Techboy's 88 Starion SHP Save ....

[importwarrior]

Did you see the big bearing in the wiper motor?

Should look in to it as well and degrease re grease it

[GINASQ]

Nice work.

I'll be restoring a black 87 soon. If you're not going to use that AC stuff, I wouldn't mind buying it from you.

[techboy]

Starting bolting things back in the engine bay this weekend for the first time since getting it back from paint ...

Started with the clutch reservoir

Then moved onto the brake booster and master cylinder.

[mbruneaux]

Very nice!

[techboy]

** For anyone viewing this Resto Thread there is about 6 years of posts and conversation missing.  I have all the pics still, so I may try to rebuild it, maybe not.  Of course it will be missing all the real-time replies and conversation.  For now, I will at least start at the beginning and work my way through re-linking all the broken pictures so that what's here is viewable.

UPDATE 8/17 - All previous posts pic links have been re-linked.  Posts from this point forward will be all reconstruction.

[techboy]

Turned my attention to working on the brakes next.  They seem to still be in working order. For now I'm going to freshen them up with new paint, clips and pads.  Eventually I will remove all these brakes again and do a complete rebuild.

First I started by just cleaning everything up.

Gave everything a fresh coat of Rustoleum.

Now it's time for new parts. Clips and boots.

New brake lines and new pads.

Ready to go.

 

[techboy]

While all this work has been going on several parts have been out getting powder coated.  Had a chance to pick everything this past weekend.  Everything was done in gloss black.

Rear hatch garnish.

Fog Light surrounds.

Gas filler surround and other tidbits.

Hood latch.

[techboy]

So it's now winter break of 2015, and I've got some time off to make some progress on this car.  I'd love to see this thing make the road at some point in 2016.

I mentioned several posts back I wanted to do some POR15 work on the trans tunnel.  Eventually I'd like to do the entire underside of the car, but we'll start here.

Starting by masking off the tunnel using natural lines in the sheet metal.  Then got everything ground down.

1st coat.

2nd coat a day later.

[techboy]

I going to eliminate some things along the way as I put things back together, but I'd like to keep the cruise control.  In an effort to get it to work I'm giving this thing a rebuild similar to the wiper motor.

Starting by disassembling the CC unit.  The yellow stuff inside is like foam material.  But when I touched it, it basically deteriorated into dust.  Lol.  (look at right side rectangle) 

So I got a crazy idea and bought a thin foam fish filter at the pet store.

I drew the profile in CAD and used a laser cutter to cut out the same shape.

Put some RTV around this plate to prevent any kind of an vacuum leak.

It's going to be quite a while until I can test out whether this thing works or not.  Either way, I tried!

[techboy]

Nothing too special here ... just continuing to plug away at bolting things back into the engine bay.

Various brackets and such.

Fresh fuel filter.

Got that wiper motor I rebuilt reinstalled and hooked up to the linkages as well.

 

[techboy]

Switched my attention back to the brakes lines, brakes, and rotors and got all that stuff all bolted back up.  Will eventually have to add fluid and bleed the system when we are closer to go time.

 

[techboy]

Going to do a little bit of a mini wire tuck here and hide these in the passenger fender.  I'm taking the intake plate from the fender wall and tracing it onto some black plexiglas.  The notch in the bottom is to snake the wiring harness through.

Threaded all the holes with a tap so that I can use the bolt mounts.

Since I'm snaking the wiring harness through here, I'm notching and folding over the sheet metal so it doesn't cut the harness.

View from inside the fender.

Here's the connectors mounted to the plastic.

Here is it mounted up.

And here it is from inside the fender again.

The beauty of this is it's easy enough to unbolt the plastic plate and get to them if I need to.

[techboy]

Ordered up some replacement interior clips off of eBay.  They seem to be pretty accurate to the originals.

[techboy]

I'm going to be doing a proper elimination of the AC, another reason I pulled the dash.  I also need to replace the notorious coolant hose the leaks inside the car.  So we're going to knock this all out today.

First up, we need to remove this guy so we can install the delete air duct.

Start by removing the two 12mm on the top.

There some wiring an other things that have attach points on here you need to remove to totally free it up.

These guys here you'll have to find new mounting points for.  I grabbed a drill and reamed out the holes larger so that I could these existing 10mm under the dash.

Next we need to tackle getting the HVAC unit out - it's the white box behind the stereo metal framework.

I started by removing all the sheetmetal.

Then I could remove unit much easier.

Here's our 2 friends out of the car.

And here's the infamous coolant hose.  It's about 2" long.

Mine appears to be in pretty good shape, but we're going to replace it now b/c this would be a total pain once the car is back together. Here's the new hose.

Original clamp back on.

HVAC unit reinstalled.

Now we get to put the AC delete duct in.  I found an old Mighty Maxx in a junkyard a few years ago that didn't have AC.  Grabbed this since these can be tough to come by.  I mount the light control box to it since I lost my mount point for that. 

Here it is in place.

And here's a pulled back view or everything complete and back together.

I'm pretty pleased with how this all came out and happy to have it done.  I knew it was going to be a big project.  But now I can get back to other stuff.

 

 

[techboy]

While I had the dash out it was time to repair some of the damaged wiring from that crazy alarm that was installed in the car.

I cut most of the damaged in 1/2 wires, then soldered them back together and slipped some shrink tube over them.

I also got some wiring in place for some aftermarket gauges I'm going to be installing.  Got a hot and a ground all ready to go for down the road.

While I was doing wiring and had the soldering iron out I removed the old dry rotted OEM speakers and trashed them. I'm not much of a "system" guy, so I just picked up some simple replacement Pioneer's for all the way around.

Cut the OEM harnesses off and soldered up the provided connectors for the Pioneer's.

Got the fronts mounted in the doors.

And I got the rears all ready to go too.

And ... to cap off the day, I installed a new pedal set I picked up b/c someone had screwed Autozone pedals to the OEM ones and butchered them.

Making good progress!

[techboy]

So now that we've got everything buttoned up under the dash, it's time to put the dash and some of the interior back in.

One more quick thing before putting the dash back in ... scrapping these old NJ inspection stickers off.  If you recognize these - I have your car and I'm restoring it!

Had to get a little help from my wire, but we the dash set back into place.

And here's things a little bit more cleaned up.

[techboy]

I'm not ready to put the full interior back in yet, but I figured I could at least get the carpet back into place.  I took it outside for a  good power wash and cleaning.

This carpet isn't perfect, but it'll work for now.  I may replace it someday with an aftermarket pre-molded one.  There is a leaked red pen leak under the drivers seat.  And there's a cigarette burn on the passenger seat floor.

But for now, here it is back in place in the car all cleaned up.

Something about having the carpet back in there just makes it look so much more finished and further along. Lol.

 

[techboy]

Now it's time to get back to work on the engine bay.  I felt like with all the work going into the engine bay, there were some other pieces in the bay that could really use a fresh coat of paint - like the cross member and surrounding parts.

Sorry these pictures are so grainy.  Most of these pics were taken pretty late at night in the garage cranking on this thing after work.

[techboy]

I wanted to clean up all the exhaust hangers, brackets and shields as well.  I just went over them with the wire wheel to get the dirt and grim off and then hit them with primer and a high-heat silver paint.  

I started with the hanger brackets.

These are the exhaust heat shields that run the length of the car underneath.

 

Now we can start installing things back under the car.  All new hardware was used to reinstall.

[techboy]

While I was concentrating on the exhaust shields and hangers, I figured I'd spend a little bit of time on the muffler as well.  I'm planning to run an aftermarket exhaust since most of the piping was in pretty sad shape, however, I want to retain the OEM look so I'm going to funnel it back into the stock muffler.  Due to some rust issues, I had to track down 2 of these to make one and weld them together.

Used some Mother's to polish up the tips.

For now I hung it back under the car to get it out of the way.

 

[techboy]

While all this stuff has been going on, I've been waiting on my powder coater to wrap up a few things I dropped a little while back for a gunmetal grey spray.  He called, it's done. So I picked it up.

OIL PAN.

BATTERY TRAY

I also pulled my timing cover off my engine b/c years ago I had it powder coated wrinkle red when I didn't really have a vision for this particular restoration.  Now that I'm into this and the car is blue, I wanted to tie a few engine components into the blue, so the red timing cover was not going to work.  So, I had the cover stripped and coated in a blue.

 

[techboy]

I'm getting very close to the point where we can put the engine in the car for the first time.  For those of you that have been following this build you know that I previously rebuilt the G54B in my Conquest and will be transplanting that engine into this car.  I pulled the engine a while back and have it sitting on my stand.  There's a few things I need to take care of though before I drop it in the Starion.

First, I'm pretty sure I have a slight exhaust leak, so we're going to resurface the manifold.

Removed the manifold.

Here it is off.  You can see where it was leaking.

Some time on the belt sander ... needs more.

There we go, that's much flatter.

Gonna heat wrap it while it's off too.

 

[techboy]

Now we can also get that freshly powder coated timing cover back on and swap out the oil pan for the new one.  I was able to slip off the timing cover without removing the head and untiming the engine.

Really excited about the blue.  It's gonna look so good with the car.

Now it's time for the new oil pan.  New gasket first.

Pan torqued down.

Lastly, we'll get the water pump installed.

We're all ready now to get this in the car.

 

 

[techboy]

Next thing I'm going to tackle is something I've honestly been completely avoiding ... the inner fender liners.  These things are in rough shape.  They are covered in years of road grime and tons of overspray.  I don't even know if I can make them look good again.  But we're going to give it a shot.

I'm going to go at it with a gasket scraper, some Purple Power and a still bristle brush.

After a ton of work and time ...  1 done.  Now tackle the other.

All things considered, not too bad.

[techboy]

So it took a couple of dates, but I finally got a couple of friends together to get this motor into it's new home.

I'm so excited to get this .....

in here ....

Here's what the car looks like right now:

First let's get some motor mounts in place.

Engine on the crane.

Got the flywheel mounted back up.

Transmission mounted up.

I've used the "scoop" method a few times to hook the engine/trans into the car.  It seems to work well for me.  Here we go....

There she is ... now I'm starting to feel like I'm making progress.

Here's a straight-on shot.