kishy's 1991 Grand Marquis

[DerekTheGreat]

Did you have the windshield tinted too? I'm a fan of ceramic tint, I noticed a significant improvement with the A/C's performance after I had the Town Car's windows tinted.

[friskyfrankie]

yeah the host is being glitchy and I don't know why

Also slow too - on and off but usually on.

[gadget73]

yeah the host is being glitchy and I don't know why

[87gtVIC]

Car is looking great. Funny finding things out about a car years later! And now that you see it,it must bug you.


I too have had problems with posting pics lately.

[WagonMan]

Stupid site won't show pic. WagonMan

[WagonMan]

I have an NOS right hand lens. The inside is frosted,(rough finish). WagonMan

[jaywish]

I can see why you love this car.

[kishy]

Today, a friend with an '05 Sunfire stopped by so we could try to diagnose a front end suspension/steering noise. He had to go take a quick shift at work from 12-3, so we had a gap in the middle of the work where I decided to wash both of the Grand Marquis: 83 first, then 91.









I really do love this car.

Later in the evening, installed LED reverse lights. I was a little put off by the performance of red Auxito LEDs as tail/stop/turn lamps, but the issues I had with them in that application (hot spot, washed out colour, insufficient delta between tail and stop) do not apply to reverse lights, so I gave white Auxito LEDs a shot here. They seem to work well for this task, their light is pretty truly white, and they throw a good amount of light, which is welcome with the tint now installed.

These were the final outstanding exterior lights that I planned to convert to LED, now done. I'm hanging onto the amber incandescent bulbs for the front turn signals.

While installing those, I realized something. The tail lights on this car are not a matching pair. There is an internal painted surface which blocks light from exiting the top of the lens on the right side, and that is not present on the left side. I'm wondering if this is a model year-specific change and my car has one non-original tail light, e.g. 88-89 do not have the paint and 90-91 do, perhaps.

[kishy]

Yesterday, this car was the recipient of a long-overdue window tint installation.
As I did with the 84 Town Car, I opted for 20% VLT, which I find to be on the edge of being too dark, but not actually too dark.
In conditions where I may use the mirrors to back up at night, rolling the windows down is helpful.
In conditions where I look out the back window to back up at night, it's really not an issue.
Unlike that car, I spent a little more money and went with a ceramic tint, which should offer UV blocking and heat rejection properties.

I used a local shop which is held in high regard for the quality of their work, plus a friend-of-a-friend is the owner's son and did some of the work on my car, knowing he'd be hearing about it if it was a shit job, which you'd like to think wouldn't matter but it's hard to be sure sometimes. The installation looks to have been done well and there are no defects I hadn't already been expecting - e.g. combination water and UV damaged interior materials that disintegrated when they pulled things back around the rear window.







Phone white balance completely lost its mind here. The street lights are very yellow on that road, and those headlights are not nearly as cold as they look in the pics (note how not-red the taillights also look).

[kishy]

Fluorescent dye in coolant often works.

Yeah, suppose it would. I had just sort of assumed that the full complement of usual leaks were all seeping very tiny amounts and that would have accounted for it, but I'm coming to realize the coolant loss seems to be intermittent, and maybe accelerated during short trips vs longer trips where less is lost. Water pump is definitely suspect. It was new a decade ago but that doesn't mean much. It does have a lifetime warranty for which I have the paperwork, though, so if it does let go, I'll be pursuing that.

As for the loud noise, I loosened the alternator and checked the water pump, alternator, and steering pump by hand. They all feel about right. No idea what it was.

[jaywish]

Fluorescent dye in coolant often works.

[kishy]

extra features by way of plugs

Not meaningfully, no. The trailer pigtail just has a more complicated 4-flat end on it. There's the standard 4-flat terminals, but beside them are 4 more terminals for what is labeled as "Uhaul Trailer", which leads me to believe very very old Uhaul trailers maybe used a proprietary connector. That, and there are test lights built into the plug, so when your signal is on it blinks on the connector, and the whole connector has little tabs on it to allow it to snap into a panel mounting bracket of some sort, which is probably an accessory you can or previously could buy at Uhaul stores.

The cheap price and equal function to the Tekonsha modules is why I went that way. Also, the Uhaul kit does include the wire and fuse holder to use for the battery positive wire, unlike the Tekonsha module, which is nice.

--

I picked up a few online purchases today at my friend's house in the US. Among those items is a Sony Mavica MVC-FD200 2.0MP digital camera - notable for using 3.5" computer floppy disks for storing photos. I've previously played with my friend's MVC-100 (1.2MP variant of the same camera) and wanted one of my own to mess around with.

The FD200 produced this photo:



Not too bad.

While coming back through the tunnel, traffic was bumper-to-bumper and the ambient temperature was quite hot. The temperature gauge got a little higher than I typically see - usually between the O and R in Normal, this time touching the M, but everything seemed about right. While nearing the customs booths, a horrendous noise started from under the hood which was linked to engine RPM. The best way I could describe it is some sort of metal-on-metal grinding. AC clutch on or off didn't change it, revving in neutral didn't make it go away or change other than increasing in frequency with RPM increase. It slowly faded, and the final hints of it were when I pulled out onto the road, after which it didn't come back.

When I got home, I looked at it using my thermal camera, and none of the accessories/pulleys was abnormally hot as best I could tell. Nothing looks like it's been self-clearancing. There's no apparent evidence of what actually made the noise. The only thing out of order that I noticed was an oily wetness on top of the lower rad hose, which would implicate the front seal of the power steering pump, but that doesn't seem to have leaked since I re-sealed it. Whatever made the noise is going to have to fail a little more before I can identify it.

Water pump bearing is an obvious possibility. The car does lose a very small amount of coolant and I haven't been able to identify where it's going.

[87gtVIC]

Yes. I have used the Tekonsha brand. Mine was very basic. Sounds like yours has some extra features by way of plugs.

https://www.grandmarq.net/vb/forum/technical/gmn-reader-s-rides/23560-my-1987-two-door-crown-victoria-aka-the-brown-blob?p=1183843#post1183843

[kishy]

Yeah, not sure if I wanna get into cop spring territory, because I value softness and higher spring rates just don't give that sort of result, but we'll see.

Still need to figure out what I'm doing about the axle oil escaping. The brake grabbiness is really irritating. It's basically a decision between swapping the entire housing over to my disc brake rear end with 3.27 open (and if doing that, might as well crack that open and make it limited slip while I'm at it) or just repairing it as it sits, which may or may not end up being seals, bearings, and shafts. 3.08 open with drums is highly tolerable but I'm not sure where I want to end up yet.

Today, I installed trailer light wiring using a U-haul branded (and rather old stock) trailer light power module, part number 13493. This is fundamentally the same thing as the Tekonsha modules mentioned here in the past by maybe David? Which I've also used in the Ranger and wagon, but in this case can be had a fair bit cheaper. The trailer connector is designed to be panel-mounted, but that doesn't mean you can't just use it like a normal connector. It also has both the standard 4-flat terminals as well as what appears to be an old obsolete proprietary U-haul connector, but some unused terminals don't present any issue using it for a 4-flat.

The hardest part of that was getting a power wire up to the battery. I went along the passenger side in the cable duct/tunnel where the other body wiring lives, and poked out through a hole in a grommet below the HVAC stuff on the firewall. I used the wire included in the kit because it has good quality insulation and was long enough to do the whole run, but it's only 16 gauge (or seems to be somewhere between 14 and 16, I guess). I suppose just about anything I ever own will be fully LED-lit, and a typical 4-flat wired trailer won't have enough stuff on it to pull more than 10 amps anyway, so it's fine.

No photos of the rat's nest at this time.

[GM_Guy]

If the late model cop springs didn't do the trick the next thing I was going to explore would be coil spacers similar to the jacked up donk crowd (weld/bolt on lower extension), but diy something of an appropriate thickness. I wish I could locate my 90's era moog catalog, when everybody had all the proper rear springs available for the various models and see just what the specs where.