My Rides

[Tiggie]

The spare tire well is supposed to have one drain hole, so if you are lucky that may be all. Mine was thin and rusty on the 88 so it got a few coats of fiberglass inside and undercoat outside.
I've heard of only one wagon without 11in rear brakes; that may been an axle swap at some point. I bet you have 11in too.

[kishy]

Well...an offer too good to refuse has come up for the '97, so that's going bye-bye soon (tentatively next Saturday). $250, he's trailering it away, and will be returning the rear axle to me once he's got the car in his shop. I bought it for $480 plus a 1G regulator, got a good set of tires and wheels out of it, and this guy needs a steering column plus has the easy means (trailer, winch and so on) to haul it in for scap when he's done with it, so he'll easily get a chunk (or all?) of that 250 back. Especially since it's still got cats.

I'm abandoning the idea of keeping the 4.6+4R70W, I just don't have the room and realistically I'll be perpetually "getting around to" a swap project but never really do it. So, this is the best possible outcome. I get my driveway space back, my net expenditure for the wheels+tires+axle will be reasonable ($250), and I'm going to see if he'll also give me back the spindles etc. for a medium brake upgrade on one of my others. If he's got no issue dragging it around with no axle in it, he shouldn't mind about the front end either.

I was studying that engine bay and I really don't think modulars are for me. Through extensive troubleshooting and maintenance I've got the 302 Panther engine bay burned into my brain, following wires and accessing stuff is second nature to me now. 4.6 is huge and bleh.

Regardless, there will be other places to get engines from. Right now cash and space are worth more to me.

[GM_Guy]

There are a whole lot less wires and nonsense to deal with on a 302 as well. Those new cars are nice, but man, the volume of wiring is unreal.

Alex.

[Kodachrome Wolf]

I get to live both worlds. Admittedly, encountering the 302 for the first time looked daunting, simply due to my lack of familiarity of it. Now I'm comfortable working on it as much as a 4.6.

[kishy]

I mean...I fell in love with that car (the 97) for how it drove/drives. But the car is beyond salvation, needs a complete suspension rebuild, torque box is swiss cheese plus another hole in the frame elsewhere, bad floor and body rust (doing donuts, car filled with tire smoke from under back seat).

I wanted to put the attributes I liked so much about it (essentially engine+trans+axle) into one of my other cars so that's where that idea came from. But I think the axle by itself will still be an upgrade. 3.27 open with the disc brakes, vs 3.08 in all my others.

Yikes. I can actually refer to my cars as "all" and it's appropriate for the quantity...

[kishy]

84 LTC

Well. Pulled up to a store tonight, turned off car, walked away. Lights turned off but the doors didn't shut. They were being held open with vacuum force, not just the spring pressure holding them normally open.

Got home, poked around a bit. Found the EEC diode I used to make it so both the high beams and low beams could trigger the doors to open had melted.



I'll need to revisit that circuit design and see if I can figure out why that happened. Possibilities:

-Donor vehicle of the diode might have upstream voltage regulation to keep it at 12V even when engine is running. If so, the charging voltage (14 and change) gradually overwhelmed the diode.
-Diode was flaky to begin with
-Some other thing I've overlooked.

In the meantime I'm back to only having the doors open for the low beams.

The weird thing is that the doors refused to close. I would have expected, in the event of diode failure, the doors to refuse to open for high beams but otherwise work normally. Weird.

[DerekTheGreat]

That is weird..

[sly]

or you need a bigger diode (higher wattage)

[gadget73]

yeah, much higher amperage. Thats probably a 3 or 5 amp part max. Depending how you hooked it up, if that needs to carry the full load of the lighting circuit you probably want at least 20 amps capacity. That tends to put you into stud mount rectifier territory wanting a heat sink, and you've got voltage loss across the diode as well, probably a volt, volt and a half easily.

Hard to find a diode rated under 100 volts anymore. The little cheap ones I buy for everything are 1 amp at 1000 volts and they're pennies.

[kishy]

I could have sworn I wired this so the only current the diode would see is the relays (the headlamps and high beams are relayed now). But I must have overlooked a load somewhere else.

[kishy]

97 Vic departure

Bye!



$250 in my wallet, and once he's got it on a hoist, the axle, fuel tank and wheels are coming back to me. I did decent I'd say.

[kishy]

Aha! The feeds to the headlamp valve box are on the switched side of the relays. This means the diode had to fight letting current flow to the high beam bulbs themselves, not just the high beam relay.

Should be a straightforward fix.

[gadget73]

That would do it. Relay current vs filament current is a big difference.

[kishy]

It's alarmingly easy to spend $400 on RockAuto. Ask me how I know! (please don't)

I did stumble upon something nifty...95-97 reman front calipers, with brackets, with pads, for 20 CAD a pop with no core charge. Bought 2 of each side. Lincoln is (sooner or later) getting the medium brake upgrade and so is one of the others cars that I haven't decided yet (wagon most likely depending on how shot its suspension stuff is). That will leave one car with stock box brakes, looking like the 2dr. Still not sure what the long term strategy is with that car. It looks good on turbines. Hell, they all look good on turbines.

But, I still have the old calipers off the 91 from when I Big-Brake-Swapped it (98-02) a couple years ago. Those calipers, pads, hoses were new only a year or so before that. So they are probably a viable option to put the wagon on the road then figure out mods later.

I am so, so glad to have the driveway space back from the 97 leaving. I can work on a car without having to move two to make it possible now (most of my driveway is gravel, and needs to remain so for drainage reasons).

Against my thrifty instincts, a wagon fuel tank is in the mail. I've been watching RockAuto nearly daily, and the Spectra tanks just jumped in price, and all but one of the cheaper (Platinum Pro? LKQ house brand) sold, so I decided to jump on that. $101 USD shipped. Not bad if I need it. When I drop the tank, I'll almost be upset if it turns out I don't need it though. The trend of availability on those doesn't look to be heading in a favourable direction though so it's not such a bad thing to have.

[kishy]

I've retired this thread in favour of individual ones per-vehicle:

1983 Grand Marquis 2dr
1984 Town Car
1985 Country Squire
1985 Ranger
1991 Grand Marquis

If a mod wishes to close this one, feel free, I won't be using it anymore (and others shouldn't either).