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Oh Come On Now, Detroit Iron has its charm. In what it costs to keep those garage queens going, those guys could buy some Chrysler death machine (Challenger, Charger, Demon, or whatever sexy name) that will fall apart in three years. It's not nice to pick on the retarded.
And those detroit irons need to stay in the garage. On a rain slick street, or on ice, they are death traps!
Reminds me of an old vw bug commercial, it shows all these luxury cars on a mountain road side overheating, steam coming from everywhere, and the humble bug chugs past them.
Last edited by midnight mechanic; 10-01-19 at 11:10 AM.
My recently purchased (from the original owner) 110,000 mile SE was very well maintained. Nevertheless, it had a few issues to address, and as a person who likes his 7s to reflect how they came from the factory, there was a bit of work to be done...
Wretched low speed driveability, including cold stalling (original owner mostly highway drove the car). Fully resolved.
Poor early 2000’s aftermarket stereo... Fully restored to factory spec stereo, everything works.
Missing rear hatch window wiper (original owner removed it, for some reason). Fully replaced, restored, and working.
Missing windshield trim. Replaced.
Driver’s door lock illumination not working. Fully restored and working.
Driver side headlight cleaner (Canadian spec feature) not squirting. Full system now works, both sides.
Other miscellaneous stuff not up to original factory spec. Fully restored to factory spec.
The only thing left to accomplish is to get the “headlight on” reminder beep to work. Maybe a new CPU is required for that one? Otherwise, we are looking at a fully factory spec 1984 SE working just as she left the factory. Oh yeah, the muffler needs to be SE spec (seems to be a GSL version), and I need a driver’s side seat belt in the correct colour. Working on those things too...
Nice work, I'm preferential to factory as well, but admit all fasteners are now either stainless steel or high grade steel to try and prevent them seizing. I did clean up all the old stuff, but can't find someone to recoat them.
Nice work, I'm preferential to factory as well, but admit all fasteners are now either stainless steel or high grade steel to try and prevent them seizing. I did clean up all the old stuff, but can't find someone to recoat them.
Nothing is perfect. Restore with making things better, the way i prefer, too. Stainless steel since more then 20 years make work so easy. BTW i hate rust.
Yes Proxes R1R on 15x7 rims. 195/50 front & 225/45 rear.
You will have a lot of fun with this combination. I had them years ago.
Now I drive 205/55/16 offset -6mm front and 225/50/16 offset -13mm rear .
Let us know how they feel!
I'd been carrying emergency water on account of recently changing the antifreeze and thermostat. I bought 2 gallons of distilled water because I wanted to it right. I used one on the coolant change and kept one in reserve. Satisfied that everything was going to hold together after 2 weeks, I decided to clear out my redundant water, tools, and sealant. The unopened gallon of distilled water was now 1/2 a gallon!! 1/2 gallon of water had been sitting on the passenger side happily rusting away for two weeks!!
So this morning was spent bailing out my car. I elevated the front and then the back on car ramps so the water would run out of concealed areas.
Later I will hit it with contact cleaner, and rust reformer. Right now it is baking in the brutal alabama sun.
About 9 years ago I removed the hatch glass wiper. This was because the gears in the mechanism ended up as nothing more than sand and the wiper arm was drooping badly. I elected to not try to repair or replace the mechanism because I felt that the rear wiper never really worked all that well anyway. I plugged the holes by taping the inside of the hole with electrical tape and then propping the hatch so the surface was level. Had to jack the right side up a little to get level. Then I filled the hole with transparent epoxy. That patch lasted until a few weeks ago when one of the plugs fell inside the car. They had yellowed pretty badly in the 8 or 9 years but still seemed to be keeping most of the water out. It needed to be fixed and I didn't have any time so I put a piece of duct tape over the hole.
I finally got around to working on it and I quickly designed and 3D printed a pair of plugs that look like the ones on the lift cylinders. Printed in black PETG plastic they should be relatively sun resistant. See attached photos.
Left plug is still in place but you can see it was leaking The clear gasket is made from NinjaFlex and seems to compress pretty well. Outside cap in upper right, inside washer on lower right. This is what it looks like assembled. Upside down of course from the way it will be mounted on the glass. Closeup detail of the outside of the cap. Kind of dark but you can see my two plugs on the left and the hatch plug on the far right. From 10 feet away you can't tell they are not factory.
I didn't realize that the holes are different sizes so I had to redesign and reprint one plug and gasket. Hole sizes are 16.6 mm for the right one and 14.6 mm for the left one.
Printed with a 0.3 mm nozzle with a 0.1 mm layer height for the cap. The NinjaFlex was printed with a 0.4 mm nozzle at a 0.12 mm layer height. The Gasket is 1.2 mm thick. This was a fun project and I might post the .STL files so someone else can print them if they need to.
Wow nice work Doug. They look better than the original clear epoxy, but that was a cool idea too. I have to look through your threads now and find out about your EV conversion.
Wow nice work Doug. They look better than the original clear epoxy, but that was a cool idea too. I have to look through your threads now and find out about your EV conversion.
I know, right? I looked for it and all I could find was a dead link to an old photo gallery (picasa). Most of the updates were in this thread as opposed to a build thread.
No idea what he actually did, but he kept the manual transmission and had a controller that could moderate the torque on launch. I'd like to know more.
The GSL-EV has not been driven much since I got a Tesla. I used the 1985 GSL converted to an EV as my daily driver for 4 years. The only things I couldn't do with it was take road trips. And when Tesla built out their SuperCharger network I looked for a way to use that to take road trips and decided it was not practical to use the conversion. So I got the Tesla to take on my several times a year road trip.
I did take the RX-7 to the Sikeston 1/8th mile track in August or September of 2015 and turned up the torque to 11. I set a personal best in the car of just over 9 seconds but this was not good enough to set a record. And it ended up damaging my batteries. My range dropped from 80 miles to about 60 miles. I continued to daily the car until I got the Tesla on Dec 21 of 2015. It saw sporadic use for a few months and I parked it in the driveway with about half charge. A few weeks ago my neighbor wanted to cut down a dead tree in his front yard and we thought it might be a good idea if I moved the car. The 12 volt Lithium battery to power the car systems was dead. Charged that up and put it back in the car and drove it around the block. The brake rotors are pretty red but they worked fine. Car still has about half a charge. Lithium batteries don't self discharge so unless they are hooked to something that will drain them they can sit ready to go for years.
Specs: 16 kwh battery when new. This equates to about a half a gallon of gas. But the efficiency is so high that this equates to about 160 MPGE.
With the batteries full I could get about 160kw into the motor. This is about 215 HP into the motor and at about 85% efficiency gives 182 HP.
The torque is the crazy part. First gear is pretty much unusable. Anything more than half throttle would break the rear wheels loose. Second gear is the demonstration gear. If you start in second and press the pedal to the floor quickly it would start spinning the wheels. You would get max torque up until a little over 3200 rpm and it would start to taper off after that. The 0 to 30 time is just a little over a second. The 0-60 time is around 6 seconds. The redline on the motor was set to a little over 6000 rpm. You could throw motor windings at speeds much above that. My best times on the drag strip were starting in 2nd and if I got a good shift into third it was better than starting in third. The fastest I have been in it was a little over 100 mph. I needed a little higher battery voltage to go faster. When it had the 12A in it the fastest it would go was 116 mph in 4th gear. When you shifted into 5th it would slow down to 110.
The weight of the car is about 200 lbs lighter than stock. A nearly even weight distribution of just over 500 lbs on each corner without me in the car.
I do have long term plans to go back to the strip with it. I have batteries that I bought to drag race with. It will reduce the weight by 350 lbs and increase the power to 190 kw (about 216 hp at the wheels). The downside is the range will be reduced to about 9 miles. This would be about 10 runs down a 1/4 mile track at those power levels. I should get a few more runs at reduced power.
The car has picked up some hail dents from a couple of summers ago and the clear coat is flaking off. The previous owners had it repainted in the mid 1990's due to damage from a sand storm. They were in the Air Force and stationed near Las Vegas at that time.
I had guessed that when Google killed their social stuff and changed Picassa that the photo album went away. In retrospect it would have been smarter to have made a separate build thread.
Hey, Doug - if it's worth your while, I'm sure a LOT of us would be very interested in a Build Thread that outlined old pictures, your thinking along the way, and the changes you made to the car over those years. The HP / Torque #'s you're quoting are impressive, and I would think that with the number of Tesla's making their way to junk yards around the US, there might be an influx (pun!) of batteries and motors that would make EV conversion easier and with even better outcomes.
And, hey - at least it's not an LS swap! Thanks for the information,
Found a neat NOS Fiat shift ****...it’s smaller, but great for my hand. It’s bakelite wood grain.
Watchknut, what kind of tranny or lever do you have? It has a strange bend and looks "foreward" in the opening. It looks great, dont get me wrong. But looks like you have a tranny swap.
10-01-19, 11:08 AM
