obsolete

The Hella knock-off glass H4 housings (Autopal, etc.) on eBay are pretty good, throw some decent quality halogen bulbs in there with a relay harness or go ahead and HID retrofit them. As for LEDs, these are the new hotness, but they're pretty pricey: https://www.holley.com/products/electrical/led_lighting/retrobright/parts/LFRB130. They look just right, though.

I like this engine swap. What's your plan for the front steer rack? Different spindles?

Nice! Steve knows what he's talking about 🙂

Who told you that your SHP front wheel is bent, a tire shop? Any chance you could get a wheel repair place to fix it?

This is the whole joint though, not just the boot.

I have these on my car, 16x8.5 front, 16x9.5 rear, with SHP tire sizes. The fronts fit well without a spacer, the rears fit okay too but they need a small spacer not to look too narrow compared to the front (I went 15mm, could've gone more). https://ns-wheels.com/wheels/ns-drift-mdv2/

Wow, nice. I wonder if these still exist for 6-bolt, but I kinda doubt it.

Awesome, nice score!

Neat. Did you get this stuff off Yahoo! Japan auctions or something?

That's got potential...and probably mouse turds.

I'm interested to see what you come up with for "tall guy mods". I've contemplated some changes to my car for a better driving position, but it looks like it could get complicated pretty quickly. Are you going to post a build/resto thread anywhere?

I think the marks you're talking about (at least where the picture is focused) are from a weld that's been turned down in a lathe. The torque tube cup is welded to the shaft, you can see the heat affected zone on either side. My '88 has the same annoying drivetrain lash on/off the throttle that you've described, and about the same amount of movement at the driveshaft as your video. I haven't taken my torque tube apart yet, but I noticed that when I took my axles apart to replace the boots, the CV joints had a noticeable amount of slop in them. I think your torque tube splines look pretty good. I've definitely seen worse. But they all get sloppy over time, it's a bad design...

Now that we've taken care of the caliper casting, let's turn our attention back to the piston. You can still buy aftermarket replacement pistons, but the only ones that are currently available are sold as the piston only. They are missing the parking brake parts inside the piston. Here's a picture to illustrate what I'm talking about. The old factory piston is on the right, and the new aftermarket piston is on the left. See the retainer plate that's staked into the old piston, holding the threaded parking brake mechanism in the center? That will need to be cut out so it can be installed in the new piston. Before butchering the old factory piston, I took some measurements and did the math to confirm that the rust pitting would in fact be in the seal area with new pads and a new rotor. The 47mm dimension comes from the width of two new pads (14.5mm each, total of 29mm) plus a new rotor (18mm). Having confirmed this, I can start cutting with a clear conscience that I am not wrecking a good reusable part. A lathe would probably be a good tool for this, but I don't have a lathe. I have an angle grinder. A little damage to the retainer plate is probably inevitable, and that's okay, since it isn't a very high-precision part, but work slowly and carefully to minimize the damage. At this point, I was able to pop the guts out with a screwdriver: Here are the guts removed from the piston: And here is the new aftermarket piston with the guts from the old factory piston in it. Perfect fit! The ID of the new aftermarket piston is 32mm, and there is a retaining ring groove sized for a 32mm bore (OD of the groove is about 34.5mm). The groove is fairly wide, and seems to be designed to use a round wire retaining clip, like the one shown in this MR2 caliper rebuild: http://www.mr2turbo.info/pics/rearcaliper.html (that page is where I got the idea of cutting the factory piston). The pistons I got did not come with any retaining rings, and I couldn't find a wire one, so I used two 1-1/4" snap rings stacked on top of each other. Conveniently, this is the largest internal snap ring that comes in the Harbor Freight assortment. It's a pretty good fit. That's not going anywhere. Okay, it's time to reassemble the rest of the caliper. Here's my caliper coated with some nice gloss black high-temperature paint. I've already installed the piston seal. No pictures for that step since it's so simple; just coat the seal with assembly lube and pop it into the groove. Next, insert the piston dust boot into its groove (keep it dry, no assembly lube for this part). Now, push the boot down into the caliper piston bore, so it's outside-in, just like in the disassembly step. The lip of the boot that seals against the caliper will look wavy. Go ahead, chase it around the bore with your finger and try to get it pushed in as evenly as you can, but perfection is not required. No matter how long you spend messing it with it, it will still look wavy like this picture, and that's okay. It will be fine. Now, get the boot retainer ring started in its groove. Be careful not to puncture the boot with the end of the ring. Here it is partially installed: At this point, you need to use a small screwdriver to pop the ring the rest of the way into the groove. If the end of the ring is still sticking up, push down on it to expand the ring a bit so the end you just inserted sits flush against the opposite end of the ring. Once the ring is fully installed, if any of the lip of the boot is still wavy or bulging out, you can push it into place with a tool like a large, dull screwdriver, and the retainer ring will hold it in. When you're done, it will hopefully look like this: Okay, now pull the boot back out into its normal shape. It's time to install the piston. You may have noticed that the outer diameter of the piston is a lot larger than the opening in the boot. How are we going to get it in there? This can be pretty aggravating, but I have a trick for you. You'll need a small sheet of plastic. I cut a piece out of a washer fluid jug, about 8" x 5", although smaller would have been fine too. Now, curl the plastic into a cone and insert it into the boot like so: Lube up the piston with assembly lube, then push it through your plastic cone, using the cone to expand the opening in the boot as the piston slides down. I used a hammer handle to push against the face of the piston with a little extra force to get it past the resistance from the seal. Once you have pushed the piston far enough into the caliper, carefully pull the plastic out from between the piston and the boot. Ta-da! Now, push the piston the rest of the way into the caliper and spin it so that the notches in the piston are in this position, at 12 o'clock and 6 o'clock. The rear brake pads have little posts in them that require the piston to be oriented this way in order to fit correctly, so you might as well do it now: The next step is to assemble the Belleville washers and o-ring on the parking brake actuator, and install the actuator into the caliper. I could've sworn I took pictures of this step, but I guess I didn't, so I'll just explain it. Grease up the 7 Belleville washers and stack them onto the actuator pin. I'm using Lucas Red & Tacky, but you can use whatever you like, just get some grease on the washers to keep them from rusting any worse than they have already. The small top of first cone-shaped washer should be against the end of the actuator pin, and the large bottom of the last cone-shaped washer should be against the caliper. Like this: Caliper Side )()()() Actuator Side Clean any grease from the Belleville washers off the threaded portion of the actuator pin and out of the o-ring groove; you don't want to contaminate the brake fluid with the grease. Then, lube up the o-ring with assembly lube and slide it into the groove. Lube up the bore in the back of the caliper with assembly lube too, then spin the actuator into the caliper until it's fully bottomed out in the piston and in this orientation, with the longer part at the top of the caliper: At this point, I used kev's excellent instructions to install the new needle bearings and the parking brake actuator arm and spring. Before linking to the instructions, I will share an embarrassing mistake I made during this part of the reassembly process. As much as I'd rather not admit I did this, I will explain my mistake, so hopefully others can avoid repeating it. When installing the lever arm and lower needle bearing, you MUST make sure everything is aligned VERY straight. Here's an example of what it looks like when it's not properly aligned. I added some red lines to make easier to see the misalignment. The red lines in the picture above should be parallel before you try driving the lever arm and lower needle bearing home with any force. Don't assume, like I did, that it's not a big deal and it will pull itself straight. In my case, the key wedged in its groove in the parking brake actuator, and I didn't notice. I just kept pressing, and I ended up badly gouging the key. Then, while pressing out the lever arm to fix my mistake, the hard needles in the bearings did a number on the lever arm shaft. Here are the damaged parts: I was sick to my stomach after seeing what I'd done, especially so close to finishing the rebuild. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to try to use the damaged parts instead trying to find replacements for them. I ground the key smooth, being careful to remove as little material as possible, and smoothed out the lever arm shaft with emery cloth. The grooves in the shaft were way too deep to remove completely without wrecking the dimensions of it, so I just smoothed out some of the roughness and called it good enough. Here's the parking brake mechanism reassembled with a new snap ring: I worked much more slowly and carefully the second time around, and everything went together perfectly and still works just fine. I can see the piston move in and out smoothly when I press on the lever arm. Good enough! Now that you've seen my example of what not to do, here's the link: Rear Brake Caliper Assembly Now the fun part, lots of grease! I also have the rubber boot started on the lever arm in this picture. After adding the grease, pull the boot on over the lever arm and pop it into its groove in the caliper casting. Then, install the boot retaining ring. Get it started on the top... Then use a screwdriver to pop it into its groove on the bottom: Put the spring back on the lever arm boot, install the slider pin boots, and there you have it, a fully rebuilt caliper! Be sure to coat the slider pins in silicone grease before installing the caliper back onto the car.

Where to find rear brake caliper rebuild parts I moved this information into its own thread to make it easier to find. Click the link above for all the info I've collected on where to find parts.

It's 2022, and all Starquests are over 30 years old. Some of them are closer to 40. The parts situation is getting desperate, and rear calipers are a good example of that. Currently, there are no remanufactured rear calipers available from RockAuto or any of the nationwide auto parts store chains in the USA. Unfortunately, the rear calipers all stick and seize over time, so something needs to be done about them. If you haven't checked yours already, and you believe they may be original, you should check them as soon as possible. When I bought my car, the previous owner told me that the left rear caliper had already seized a few years ago: he pulled into a parking lot after driving on the highway, and there was smoke coming from the left rear wheel well. He had the car towed to a shop, and they were eventually able to find and install one of the last reman rear calipers in the country. Last fall, I noticed that the right rear was starting to stick. I could hear it dragging when I would back out of the garage. The car was still driveable, but I knew if I didn't do something about it soon, it was going to end up cooked like the other one did, so that's what got me started on this adventure. I didn't do it in this order, but I would recommend removing the piston first. With the caliper off the car and drained, you can use a rubber-tipped blow gun sealed against the brake line port, with the bleeder closed, to pop the piston out with compressed air. If you don't have compressed air, you can also use hydraulic pressure to pop the piston out while the caliper is still connected to the car. Make sure the master cylinder reservoir is full, and with the caliper off its mounting bracket and the pads removed, just pump the pedal until the piston pops out. This is the messiest option, but it works. Here's the right rear caliper on my workbench. I'd already removed the bleeder and poured the fluid out into a pan, but it still dribbled a puddle of really disgusting-looking brake fluid on my workbench. Not a good sign. Before tearing into the caliper, I inspected the caliper slider pin boots. This one is obviously torn... ...and the other one also has a hole in it. Here are the boots removed. The small one just pops off the lip it seals against, and the big one pulls out of the hole it sits in. The torn boots led to quite a bit of rust on the slider pins. Unfortunately, new slider pins are no longer available, so if you can't find any better condition used ones, you may have to clean yours up and reuse them, even if they're in rough shape. Now it's time to remove the big rubber boot that covers the parking brake mechanism. There's a spring around the small hole in the boot for the parking brake arm, I slid it off carefully with a screwdriver and set it aside. Be careful with this boot; replacements are difficult to find, so you'll probably want to reuse it. The factory rubber seems to be good quality; mine is still soft and pliable after 35 years, with no splits or cracks. There's a steel retaining ring around the larger hole in the boot. You can just pop a screwdriver under one end of the ring and lift it up without damaging the rubber. I lifted up both ends of the ring and slid a small pair of pliers under each one. Only the pair on the left, opposite the parking brake arm, is really necessary, but the second pair helped prevent the other end of the ring from gouging the boot. I removed the ring by pulling on the left pair of pliers and guiding the ring off the back of the caliper and around the parking brake arm. Okay, now the moment of truth...I pulled back the rubber boot to reveal the rust horrors within: After brushing away some rust and grease, you can see that there's a snap ring holding the end of the shaft in place. Easy to remove with a small set of snap ring pliers. Now, to remove the parking brake arm. I gently clamped the caliper in a vise and started tapping the shaft with a punch and a small hammer. It really doesn't take much force at all to move it. If you use a small punch or screwdriver centered on the dimple in the end of the arm, you may just be able to tap it all the way out this way. If you use a large punch like I did, you'll get stuck when the arm is part-way out, because you'll run into the part of the parking brake mechanism that engages the piston. To make the shaft easier to remove, you can pop the spring clip up with a screwdriver to release the small amount of tension it puts on the shaft. Shaft partially removed and spring clip popped up with a screwdriver: After popping up the spring clip, the shaft moved freely enough that I was able to just grab the parking brake lever arm and wiggle it the rest of the way out by hand. This picture that shows the wedge that sits between the parking brake arm and the piston actuator, which is what you'll run into if you use too large of a punch to remove the shaft. With the parking brake arm removed, you can see the mechanism that engages the caliper piston. Mine was covered in more rust and grease that I didn't brush away before taking the picture. If you've removed the caliper piston already, you can just pull this part out, or push it out from the other side. The only thing holding it in is an o-ring that seals it against the caliper. If the piston is still in the caliper, you'll need to spin this part out of the piston. You should just be able to grab it and twist it out. In my case, it helped to push the piston into the caliper a little bit (I used a cube tool to spin it in). By pushing the piston into the caliper further, it made the actuator part stick farther out the back of the caliper, which made it easier to grab. Here's the actuator part removed. You can see the o-ring and the stack of 7 Belleville washers on it. Note how the washers are arranged on the shaft, it's important to put them back in the same orientation when reassembling the caliper. Since I didn't remove the piston from the caliper in the beginning, I needed to remove it now. Since I now had a large, conveniently-located hole in the back of the caliper, I just set the caliper in a press and pressed the piston out using the same big punch I used on the parking brake shaft. You could probably accomplish the same thing by tapping the punch or screwdriver with hammer, but be careful not to damage the back of the piston, or the bore in the back of the caliper that the actuator o-ring seals against. Oof, that piston does not look good... When I cleaned the caliper piston up, it looked like this. There's a ring of rust pitting where the chrome plating has failed and brake fluid, air, moisture, and time have taken their toll on the steel underneath. The caliper wasn't noticeably leaking; with worn pads and a worn rotor, the pitting was outside the seal area, but if I would try to reuse this piston with new pads and a new rotor, it would certainly leak. The next part to remove is the caliper piston dust boot. You need to push the boot down into the caliper to see the retaining ring that holds it in. I'm pointing to the ring here, it's the thin gray crusty looking thing. You can push a small screwdriver in behind the ring to remove it. This may take some force, and you may have to try in a few different spots to get close to the gap in the ring. I couldn't see where the gap was on mine, but I managed to get close enough by trial and error. Here is the ring removed. This shows the orientation of the gap on mine; it was facing the hydraulic ports. Maybe they are all assembled identically at the factory, and yours will be the same? Or, maybe not. With the ring out, the boot just easily pulls out of the caliper. This is why I wanted to remove the boot. Lots of rust hiding behind it. Maybe the caliper was leaking a little bit after all? I also removed the caliper piston seal, but didn't take any pictures of that. I carefully used a bent dental pick to get behind the seal and pull it out of its groove. I recommend hanging onto the seal, it may come in handy later. The final parts to remove are the needle bearings for the parking brake arm shaft. They are 21mm OD, so you'll need something slightly smaller than 21mm to remove them with. I found that a short 14mm 3/8" drive socket was the perfect size. It fits in between the two bearings, and I just popped a 3/8" drive extension into it through the bearing opposite the one I was going to remove. The caliper is pretty awkward to set up on a press, and the bearings aren't in that tight anyway, so I just knocked them out with a 4lb hammer, balancing the caliper on a 1" deep socket. When you're using a hammer like this, what you're hammering against matters a lot. On the wooden workbench, it didn't work very well. On the concrete floor, the bearings knocked right out easily. Okay, now we have a bare caliper. Well, there's one exception: the little cap with the rubber plug at the end of one of the slider pin bores is still attached. I couldn't find a replacement for this anywhere, and it seems fine, so I left it alone. Time to start cleaning the caliper. First, I removed as much grease and dirt as I could with wire brushes. I don't have room in my garage for a real parts washer, so this is my parts washer. With the strainer basket removed, the caliper fits, just barely! I used a zip tie as a handle so I could completely submerge the caliper in the cleaning solution. I left it in for about an hour. Since the caliper is cast iron, I probably could have let it soak a lot longer without risking damage, but after an hour, I felt the Chem-Dip had done all it was going to do. Here's the caliper after the Chem-Dip. Its color has lightened up significantly. At this point, I had already rinsed it under hot water and dried it with compressed air. This is an important step; you want to rinse the Chem-Dip residue off! Yes, exposed parts of the caliper will flash rust after rinsing and drying, but we can easily take care of that. I used some 0000 steel wool stuck onto a brass brush to polish the flash rust off the caliper bore. The surface of the bore doesn't need to be perfect; yours probably isn't, and that's okay. As long the seal groove is in good shape, the caliper can be reused. At this point, the caliper would probably take a coat of paint, but I wasn't satisfied, so I decided to sandblast it. The first step, regardless of whether you're painting or sandblasting, is to mask the caliper off. I wanted to blast the rust out of the groove for the caliper dust boot so I could get some paint in there. The easiest way I found to mask off the caliper bore to do this was to clean up the caliper piston seal that I saved during disassembly and put it back into the groove, tape over the seal with blue painter's tape, then use an x-acto knife to cut the tape between the front of the seal and caliper: Here's the piston bore fully masked off: I wadded as much tape as would fit into the bore for the parking brake actuator to protect it. I also screwed spare bolts and studs into all the threaded holes to protect them. I put the bleeder screw back in, and I shoved a wad of tape into the brake line port and screwed a spare M10x1.0 flare nut down into it to protect the threads and hold the tape in place. Here's my extremely cost-effective, minimalist sandblasting setup. $20 Harbor Freight hopper gun with 70 grit aluminum oxide abrasive. Gun calls for 7CFM, but that's at 100% duty cycle. My compressor is only rated for 5ish CFM with a 15 gallon tank, and it had no trouble keeping up because I was only using short blasts, not holding the trigger down. I found that the gun worked best with the cap on the hopper open. With the cap closed, the small hole in the cap restricts the airflow into the hopper, and I was getting almost no abrasive out. With the cap open, it worked great. YOU NEED FULL PPE FOR THIS, PERIOD! I was using a 3M respirator that seals properly against my face with P95 filters, chemistry-style safety goggles, and earmuffs. The grit still ended up collecting in my goggles because they didn't have a perfect seal. It also went in my hair, on my face, down my collar, up my sleeves, in every pocket of every piece of clothing I was wearing, in my shoes, and inside my gloves. This mess and discomfort is the price of being cheap and unwilling to dedicate garage space to a real blast cabinet that I would rarely use. Life is full of trade-offs... The tub caught most of the media, and I was able to recycle the same media several times. I think if I'd tilted it up at a little steeper angle, the recovery rate would've been even better. Every time the hopper got empty, I would dump the recovered media from the tub back into the bucket it came in, and then scoop it back into the hopper. I went through about 20% of the 25lb bucket, which was more than I expected, but at this rate the bucket will still last me a long time. So I lost about 5 lbs of media in the lawn, but you'd never know. It completely disappeared into the grass. Here's the caliper after blasting. It came out very clean, with a nice rough surface for the paint to grab onto. Here's the caliper prepped for paint. I used compressed air to remove residual dust from blasting, then wiped the caliper down with 91% isopropyl alcohol on a microfiber cloth. There are plenty of paint prep solvents, you can use your favorite, but the 91% isopropanol works well for me. I also taped off all the surfaces that will be greased later: the back of the caliper and the closed slider pin bore.

I know it's a hack fix, but I can say from experience that Lucas power steering stop leak works. My steering box was leaking, so I drained the reservoir, filled it with Lucas, and drove the car for a while. I thought it might just slow down the leak until I got a chance to fix it properly, but the leak completely stopped. I know it still needs to be fixed the right way someday, but the results were way better than I expected. The only downside is that it's noticeably thicker than ATF, so the pump is a little noisy in cold weather

Cool, keep us updated on how it works.

This is the guy who does the hatch bushings: https://www.facebook.com/Schiemann-Composites-1044728035562051/ They are great quality, highly recommended.

Neat, I didn't know these were available. I've seen plenty of cars that people have put a lot of work into still running around with old ratty-looking throttle cables on them. Looks like Summit will drop ship you one cheaper: https://www.summitracing.com/parts/pio-ca-8867

Did the car sit for a while before you got it? I agree, looks like rust pitting.

That looks great!

Yep, I think you've got the meaning right. Look at picture 10, see how the key is off-center toward the uninstalled bearing? I believe that's what kev means by the bottom of the caliper. It's been a while since I've done this, but if I recall correctly, you can use the pin as a lever against the key/screw to compress the belleville washers a little bit, which will allow you to get the pin started in the installed bearing. Just be careful you don't gouge the pin/key by pressing them together too aggressively after doing this. Good luck.

That's odd, even without a tank, I would still expect the compressor to be able to lift the front end with the air cups, just slower. Got any pictures to illustrate the "one cup will leak from the center of the cup" issue? I agree it would work better with a tank, that will give you a larger volume of 200psi air ready to slam into the cups when the valves open.

Dang, that's purdy. When I get to that point with mine, I am thinking of rolling on paint instead of spraying.

That's what I would do instead of risking drilling through the glass. Instead of tape, I would use this, 3M 8001: https://www.oreillyauto.com/detail/c/3m/3m-5-ounce-weatherstrip-adhesive/mmm0/08001?q=3m+8001&pos=0. The only compromise is that the spoiler will probably never come off the hatch again.