Just sharing my joy and my story.
So I bought my 86 SE 5sp nearly a year ago. Has a 3.4p/r swap and an 88 cradle in it. Picked it up for $1800 as it needed exhaust work, threw a bunch of codes (I think 4 different ones) and was always winking (one working headlight).
- Drove it home and broke down on the way - couldn't figure it out...would crank, had fuel, every once in awhile it would barely fire. Towed it home...turns out the little graphite nub on the distributor cap was broken (with evidence piece found in the cap).
- Took apart the headlight mechanism (there was nothing wrong internally), but it must have just been a loose connection because when I plugged it back in, it worked! Winking headlight fixed.
- Car came with a new fuel filter, so figured I would throw that on...of course even when using two wrenches, the fuel line split...bought some stainless braided line and replaced that whole segment that runs into the right side of the filter - looks better and was less than half the price of an OEM replacement. No problems so far.
- I thought it needed a little exhaust work, but it needed a lot...replaced everything behind the Y-pipe. It was such a pain in the ass...
- Had to dremel the bolts back into hex shapes and use those extractor sockets to budge em.
- The O-2 sensor was seized like crazy - two weeks of pb blaster and a breaker bar wouldn't budge it. Even with a 4ft cheater pipe it didn't do anything. Thought maybe the socket was expanding, so bought an impact socket and it moved first try.
- Just when I thought I had the exhaust figured out, I took it for a test drive and my pipes disconnected right behind the Cat and drug on the ground - I pulled it up a bit with lacing wire to limp home, but my garage has that lip as you enter and it caught one of the clamp bolts and bent the pipe all the way around. Fortunately I was able to grunt, pull, and kick the pipe back into shape with the cheater pipe. Put a much longer coupling in there and cranked down the clamps tighter so that shouldn't happen again.
- Timing...holy cow, this took awhile
- Marked the fat mark on the harmonic balancer, did timing procedure and didn't see the mark at all.
- Checked the firing order - was definitely not in order, but it ran - I think it was 180 degrees off
- Pulled the #1 plug, set it at TDC and put everything in order
- Timing bounces between 12 and 8, so I'm thinking a new timing chain is in my future, but it's all set right now
- Spiders!
- Man, there was a crap ton of spiders all around this car. Mostly couldn't see them, but every day I would go into my garage and see a bunch of webs everywhere - mostly from the car to the ground.
- Tried sweeping out the webs for a couple weeks, but they were relentless
- Sprayed some Ortho Home defense all over the undercarriage. Came out that night and found a few of those punks hanging down. Two of them were Black Widows! One had it's hangout right where I go under the car...so that was creepy.
Took it for a test drive today - I've got power, my exhaust doesn't stink, it's not pissing off the neighbors, and there were no check engine lights
Feels really good when it all works just right!
Feels really good when it all works just right!
