ha!
I honestly don't know when I'll be able to get to welding up the hole I made in the side of the car last year. There's just so much else to do that's more important...
These instructions for building an injector pop tester are rather interesting. I've been a grease gun fan myself, but now I can see how the bottle jack approach could be better. Interesting...
The heater blower is squealing nearly all the time now. I wish it were possible to actually lubricate it. I wonder if I could snake a small video camera down in there to see if I can find a path to that rear bearing? It's possible to lubricate the front one, but that rear one just can't be found by feel.
Mistake.
It wouldn't start after work, too cold and the battery too cold/weak/old/small. We had theater tickets, too. Real theater, Sweeney Todd, not the movies, and we couldn't be late. Jill came and got me instead, after shuttling the babysitter herself. After the bloody fun-fest we dropped back by work, and I found that the one tire was now too flat to drive. I changed it while I let the car battery charge off the jumper cables I keep in the trunk. (The jack leaned against the car and rubbed the rubber bumper button out of its socket and scraped up the paint on the side. Nice.) The car wouldn't start then, either. So I charged it again a bit and hooked up the tow rope that I also keep in the trunk. (Be Prepared!) Starting it wasn't easy: I needed third gear and yet it still wanted to skid; we towed it with the Chicken Wagon. (I glowed the car while it got up to speed, then dropped the clutch. I had to do this several times, Jill wasn't really going fast enough.) It fired once and ran a few seconds, long enough for me to flash Jill to stop, then it died. We had to repeat the exercise. (She hates this kind of thing!) Once running solidly it was fine. It's cold outside! 7 °F when we got home, but at least it's a lot less windy than yesterday.
I have some work to do.
...I did get the battery swapped, the preheater junk still fits between the battery and the master brake cylinder, though not nearly as neatly as before. Unfortunately the handy battery cutoff switch doesn't fit on the negative post anymore. Maybe some time later I'll look into that, it was very nice to have.
Since I was there I changed wheels back. I had to put a radiant space heater on the air compressor for half an hour to warm it enough to start. (Neither convection heater could start their fans, so I had to dig up a radiant heater. It's cold!) I pumped up the flat tire, now back on the car. I used the car's jack, after I put the rubber bumper back in its socket and lubricated the screw with ATF. I had an extra minute or two and went to the other side of the car and jacked it up. Up close the horrible scraping noise sounded like the brake backing plate, which it turned out to be. I bent it a bit and the noise went away. That'll be nice.
As a safety measure, to go with the jumper cables I already carry, I put the boat's battery in the trunk. Just in case.
A friend loaned me a small B&W pinhole video camera, it's about 1" square by about 1/4" thick with a short barrel coming out of the face, and thumbscrewed to a little yoke. It has a pigtail with the usual wall-wart +12 V and video connectors. (These things are well under $20 now.) The plan is to see if I can use it to find a way to lubricate the rear bearing of the heater blower motor. Step one is to screw it to a stick for probing. I can use the preheater system's +12 V power supply connector, and I have a small LCD TV in the camper. If it looks like it will work then I'll have to remove the wipers and the air intake grille and go looking. At least it's warmed up this morning: back to a balmy 7 °F!
But I was being a bit dumb: instead of prototyping this all out in the cold I fished around in my junk box until I found a suitable +12 V wall-wart. As I tend to collect these it should have occurred to me to do this first so I could work in the warm! I removed the detachable side speakers from the camper's TV and hooked it all up. It works! Now to find a stick... I'll only take it all outside when it's ready. The camera seems to be fairly light-sensitive, I suppose it's meant for surveillance. If it's too bright things wash out. It's a bit grainy, but I'm only looking for guidance here, not great detail.
But, it's too cold to muster further interest in going outside. Maybe next time.
I plugged in the preheater system and the space heater in the car, it'll be good and warm, and with clear windows, by the time I leave for work. I then put back the repaired fog lamp, and tested the lights. Looks good.
The clock is losing time again. Rats.
...At lunch I loaded up the car with booty from the discard pile at work. Mostly a bunch of heavy sheet metal, suitable for welding supplies. Some shelving racks, I might be able to use them as shelving. We'll see. If not, scrap!
...On the way home the new clock is apparently keeping good time. So, apparently, is the old one, inside in the warm and on a bench supply!
The old clock is not keeping good time, on the bench it's now losing steadily.
And I love that I used some of our cast-off work product to repair my car.
While I was under there I couldn't help but notice that the rear half of the right-side rocker is rusting out now. (The front half was fixed four years ago.)
I then tackled the rust holes that were forming underneath the passenger-side headlight, due to the undercoating that was peeling loose (and which I removed) and trapping moisture rather than repelling it. I filled in the holes with the welder, and some bits of leftover metal box from yesterday. (I used the Miller 175 this time, since I wanted more control and cleaner welds on the rusty bits.) I also filled the unsightly hole in the top of the fender where the stalactite of Bondo had fallen out. Then I ground off what I could to restore the profiles. (Some of the welding was behind the bumper, and inaccessible unless I wanted to remove said bumper, which I did not.) I then wire-brushed the areas, and the rust starting near the other headlight bucket, primed, and painted the work areas. It's not beautiful, but it should be more durable. If I really wanted it to look good I'd Bondo the top and do it right. Done for another day!
This evening I noticed that I've lost one backup light. I need to replace it!
I tore open the dead heat gun, figuring that at the very least I'd need its power cord for any replacement system, and found the motor's rear bearing melted and siezed and its diodes burned up. Yeah, it's dead all right! The nichrome heating element looked good, though the excess heat had burnt one power wire off, so I liberated it and hooked up the power cord to it alone. Perhaps this can be installed so that it has air drawn through it when the blower's running? I then removed the air intake grille and slipped the heater cartridge back into its place. With the blower running I could feel some warm air coming through, but I don't think it's enough. Visibly the heating cartridge gets quite hot inside, and in fact stayed orange-hot for some tens of seconds after power was removed. I need to come up with some sort of small 110 V fan to rig to this to keep it from overheating again. Something a bit quieter than what was there originally, perhaps a computer box fan? Later.
I then got out the borrowed pinhole video camera and tried to use it. It was too dark inside the air plenum so I lashed a C7 Christmas light to the same stick. That helped a lot, but the assembly was just too ungainly to do much good. I did use it to help guide my oil tube in, but I think I could have done just about as well without it. I attacked both ends of the motor, I hope that I got oil in the right places. The fan ran smoothly after the operation, but it was running pretty good today anyway. I then buttoned up the car again. I dressed up the aluminum air intake screen with some rattle-can flat black paint before installing it.
I had a look at that water heater element I'd nabbed, but I don't think there's any way I can fold it up small enough that it'd fit inside the plenum without either burning something it was too close to, or itself breaking in an attempt to wad it up small enough. Too bad, that'd be the best method of getting heat into the plenum.
I grabbed a three-wire computer cooling fan from the discard pile at work, it's rated 12 V at 250 mA. (Of the three such fans there today, two were siezed up.) Not a very powerful fan, obviously.
I got out the heating element and checked its motor taps. I found two (of the four) terminals that had 14 VAC on them, so I dug out a full-wave bridge rectifier that I'd used for one of the prior preheater version attempts, and hooked it all up on the bench. Nothing but buzzing. So I got out a small filter capacitor and wired it in too. That did it. The fan blows air, but not a whole lot. I suppose I should try assembling the mess into something that'll work, but I was out of time. (This is turning into a real pain in the ass.)
Myself, I'm not so proud of. Once I got the sheet metal banged into shape I wired up the heating element and the fan, and got it all put together. By early afternoon I was ready to test. When plugged in the thing fired up and started blowing out hot air, so I slipped it into the car. After a few minutes, the new preheater caught on fire! (Not enough airflow.) Disgusted, I threw the abortion into a snow bank to put it out. Some time later I'll salvage what I can from it.
I'm going to have to come up with another heat gun or hair drier. But in the meantime I'll just continue to use the space heater inside the cabin.
...At the U-Pull today I picked up a set of 14" Bundts from a 300 SD. They're in a lot better shape than what's on this car, at some suitable point I'll be able to switch. They're painted, not chromed.
I then opened up the air filter housing, I thought it was about time (after all these years) that I checked to see if there was actually any oil in it. There was, and very gloppy black stuff it was too. It also had a nice dirt crust on the bottom. I dumped/scraped it all out, and then sluiced out it and the the filter element with bad gasoline. I burned off the goo in the housing, which turned the tenacious oily crud into loosely-attached dirt that was easily gotten rid of with a little wire brushing. I then reinstalled the filter housing in the car and refilled it with used motor oil, and put it all back together. Two of the three rubber mounts for the filter housing are broken off, but that's not really an issue.
...After work I filled up the car for the last time this year. Tomorrow I should be retiring it for the season. (Legally I'm supposed to, because of the studded tires.)
I stopped by a muffler shop today and nabbed some cut-offs. (2–3 inch pieces of new pipe.) I also bought more flux-core welding wire for the Hobart. Ten pounds this time, $55 at Big R (on sale) for the 0.035". I'd lost a rubber exhaust hanger with the muffler yesterday. As I was at the U-Pull I got a couple more, along with a rather nice trunk mat and carpet from a 114 gasser.
The muffler ended up a bit cocked so that the rubber hangers and bumpers don't fit as well as they did. Oops. I broke a rubber hanger, but I got two Friday so I was still OK.
Of note is that the Hobart wire was much shinier and smoother than the cheap Harbor Freight stuff, and seemed to work better. It was a bit too large for the job (the old stuff was 0.030"), but surprisingly it fit through the gun's 0.030" tip. (I should get the correct tip, which Big R carries. I also will need some more 0.024" bare wire for the Miller, I noticed it was getting low when I tried to borrow its 0.030" tip [which doesn't fit].)
Car's sure a lot quieter now!
No, it's not. I think the molten metal bits are spatter from the welding I did on the fender. Next time cover a lot more of the car with wet towels! The pits from the rock are as you would expect.