kishy's 1985 Country Squire

[kishy]

I've dealt with the push-n-twist sockets on a friend's '97 Caddy STS. Silly things had ground issues causing the filaments to pulse between each other when the turn signal was on causing fast flash. Swapping those over to the wedge bases was the biggest reliability improvement.

So the wedge bases of the '92+ cars just fit in the same way the older bases do? If so I may do that from a standardization stand point since I have a good number of 3157 bulbs.

Not even 92+, sometime in the late boxes it switched, first for tail lights and later for front turn signals. 88-89ish. But, the front turn signals stayed round longer and the tail light sockets on a Mercury are not the weather-resistant design as they are accessed through the trunk wall. Cars where the sockets are accessed by removing the lamp housing are usually weather-resistant sockets. Reminds me to ask the guy if I can harvest the light sockets off the 97 lol.

The aero sockets have the wires come off at a 90 degree angle. This usually doesn't cause any issues but can sometimes depending on the 'clocking' of how they stick off the lamp housing. Also, the seals/washers for the aero sockets are too thin, you need to use the thick puffy box ones.

[kishy]

Alrighty...

So, I received my fuel tank, some cheap awful fuel pump that'll probably only last 4 days, 95-97 calipers, some "just in case" lower control arm bushings...tank straps, a water pump and some other junk are still in the mail. I'm gearing up to do a "medium brake swap" on the wagon. I figure rather than put the effort in twice (run lines, replace shit) might as well just do it once. Kind of. I'm going to use my sloppy noisy scrap ball joints I took out of the big-brake-swapped '91. It'll at least hold together in the driveway and for early basic test drives when the time comes. Prior to going for inspection it'll get new ball joints. That is probably sometime after May 2018 but we'll see.

Going to need to grab some of those 92-94 upper arms and double check if the spindles I have in the garage are usable. I already have new 95-97 hubs.

Lincoln will also be getting that treatment, but since I'm using a mish-mash of used parts for the wagon instead of all-new for the Lincoln, the wagon might go first.

[kishy]

Updates!

Drained the oil, it didn't actually look awful. No coolant mixed with it. Still had some oil-like consistency to it, not watery nor lumpy. The drain plugs were both the right thread but one had a 13mm head, the other had a 7/8" head, and the latter was stripped so badly it just freewheeled in the hole. Was able to get a new drain plug also with a 13mm head so now they match, and thankfully the threads on the oil pan weren't harmed, just the old plug.

Took the oil filter off, it had no oil in it. The filter hangs at 45 degrees from horizontal, how can it be empty? Found that there's a plastic wrapper on the filter, with a hole torn in it, but the wrapper was still on the filter since it was new. It doesn't seem like it would have outright prevented oil flow but I'm not sure. The filter being empty is really damning for whoever did the last oil change.



Figured out why the start wire was constant hot - because it's not the start wire. I'm not sure what it's for, but it's not the right wire for that terminal. I found the right one, connected it, and the starting circuit works as expected.

After having to be reminded (GMN Facebook group) about the inertia switch, I started it. It actually runs great, relatively speaking. Idle speed wavers a bit but I wouldn't be surprised at all if there are some high resistance or unreliable connections to the harness in various spots. It's not like I don't know what to look for now, from the Lincoln.

I filled the rad with water and a bottle of rad flush and let it idle for 40+ minutes. Thermostat seems to work, no massive cooling system leaks, power steering is bone dry. Rolled it forwards and backwards under power, trans engages gears quickly and car will roll without needing to bump the throttle at all, despite the sticky drum brake. At no point did I hear anything that sounds like bottom end knock. It has exhaust leaks a-plenty, but in over 40 minutes running I didn't hear a single knock. It revved smoothly and kept itself idling the whole time with no stalls. There's a video of it running on the Facebook page.

I checked the front end play and it actually seems like it's all in the bearings, so it might be able to pass a safety if I just throw some calipers on it and adjust the bearings (and of course fix the floor). I'd rather do the brake upgrade at the same time but we'll see.

Put one of my surplus flat-sided (89 plus I think?) window motors in the driver door, since the magnets had come un-glued in that one.

I'm feeling pretty good about this thing.

[87gtVIC]

It lives.

[sly]

That oil filter tho.

[TecNickal]

Hell yea it lives!!

[Kodachrome Wolf]

Happy to see another Boxy-Box wagon getting back on the road.

[kishy]

I thought I had an oil pressure gauge hanging around, but I guess not.

I pulled the filter off and it was full of oil, completely unlike the old one I took off. So it would seem the oil is circulating and that path includes the filter which is obviously a good thing.

I tried to check the timing and found some nonsense. When the engine first starts, it has a really unusual exhaust note that sounds kind of like a mis-stabbed distributor, really diesel-ish. Like an old farm tractor. After a certain amount of time (30 seconds?) that goes away and it smooths out. I found that with SPOUT disconnected, that sound does not go away. Logical conclusion, the timing is out to lunch and the computer is able to wrestle it into spec. SPOUT unhooked, computer won't compensate, hello Massey Ferguson.

It would appear to be set "10 degrees before a notch in the balancer that isn't a timing mark but could be mistaken for one".

I found and cleaned up the timing marks, and they're roughly opposite from the mark the timing is set at. I'm not even sure how the engine could run like that. At this point I'm assuming some combination of the following exists: jumped time, balancer ring slipped, distributor stabbed wrong, and timed based on the wrong mark. I'm pretty much going to have to find TDC and re-do it all from scratch. Will be fairly easy if done when I replace the timing set. Thing is, I was hoping to evaluate "is the engine good" before I put a lot of work into replacing stuff, so I'd obviously rather not replace the timing set (what a job from hell THAT is) until I know how oil pressure looks on this thing.

I did poke both valve covers, front and back ends, with a stethoscope and didn't hear anything abnormal up top. Next will be to do the same from below against the block.

Fun!

[gadget73]

There should be two wires on the studs of the starter solenoid. One is the S wire that is hot in crank, the other goes to the I terminal to power the ignition system when cranking. That wire is basically hot in "run". Reversing them would make it crank until you rotate the switch to the "start" position.

you can check the chain for slack by rocking the crank. That will tell you if its likely to have skipped before tearing into it. My vote is someone dropped the distributor wrong and shuffled wires around. Its perhaps not as far off as you think if the wire on #1 is not actually going to cylinder #1.

[kishy]

Yeah, I had kinda forgotten about that "other" wire. Something about the hot-in-run being below 12V, and the hot-in-start function being to boost it with 12V while cranking? I could crack open the EVTM but it's hiding from me at the moment.

Demystified a bit of the timing situation. There is pretty minimal slack between turning the crank and the rotor moving, I'd say it was less than the Lincoln which was not enough to jump.

The balancer did not slip (or at least, not significantly). I found TDC on #1 using a length of firm wire in the plug hole, and did the finger test to make sure it was the compression stroke. The timing pointer indicated TDC at TDC, and the distributor rotor was pointing to "halfway before the #1 plug wire" which itself is on the #7 stud of the distributor cap.

My timing light was giving me a garbage timing reading because I had it hooked to the wire coming off the #1 stud on the cap. The light was flashing when the #4 plug was firing. Since those studs are opposite each other on the cap, that's why the timing looked to be set to the opposite side of the balancer than where the timing marks are.

This will be pretty easy to straighten out with a well-thought-out re-stab and adjustment. Since the timing slack seems pretty minimal it can indeed wait until after I've checked the oil pressure (which needs a gauge I don't have at the moment). Sorry if any of this is boring, but it'll help me remember where I left off if I write it out.

Science!

[gadget73]

for Duraspark, yes. For TFI it just doesn't have any +12v without it on the 85. In 86 they just tied the "crank" input on the TFI module to the start wire so its powered both ways. Sometime prior to 85 it was wired that way too. I honestly have NFC what they were doing with it most of the time.

[kishy]

for Duraspark, yes. For TFI it just doesn't have any +12v without it on the 85. In 86 they just tied the "crank" input on the TFI module to the start wire so its powered both ways. Sometime prior to 85 it was wired that way too. I honestly have NFC what they were doing with it most of the time.

Weird thing is I don't think either the original harness, nor the '85 Vic harness in my Lincoln now had that wire. And the wagon will start and run with it disconnected.

Sooner or later I'll have to yank this harness out and take a look at it in detail at which point I can figure stuff like that out.

It has a new reman alternator (60A 1G) from not long before it was parked, but I have a collection of 3Gs in the garage so I may upgrade it anyway just because.

Not sure why I started moving on this car as early as I did. I have so many other things I need to do, but the wagon calls out to me...fix me...

[kishy]

Yanked these off my phone, turned them into a single video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARQ_1GS7sV4

[DerekTheGreat]

It lives! But far from being able to walk away from the hospital haha.

[VicCrownVic]

...Not sure why I started moving on this car as early as I did. I have so many other things I need to do, but the wagon calls out to me...fix me...

Because even a beater wagon is better than no wagon. Although I have seen much worse, I'm not even sure I would consider this one a beater by my standards.