Our F85 Power Tour Project

[Motown 454]

The car looks great Philip.

[PhillipM]

Thank you Wayne!

[PhillipM]

After driving the Slayer around I noticed I had coolant leak out of the intercooler reservoir. It was weird, it wouldn't leak until the system built some pressure. Then it would drip out about a paint can size mark. then stop. I knew I needed to pressure test and locate the leak. For this I have a second cap that has a schrader valve in it. So I put some air in there and sure enough, a small stream shot out of the welded area. Dang. So I go grab a silver marker to mark where the repair needed to be and it's not spraying any more. Okay, so I put some more air in there. BAM! blew the whole side of it out! Turned out to be okay because there were some other leaks that I didn't see at first. This area took a pretty hard hit so I'm not really surprised. I went ahead and got the tank pulled out and got it repaired. I ended up re JB welding around the NPT port as I've repaired it here before. Hopefully JB weld over JB weld sticks!!. I don't see why it wouldn't.












Also, in my never ending quest to reduce NVH in this car. I've switched from a Silicone intake coupler to a bellows style rubber one. The new rubber one from Spectre has way more movement. The silicone one was almost like that tube was solidly mounted. Here are the before and after shots of that.





That's all for now. Hoping to get out there again on Wednesday night and confirm my tank repairs are good, then get it sanded and repainted for install.

[PhillipM]

More upgrades? Haha, not sure if they are really upgrades, however after having a friend ride in the car he mentioned that it felt like the rear trailing arms were solid. I explained that no, I have rubber in the upper ears on the 9". Well, I do, however the mounts at the body were solid as that's how Metco builds their adjustable bars. I figured, at this point it wouldn't hurt to swap those out with rubber to try and dampen my vibes..

After searching and searching I found that no one really makes a nice performance rubber mount in the correct width for the A body and with a 3/4" 16 tube adapter. So, I built my own. I started with a piece of 2.25" .25" wall DOM and bored it out on the lathe to match the Moog press in bushings. The bushings have a step in them but that was not too difficult to add really. I then grabbed some old bars that I had built for something else and was able to salvage the tube for this new set. Notched them in the mill and simply welded them on. That description really makes it sound fast but I've got about 5 hours in the whole thing including swapping them out and paint drying.

I haven't driven the car yet but I will of course report back if they make any changes.

[therobski]

Really neat work Phil. Hope to see you guys on the Tour when it stops in Dallas

[Reckn8]

You better be there Robski !!

[therobski]

I will Paul may take the last leg to OKC.

[PhillipM]

We'll be there for sure!

[PhillipM]

Some feedback on the new Moog rubber upper trailing arm mounts.. they have really masked about 50% of the vibrations felt. I think I've decided that all new cars vibrate, they just use nice rubber to isolate it so you don't feel it! Haha

Along that theory, I've got a nice set of GM rubber engine mounts I might swap in for the Poly ones and see what that does!

[PhillipM]

I thought I'd give a small update. Anyone that knows us, or has read through this thread, or has been on Power Tour with us will know that this car has vibrated at speed for the entire time we've had it. From the first trip to about 2 weeks ago, there was nothing that would fix it. I've heard, it's your pinion angel, it's your drive shaft... yadda yadda yadda. Well. Here it is ladies and gentleman. Here is the fix for our trans.

Now before I get into a few pictures I'd like to remind everyone the history of this trans. In 2006 we ordered this trans from Tyler at ATS in Vegas. All he did was order and have it drop shipped from Rockland Standard as it came in their box directly from them. What I ordered was a Fbody t56 with an upgraded Viper mainshaft. Very common thing and I'm sure Rockland was stabbing these things out by the dozens at this time.

Here was my first clue that I didn't even know was a clue. Who puts one of these together and doesn't machine off the output shaft?



Now that pic was really for you to just understand what I've got/had.

This last time we took it serious. Let's take this thing apart and really investigate. I checked the 5/6 gear. Nope, tight as all hell. Took off the front plate and got that up in the car. Dead nuts on. .002 TIR.





So we decide to check all the clearances. 1st thing we noticed was the counter shaft seemed loose. It would audibly clunk back and forth. So it definitely wasn't at the recommended .000 end play. In order to check the extension shaft you need to have the tail housing on. When we went to put that on my buddy noticed that it didn't audibly clank onto the aluminum. He lifts and pushes down. It's up about 1/16". That's weird he says. (I have no idea, I've had it apart but wouldn't know that's not right). So he starts looking at the rear shim pack and finds this.



This funnel goes with the shim pack for the extension shaft and controls oil flow back through counter-shaft. Well, it was rotated slightly and that tab was underneath the shim pack. What that did was cause the preload to go from the recommended .002 preload to about .052" of preload. From what we can tell what this did was leave the center bearing basically useless.

Took the car out and ripped it up to well over 100mph. All is good! I do have a slight vibe on decel only above about 80 or so. I don't think this is in the trans though. I need to do some more investigation on that, however, this thing is 100x better than it's ever been!

[PhillipM]

Just a follow up. 200 miles in and trans is still nice and smooth!

[PhillipM]

Well haven't worked on this car in a while, but after last Power Tour I decided I was kind of over how tight my seats are in the hips. These are some old Arizen seats from around 2007 or so. I do like them for the most part and I paid way too much for them, so I'd like to keep them for the time being. After talking with my interior guy and having a real good look at how they are constructed I decided to attempt to widen the bottom by tilting out the lower bolsters. Turned out to be fairly easy actually.

I fist started by disassembling them completely. These seats were built in Taiwan and then upholstered in Main I believe if my memory serves me right.



After that I was left with just the lower frame work.



Now that I fully understood how it was constructed I decided I would cut the tubes in rear and then in the front I would cut them about 80% through and then just rotate the tubes out to give me more room. I ended up going from 17.5" CtC to 19.5" CtC, so a total gain of 2". Hopefully that's enough.











After that I put it all back in the car. Can't even tell really that much has been changed. The fit between the center cushion and the outer bolsters is a little looser, and if I need to I can add about a 3/8" piece of foam here to take up some space.

[PhillipM]

Here are a couple more photos I found on my phone. These show a little more detail on how I cut the tubes and then tilted out the bolsters.





I left the fronts connected only slightly to keep them in place. I then added a piece of steel to the gap and welded it up. That took a lot of the guess work out of alignment.

[PhillipM]

Got the car out to enjoy it a little bit. Shot a few photos just at work. First time outside with the quarter panels fixed! Also, the newly widened seats are comfy as hell now!

[PhillipM]

Well we've updated the cooling fan and I wanted to share with you what we've done. During HRPT 2016 I spoke with Charlie shortly about the cooing system in the Red Devil. Following up with that I did a little research and found that the fan was out of a Cadillac SRX. So I scrounged Ebay and picked up a blade and motor for $45.00. I'm not saying that our old CCI 17" fan wasn't good but when the temps got around 110* out and you sat in traffic the temps would rise to about 235* and the A/C would start to suffer. So, I'm hoping with double the wattage and a 20% larger blade we can negate those effects! First thing I'll say is this sucker is quiet! I thought it was going to be super loud but it's the exact opposite. We were able to still use the original shroud I built about 6 years ago and just make some updates to it. Here are some pictures..

[Mr Nick]

I did a similar tweak on my Corbeau A4 seats. I had the driver lower seat base apart to replace the worn out side bolster foam, and while in there I put a pry bar between the side bolster tube and main frame, and bent them out about 0.75 each. Much better. For a guy my size (6'5") every bit helps.

This car is wrapped correct, how is it holding up?

[PhillipM]

Wrap is holding up great in my opinion. It does scratch pretty easy so if you open the door up and it hits a table or something it's most likely going to be scratched. But, if it gets too bad I can just rewrap the door or what have you. So far though I've wrapped 2 vehicles and i love it. The only part on both that you can tell is at the front fenders where they roll over into the engine bay at the front of the hood. It's a tight compound corner and it pulls back sometimes. But, with my investment I'm okay with it! Looks killer and going down the road people love the matte finish.

If you want I can post the area I'm talking about, if you're considering doing a wrap..

[PhillipM]

TO EVERYONE THAT MAY READ MY THREADS. AS AN AVID USER OF PHOTOBUCKET.COM FOR OVER 15 YEARS ALL OF MY PICTURES AND HOT LINKS HAVE BEEN NUKED. I DON'T KNOW IF THEY WILL EVER GET BACK AS I'M NOT WILLING TO PAY $400.00 RANSOM TO DO SO.

Thank you for your time.

Frustrated,
Phillip

[Bugzilla]

Phillip - I feel your pain. All my pictures are gone too. $400 is just ridiculous to ask for. $100 a year and I would think about it. $50 a year, no problem. Thanks for screwing everyone over Photobucket.

[PhillipM]

Phillip - I feel your pain. All my pictures are gone too. $400 is just ridiculous to ask for. $100 a year and I would think about it. $50 a year, no problem. Thanks for screwing everyone over Photobucket.

Yup I was thinking the same thing. That'd it'd be like $50 and I would just pony up and pay it to save the aggravation. Whoever is their CFO if a freaking f* tard who has no idea what's going on.