kishy's 1983 Grand Marquis 2dr

[gadget73]

have you verified that the mechanical advance works properly? If its not doing it's thing, that might be the haze on acceleration. Spark needs to happen earlier as engine RPM increases or it won't burn efficiently.

[kishy]

As mentioned in WAYWO, this car and its engine bay got a quick spray-down with a turbo nozzle on a power washer. Looks a little less sad without the layer of dirt.





Organizing stuff in the garage, I stumbled upon a project for this car that I haven't gotten to yet.
The '83 has crank-operated vent windows. The cranks are large round knobs.
A bunch of years ago in a junkyard, I found a '68 Continental with small cranks that look like window cranks for its vent windows.
I took those with the intent of retrofitting them onto my '83, and tonight I found the pair of cranks.







Unfortunately, the Panther crank knob has a long snout to reach the recessed splined shaft to operate the window, and the 1968 parts do not, so they can't be used.

Fuel system issues mentioned recently in the thread are not resolved and I'm hoping to deal with those this year, but I guess we'll see.

[GM_Guy]

I wonder if you can find a splined extension in the correct spline count and size.
simular;

[kishy]

After recently installing a trailer hitch on my 91MGM, I found I had only one new hitch remaining, so I decided to move forward with installing it on my 83MGM. The hitches take up a lot of space to store, so between that and their functional value, they're better on the cars than off.

The 83 has a home-made drawbar installed. It's made of rather heavy materials, is installed with decently heavy hardware to very solid points on the car, and would probably be an excellent hitch for towing, but my primary goal isn't a hitch ball, it's other 2" accessories like a cargo carrier or bike rack. For that reason, the home-made arrangement has to go.

Tonight, I put the car on ramps and studied what I'll need to do to remove this thing. I got to looking at this too late at night to actually hack any of it apart, but it appears a grinder with a cutoff wheel will be used heavily in the process as the threads are all pretty rusty and the fastener heads aren't easy to get tools on. Interestingly, much of the hardware is very large Allen-head (internal hex) cap screws. While under the car, I noticed the factory tailpipe hangers are both present - this was a factory dual exhaust car, which I believe is common to Canadian-market, factory 2150 carb 302 Panthers.















After determining that I couldn't do anything with the hitch tonight, I moved on to the tail light wiring. As with the 91, I had installed sequential turn signals in about 2013 or 2014 using a module from the now-defunct meter4it.com. As with the 91, I recently discovered the module misbehaves rather seriously when used with only LED bulbs, and I did swap this car over to Sylvania Zevo LEDs for the tail lights at the same time as the 91. So, when I bought WebElectric modules to re-do the 91, I also bought a set for this car, and tonight I cut out the meter4it box and put in the WebElectric pieces. They are presently lacking their 'control wires' to cancel sequencing when braking (to be clear: a turn signal continues to sequence when braking, but no sequencing will occur for a side that isn't blinking as a turn signal), but that's fine. Assuming the (not optioned) cornering lamp relay sockets are stashed somewhere up in the dash, I will easily be able to tap into the turn signal circuits there for the control wires.



As mentioned in WAYWO the other day, this car was giving me a lot of issues starting and running. It was like the air-fuel ratio was totally off, seeming more on the extreme lean side. Wouldn't start without doing things with the pedal that seemed unnecessary, and wouldn't stay running without pedal, and was revving really high for the amount of pedal being given. This turned out to all be caused by a massive vacuum leak - the PCV hose from below the carb was detached. With that connected, it went back to starting easily and running rather well (minus some minor carb turning stuff I still need to sort out).

In the next few days I should be able to attack this thing with a grinder and get the hitch done

[kishy]

In the words of the Fixx, one thing leads to another.

Tonight, I fought with the homemade trailer hitch. It took a remarkable amount of effort and time, but it is now off of the car. In the course of removing it, I also removed the rear bumper to get better access

While the bumper is off, I decided to separate the front and back pieces of it, and discovered a lot of rust (this is a steel face on steel backing bumper), some of which is deeply pitted, probably almost to the chrome. This car was winter driven before I owned it, and while it's pretty clean in the usual trouble spots, clearly the bumper got packed with salty slushy grossness at least a few times. Between the rarity of good condition rear bumpers for the pre-88 cars, and this being the even rarer variant without the plastic rub strips, I feel like I've gotta do something to prevent this worsening.















So far, I've used a stiff wire brush to knock all the loose rusty flakes off, then used a flap wheel on a grinder to lightly knock a little more off. I then vacuumed up all the chunks, and rinsed it off with the garden hose. This may seem counterproductive, but a rinse with water is necessary to try to get any little particles of salt out of the pits before potentially sealing them in.

With how deep the pitting goes, I'm not sure that I want to go too crazy cleaning up the surface, as breaking through the chrome would ruin it forever. This may be a prime candidate for rust converter - then slap some paint on it, clean up the inner half, bolt it back together and toss it back on the car. I dunno, still thinking about it. I'm annoyed that this has become a sort of big deal, but I'm also glad I caught this while it was still salvageable.

The body mount bushings look absolutely destroyed. I wasn't planning on touching those, but they'll never be easier, especially once a hitch is mounted blocking the access holes.

I peeled the license plate expiry stickers off, RE: Ontario getting rid of stickers. While the plate was off, I admired my cool original dealership plate frame, and reinstalled it with new shiny hardware.







I managed to break both of the under-dash courtesy light holders trying to swap out the bulbs for LED, so I guess that's one more junkyard item to pull.

[Kodachrome Wolf]

The homemade hitch assembly certainly looked decent for whatever light duty job it had to do prior. Certainly understandable to swap it for a more appropriate receiver assembly in the long run. Best of luck in preserving the bumper skin!

[DerekTheGreat]

The Fixx.. Good tune, sounds great on the hi-fi.

[87gtVIC]

Nice work. I have taken apart a number of the bumper chrome to inner skins and they are never fun to do. Definitely tedious after all these years up north.


out of curiosity what was the heat gun and soldering iron used for? Did you do the trailer wiring also?

[Tiggie]

Had to go through the bumper treatment on the old 82. Used the rust converter. I swear that inner steel bumper was raw steel when it was assembled. Luckily both wagons are equipped with aluminum bang guards.

[gadget73]

The current pair of bumpers on the Continental got the same treatment. Similar inner/outer skin sort of deal. Did the same sort of de-scale and used rust converter and Eastwood's equivalent of POR-15 to hopefully stop it. I still have the original rust-free bumpers but the chrome is in pretty sad shape. If the shiny but rusty ones rust through they will get re-installed.

[kishy]

I spent only a short time tonight messing with the bumper, but I did want to at least do something with it.
I removed the bumperettes. One came off without incident. For the other, the threads jammed up and the stud came out of the bumperette. This technically ruins the bumperette but we'll see what I can cook up to solve it. I'm also pretty sure I have a couple hanging around somewhere, plus the ones on my spare bumpers, which are now pretty numerous.



I used a hammer and chisel to break up some of the more layered looking rust, which I would estimate goes around 60% of the way through the steel. There are still more chunks to try to break off. The problem with just leaving it and trying to apply solutions on top of it is that there could be salt inside the layers, and salt plus even the tiniest bit of water (like humidity in an air pocket) would enable it to keep going underneath the paint.



I put a wire brush on my grinder and cleaned up the rest of it somewhat. Still more to do, but I'm confident I've caught it in time to be successful. I'm not aiming for perfect but I do want to eliminate any hidden cavities. I definitely think an upgrade to the Milwaukee Fuel brushless grinder is in order - the brushed one gets quite hot and powers off. Either a thermal or overcurrent protection feature is kicking in, and I'm not really being all that hard on it.





This whole sub-project is making me think that I should probably rip apart all my spare bumpers and, if nothing else, clean them, because they'll be no good if they rot from the inside out in storage.

As for the soldering iron and heat gun, that was from the sequential turn signal wiring. No photos because it's hideous. It's a retrofit of a retrofit of a retrofit and because it's not done, nothing is neatly tucked in loom or anything, so the trunk is just full of wires everywhere. But the lights work, which was what I was going for.