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Messages - Haystack

3
Suspension/Steering / Re: Stock rear brake drums
86 xr7 should have the larger 10" drums. These were hard to find about 10nuears ago, if you can find a replacement set, I would pick them up.
4
Site Suggestions / Image attachments?
With the demise of Photobucket, I no longer have a majority of my pictures. I noticed that the site now allows up to 512mb attachments, but what does this do for our hosting? Do we have plenty of hosting available, or would I be better off to find a picture hosting setup to not clog up the server?
5
Engine Tech / Re: cranks no start **Diagosed**
My old 86 had around 350k miles when something broke in the front suspension (car had lots of rust and was repaired from a bad accident badly) and the sway bar started banging against the oil pan. I swapped a ton of stuff in trying to repair it, even doing two oil pans from the sway bar rubbing a hole in it. Eventually, everything broke, and it just wasn't worth fixing anymore. In about a months time frame, I lost brakes, water pump, timing chain cover gasket, blew a hole in the radiator, heater core went, blower motor went, and the ignition switch melted. I could no longer daily drove it and gave up.

I purchased the car with around 250k miles. The valve stem seals were shot, and so were the oil rings. At first it used about 1 quart every tank of gas, but it quickly got to the point that I was dumping a quart in every 100 miles or so.

Eventually I just got to the point that I picked up a gallon of oil Everytime I went to Walmart, and I would wait until the oil light came on, and I would dump the whole gallon in after I got to my destination.

I mercilessly beat on that car. I have an 85 gt block that has been sitting on an engine stand, and I have tried to blow up every 302 I've owned hoping to get to use it. It's been on that stand for over 20 years now.

My most recent 86 tbird, I purchased with 130k miles or so, and I have daily driven it for almost 8 years. I have never changed the oil on it, even after taking it all apart to do the head gasket when I found a broken head bolt. I have not looked at that timing chain, but it's sitting at about 260k miles now, and I have parked it for a wintertime revamp, and I would be very interested to see what the timing chain looks like. I don't even know what the oil filter looks like, but I'm willing to bet it is starting to rust.

I am 100% sure you can get to the oil pump if you can get the pan out, but it really is much easier and quicker to pull the motor. I have done an oil pan gasket about 5 times trying to keep the motor in the car, and every time, I have ended up with a worse seal then when I started.
6
Lounge / Anyone still around?
Just curious how many people just lurk now. I check in every month or two, but have been horrible about actually logging in.

How many peeps we still got hanging around?
7
Engine Tech / Re: cranks no start **Diagosed**
Glad you got it figured out, but I am trying to figure out what you did to eat up the timing chain like that. I had to swap my timing chain cover gasket on my old 86 that had around 350k miles, and the chain was loose, but it did not have the sharp teeth like yours, and I beat the ever living  out of that car. It's interesting to see all the nylon, I only had a few flakes left on mine, and they were noticable orangish tan.

It took me about two 12 hours straight 2 days to swap the oil pan in car. It is much easier to pull the motor. If you leave the ac/ps bracket in the engine bay, I can had the motor out in about an hour. Much easier then fighting an engine stand/jacks if you have a motor lift.

Also, glad to see you are uploading, I went ahead and subscribed. We need more fox cougar bird stuff. I try to check the forums, but I rarely see enough traffic to feel like logging in and my saved login is always expired.

The double row h.o. timing chain also fits and last one I bought was the same price, I didn't see that mentioned, but also did not finish the video fully yet.
8
Electrical Tech / Re: 83 Digital Dash Fuel Sending Unit Options
Not saying this is the right way, but I had my fuel pump die on the side of the road and the clip disintegrated. I clipped off another clip, but there was not gasket at all. I ended up using a 20v hot glue gun.
9
Audio & Other Aftermarket Electronics / Re: Car pc
This is going to sound dumb, but it's mainly for music.

In about 2005 I was super big into computers. I saved up some money and bought the first commercially available mini-itx form factor motherboard. It was a 533mhz fanless computer with a built in dvd-decoder.

I was saving up $600 for a pop out single din vga screen, but the runs were limited and you often had to wait a few months between batches. When I had the money they were always out of them, and I sucked at saving money as a 18 year old kid.

I never got around to building it, and the place that built the screen got bought out and went under.

Fast forward 10 years, and my kids wanted a computer to get into Minecraft. My work was throwing out some old Lenovo servers and told me I could bring them home. I hadn't even touched a computer since I bought my first Android, it did everything I really needed at the time.

But I always had that itch, and now that you can get a raspberry pi screen for $25 on Amazon, I decided to go for it.

I also travel quit a bit for work, and often were running fiber optics for cell towers in places with no cell service. I'm dealing with court stuff from ex #2 now, and there are times you just need a desktop and a printer. I bought a laptop to bring with me, but it's really inconvenient to set it all up and carry it in and out of a hotel room and keep it safe in a trunk full of tools.

How I've got it setup right now, I have think client mounted in the trunk with a battery box and a cheap power inverter with a laptop power supply. Eventually I was to just put a 12v laptop power supply in there, but trying to find one that is reliable and quality but not too expensive is sorta annoying. The power supply I am using is rated for 95w and running stress tests, it maxes out at 40w. In general use, it pulls about 10w, about the same as a 2amp cell phone charger.

I am working on mounting the 3.5" screen where the clock went. I had to Dremel it out slightly, but it fits good there. I am running two full sized HDMI cables from the trunk tucked under the rear seat and under the center console with a single 3.0 USB.

Behind the screen where the clock would go, I am going to mount a powered 3.0 USB hub. I have wired in a power supply that turns on and off with the key to power the hub, then I am going to add a small USB 2.0 hub with powered switches for the screens and touch screen.

The basic idea is to use one screen and the HDMI for Pandora/audio. Then I have a larger 5" screen that I was hoping to use where the clock was, but it's a bit large and I want to keep both center dash vents.

But with that small touch screen I can play/skip songs more like a modern car stereo, then I am also going to use Bluetooth with a USB microphone to give me hands free calling through the stereo.

Then If I want to do something more task heavy, I have a USB touch pad and that larger screen that I think I am going to mount to the sun visor. The switched USB 2.0 hub will be so that I can turn the screens off when not in use without a blank white screen illuminating at night.

Definitely not a power house gaming setup, but if I wanted to, I could take my multimedia backlit keyboard and play Minecraft with my kids while I'm out of town, and even do voice chats with them.

Like I said, it's kinda pointless, I could do almost all the same things on my Android phone, but it's a life saver for emails, pdf, and if I wanted to, I could even type up and print legal dospoogeents if I get surprised with something.

All and all, it's kinda dumb but I love it. When I get finished with mounting everything the way I want it, I'll post some pictures, maybe a short video of it in action.

10
Audio & Other Aftermarket Electronics / Car pc
Starting my car pc project. Gonna just mount it in the trunk, mount a small 3.5" rasberry pie screen where the stock clock goes and go from there. I have a old i-5 6500 mini computer I got cheap used. Hooked it up to a watt meter, and it pulls a grand total of 40 watts under full load, and as low as 5w at idle.

been a long time coming, and im excited to do it, even though its pretty pointless with android devices and stereos now a days.
11
Engine Tech / Re: Proper injectors for stock Speed Density 5.0
I'm also leaning towards the map sensor or a vacuum leak. Having 19-20 at idle should be in spec. An easy way to test it,, as well as a base idle reset.

With the car running, unplug the iac. The idle should barely change. How I adjust it, I turn down the idle screw until it starts to buck or have a hard time idling, then I plug it back in. Thats it.

If you have a bunch if vacuum leaks, then you will not be able to lower the idle enough the car might die.

The reason I bring this up, if the iac is unable to control the idle, the car will try to compensate by messing with timing and fuel. This causes all kinds of issues.

If you can get the car to almost die, then the iac is able to perform it's job, and you really don't have to worry about vacuum.

However, I would check the plastic vacuum manifold. These 5.0's like to eat motor mounts. I've had a few where they started surging and gas mileage went way down. Either that plastic manifold was broken/cracked it the hose had a hole. This is the main vacuum distribution for the whole engine.

You need to verify that the mao sensor is indeed getting the same 19-20ish vacuum at idle. If that's all good and you are able to do the iac reset like I said, I would feel pretty good about saying that the map sensor is probably bad.

As far as the cats go, they usually only last 7-10 years and about 100-150k miles. Almost every one of these cars I've seen, the cat is either completely hollow, it blowing honeycomb out the exhaust. I even passed emissions with 291k miles on a car that had a very annoying rattle. The rattle ended up being a round chunk of cat material that bugged me for years. It was about the size of a golf ball, just bug enough to not go through the exhaust opening in the cat.

One day I replaced the rusted out tail pipe, when I dropped it, a little ball came rolling out and my rattle was gone.
12
Engine Tech / Re: Oil pan issues with windage tray
Fox Stang oil pan should be the same as the stock fox tbird oilpan. The only difference is that the tbird pan has an extra low oil level sensor that the Stang pan doesn't
13
Suspension/Steering / Re: Problems with Cobra brake swap
I also got three bad brake master cylinders in a row from parts stores. Two reman and one new all in the same go.

The one that was on the car felt find but bled off when you held the pedal down. If you stepped on it again it would do the same thing.

All three of them I couldn't get a stiff pedal out of and the fourth one worked perfectly with almost no bleeding.
14
Electrical Tech / Re: PMGR Starter Issue
Does the starter spin but just not engage the flywheel,  or does it just not spin at all?

Pretty much every starter has the same tooth count reguardless of flywheel tooth count.

When I did my sn-95 t-5 swap, I found out that there are two different offsets for the nose of a starter, 3/8" and 3/4" length. The first starter I tried. It hit the flywheel but could not pull back enough. After doing some reading. Lot of guys had the same problem and added a 1/2" stack of washers. That when I found out about the nose length difference and I got the correct starter out of a pick up truck.

My thinking. It might be possible that you have the wrong lenth and the teeth don't always make contact.