'74 widebody hot rod build

[al lkosmal]

Brooke,
I have not done this.....But you should be able to tweak/program the LC-2 controller to obtain matching outputs via the Innovate LM Programmer software.



Link to software downloads

http://www.innovatemotorsports.com/support.php



regards,
al

[rswannabe]

Al, I was thinking that might be another option to bring the two sensors into agreement. I’ll look into that further. Thanks!

[rswannabe]

Today was a service day. Oil change and valve adjust and recheck the torque on the rocker shafts I redid a number of months ago. All good there.

Last weekend while on the group drive they guy behind comment my car was smoking on decel sometimes. So while I had it on the lift and opened up I also ran a leakdown test. All was good with no cylinder lower than 97%. So rings are good. I likely have some tired valve guides. Just going to live with it for now.



I pulled the heat exchangers to check the new gaskets I put in a few months ago as I’m still getting some small backfired that seam to indicate an exhaust leak. Sure enough there was pretty clear evidence of leaks on three of them.





So I went ahead and replaced my exhaust seal rings to see if they might be the culprit. Here are the new rings in place ready for headers and gaskets.



We’ll see if this gets its all sealed up finally.

[rswannabe]

I had to drive from Seattle to Vancouver BC and back today for a memorial service. I took the ‘74 and did some fine tuning on the drive up. I enabled ego control to allow control under cruise conditions and saw 24mpg on the 270 mile trip while cruising 70-80 mph. The car was running really well and I’m sure I could start pushing it leaner for better mpg in pure cruise.

The drive back was with sunroof and all the windows open with the tunes cranked on a beautiful late summer evening as I contemplated life. Even though it was all highway cruising, it was one of those special drives.

[rswannabe]

Out at Lake Washington Cars and Coffee again.

[rswannabe]

I had the ‘74 up on my lift to get it out of the way while I was driving my ‘52 MG more for a bit. While it was up there I noticed fluid under the front passenger side. It was brake fluid. Not good! In digging into it I found that my hard brake line from the caliper to the strut had a hole chewed in it and the fluid was leaking out from there. In checking the drivers side I found similar marks on the driver side brake line.

SOMEONE WAS TRYING TO KILL ME!

Actually, it turns out the at full steering lock and with a little compression of the suspension, the upper bolt on the sway bar tie rod was contacting the brake lines and rubbing on them.



I think this contact could only happen with raised spindles (mine are 30mm higher) and the sway bar set on full soft like I had it (top of the drop link as far forward as it will go and thus closer to the caliper when at full lock) and running 993 calipers (964 calipers might be an issue as well) with strut front suspension (because of the routing of the hard brake line). Thus I think this is a pretty rare issue. To resolve this conflict I moved the sway bar ends as far inwards (towards the centerline of the car) on the shaft that they would go, thus picking up 1/4” clearance on each side, and slightly stiffening up the sway bar by sliding the upper links rearward by 3/4” and thus increasing the distance from the brake lines at full lock.

With all that done, I bent up and flared some new lines and had my 12 yo daughter help me bleed the brakes. Should be good now, but I’ll check these periodically to make sure there is no further interfearance.

[rswannabe]

I’ve been diagnosing a rough running condition that seems to be due to a couple of partially clogged injectors. As I was diagnosing, which involved swapping around injectors and the like, I finally got fed up with my old injector plugs. They were the kind that had the U shaped retaining clip you needed a dental pic, good light and two hands to remove. I replaced them with the type you just press down on the retailing clip to release. SO MUCH BETTER!!! It takes a whole lotta hassle out of trouble shooting and servicing them.

The old plugs that were hugely frustrating.





The new plugs that are much more awsomer!

[Mixed76]

That looks really great, thanks for sharing! I will need to replace with similar, really glad to see these available

Sent from my Pixel 7 using Tapatalk

[rswannabe]

My fan shroud has been looking rough and getting worse. The paint down near the case was flaking and looking like crap. It had been previously refinished and my guess is the prep work was bad or a non-heat resistant paint was used.



So I deflaked, cleaned, sanded, cleaned again and then shot it with high temp primer and paint. I decided to go with a low gloss black. I also repainted the heater block off plate from the top of the motor shroud as it was a bit scraped up. The fan finish in a metallic silver was in good shape so I just gave it a good cleaning.



The finish came out pretty well and is much better than before.

[chucksmith]

looks great!

[rswannabe]

Originally Posted by Mixed76

That looks really great, thanks for sharing! I will need to replace with similar, really glad to see these available

Thank you, and happy to help.

Originally Posted by chucksmith

looks great!

Thank you.

[rswannabe]

I have been running the Dansk sport muffler for a while now and have been pretty happy with it. It has a nice idle note and ZERO drone, but lately I have been wanting something with a little more volume and bite. So when I came across a good deal on a Monty MRSN (GT3 style) muffler I decided to take a chance and pick it up. I say “take a chance” as I could find no videos or sound clips of what this model of Monty sounds like. However, I have really liked every Monty I’ve owned and heard; they generally have a fantastic deep tone, great build quality, make good power, and have little to no drone. So I was willing to roll the dice.

The new muffler.



Out of curiosity I weighed it and found it surprisingly light at just over 16 lbs.



For comparison the Dansk sport was almost 50% heavier at just under 24 lbs.



Here it is mounted up without the lower valance. I’m going to live with it for a bit and make sure it’s a keeper before to cut the valance to accommodate it. It’s not rubbing on the underside of the bumper, but it’s awfully close. I might need to space it down a little bit. We’ll see.



I haven’t been able to drive with it much yet, but initial thoughts are that it has strong idle tone: deep with a slightly sharp edge to it. It is louder than the Dansk, but nowhere near being too loud. The note gets higher pitched with RPM, transitioning from growl to wail. So far, big thumbs up!

[rswannabe]

Next up: seat heaters! In the past I’ve added seat heaters to my WRX l and my e46 M3 and they were the single best mods I made to those cars. I’ve had a set ready to go into this car for a while, but hadn’t made the time. Frankly I was a little hesitant as it can be an involved job to skin and recover seats to install the heating elements. I needn’t have worried, the Recaro sport seats proved to be surprisingly easy to do this with.

To do my seats all I needed to do was take out the two pivot bolts to separate the backs from the bottoms.



For the seat bottom there were four hog rings securing the rear of the cushion to the Webbing.



With those hog rings removed there was enough access to slip the heating element in between the foam and the interfacing behind the leather.







Then it was just a matter of installing 4 new hog rings to rescue the rest edge and the bottom was done.

[rswannabe]

The backs were only slightly more difficult; instead of four hog rings there was a row of staples to remove along the bottom of the seat back.





With the staples removed it was again a simple matter to slip the element in between the foam and the interfacing.







Then it was just a matter of restapling that bottom seam.

[mike621]

Originally Posted by rswannabe

Next up: seat heaters! In the past I’ve added seat heaters to my WRX l and my e46 M3 and they were the single best mods I made to those cars. I’ve had a set ready to go into this car for a while, but hadn’t made the time. Frankly I was a little hesitant as it can be an involved job to skin and recover seats to install the heating elements. I needn’t have worried, the Recaro sport seats proved to be surprisingly easy to do this with.

To do my seats all I needed to do was take out the two pivot bolts to separate the backs from the bottoms.



For the seat bottom there were four hog rings securing the rear of the cushion to the Webbing.



With those hog rings removed there was enough access to slip the heating element in between the foam and the interfacing behind the leather.







Then it was just a matter of installing 4 new hovering to rescue the rest edge and the bottom was done.

I love the red sport seats!

What seat heater parts/kit did you go with? Curious what your solution will be for switches and mounting.

I am thinking of doing the same mod to my car, once its back on the road.

[rswannabe]

I decided to mount the switches to the seats themselves. So a made a couple of small brakets out of aluminum angle stock to mount the rocker switches to the steel member in the seat along the bottom of the front edge.



I tucked and secured the wiring into the webbing under the cushion and mounted up the switches.











Tomorrow I should be able to get these bolted back iin the car and hook them up to power.

[rswannabe]

Originally Posted by mike621

I love the red sport seats!

What seat heater parts/kit did you go with? Curious what your solution will be for switches and mounting.

I am thinking of doing the same mod to my car, once its back on the road.

I used these Voxx SHSB1 kits. I chose them for their carbon elements and manual rocker switches. I didn’t want the electronic momentary switches many kits use that have to be turned on every time you start the car. I like to be able to leave them in the on position.

[rswannabe]

In the process of swapping mufflers around I took the opportunity to fix a little problem that’s been bugging me. The ends of the rear bumper rubber trims that used to be under the rear overriders always stuck out a little bit after I removed the overriders. They never looked right.





With the muffler out I drilled a holes through the bumper behind the ends of the rubber trim to set screws into the ends of the trims to hold them in. The rubber trims have to be predrilled to accept the screws as these seems to be a metal layer in them.







It’s a simple fix, but it makes my eyes happy.

[rswannabe]

Next up is cleaning up the rockers. Structurally they are solid, but because this car used to run 930 rocker trims there are a bunch of screw holes in them. Most of them are not accessible from the backside, making welding them up more difficult (can’t get a copper pad behind them). Also I don’t want to cook the paint if I can avoid it. In looking at options I came across the idea of using solder to fill the holes and so I gave it a try. First couple attempts went well and I like the results.





I used a small flap disc to take off the paint and rust around the holes.



Then I smeared on a little flux and used my soldering iron to flow the solder into and across the holes.



Then I ground it back down flush with the flap disc.



Next up is finish filling the other holes, hit them with etching primer, and then blend with a touch of filler. I think I’ll then just hit the entirety of the lower rocker with epoxy bedliner to finish it off.

[Tremelune]

Is there a term for this kind of soldering (so that I can search and figure out how to do it)? I've got a few "aftermarket" holes in the metal of my dash, and it's too dicey to weld...I tried to solder with a little butane torch with bad results.