Put the new driveshaft in and started thinking about brakes.

I spend more time hunting for nuts & bolts than actually assembling anything.

 

Finally finished the fabrication on my fan shroud and got it installed....

 

Found this inside my heater ducts. I think it's multiple generations worth of nest!

 

Impressive!

 

My 8yo son flew with me from Philly to Providence RI to get my car and then drove back that day. We went from that guy's house to gas and then McDonald's, before hitting the road home.

Sitting in the car with bags of food and his happy meaL open on his lap,, he opened his vent and about a cup of seed hulls and nest blew all over him and his food. It was disgusting and funny. I'm chuckling as I type this.

 

Thanks for this. My SA's side markers are starting to crumble.

 

Realigned the hatch. I had to pop out the roof liner and loosen the hinge.

The gap on this side was a lot smaller before, causing contact to the body.

 

built new shroud for radiator and installed new radiator the other day. now dropping the transmission to change clutch and go through tranny/may rebuild depending on what I see.

 

Today I finished assembling my GSL rear axle. Been collecting parts for probably two years!! Large bearing axle with GSL-SE LSD and gearset.

And somehow found NOS brake dust shields.

Going to go in the car soon.

Going in with it is all new oem rear links, watts etc, except solid heim hojnt lower links from T3.
Had to get a bit creative with the new brake hardlines and brackets, I think it should work well.
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That looks great!

 

Looks awesome... I did the same thing...

 

Yeah thanks for the pics Tommy. I'm hoping to finish my new rears brakes this weekend. Never bent hardliners before.... I like the way you attached them to the suspension brackets.

 

My car has been on jackstands for over a year. Last night It sat on its new suspension and wheels for the first time!


And then today I put it BACK on the stands, and started the alignment work!

 

Car looks like its coming along! Looks awesome.

I will post more pics of the hardline setup. My advice is to practice a bit with coat hangers. Install your soft lines and the 'union' piece and start to map out the routing. There are some good pics I found on google of the factory routing. I used Copper-Nickle line and just bent by hand.

Oh and get spare brake line and practice some flares. Unless you have a fancy hydraulic tool its sort of a pain to make them perfect. After spending so much time to bend the line the last thing I wanted to do was mess up the flare, there isn't enough spare length to redo it.

If your axle is like mine, the spot welded sheet metal 'clamps' had all rusted away long before I got my axle. Maybe there was 1 or 2 left but they didn't survive sandblasting.

I think brackets at each suspension link and make use of the OEM 'cover", and the support seems pretty good.

 

Oh I'm close now. Tomorrow I'll have the front end together well enough to drive to the alignment shop, but I don't have any brakes (driving or park brakes) on the rear yet. Once I do, and I install the new master and proportioning valve, I'll be driving again.

 

Sounds like we took on a similar build!

I am also running coilovers with T3 front lower control arms, tension rods. With Chips Motorsports streetport 12A and Dellorto sidedraft setup.

I just installed the 84/84 disc brake master with a GSL proportioning valve. Hope none of the connections leak, it is all the original OEM hardline but since so many hardlines connect to the master and prop valve, it was a bit tricky to get each one aligned nicely. Need to go slow.


Some grease on each brakeline tubenut threads helps to run down smoothly.

From last season.

 

i installed the drifting dads Panhard bar over the weekend. Andrew Robinson(?) builds them, good price too.

pulled my left rear wheel forward a little, needs to adjust slightly but i like ditching the watts. slid it on monday and she feels good, tight.

 

I changed the fluid in my diff, major difference.

 

...

 

Had this really annoying vibration at 6-6.5k rpm that I couldn't figure out. Vibration was while under load, and while in neutral. Today I tried removing the fan belts to see if it went away (it did). I spun the water pump by hand and it "felt" ok. Put the belts back on so I could drive the car, with the belts a little looser this time. And presto, the vibration at 6k is gone....

Man are these cars sensitive to belt tension...

 

*Ran new hardlines on the new rear end and connected new stainless soft lines.
*Installed new master cylinder and disc-car proportioning valve.
*Bench-bled the master on the car with sections of old line looped back into the reservoir, then flushed the old fluid out of all old hardlines.

Tomorrow Ill connect all hard lines to the soft ones/calipers and fill/bleed everything. Front end is aligned half decent so on the rear I'll confirm/adjust the pinion angle and side-to-side and I might just have this car on the road on Sunday.

It's been a long time.

 

Today (well, yesterday) I learned that you can remove an engine with a CP strut tower brace still in place.

 

excellent! if you want to know the easiest way to do something ask the laziest guy! the FC i have here i did the clutch without pulling the engine or trans. there was enough room to push the trans back, and the engine flops forward, and you have enough room to do the clutch....

 

Finished hooking up and bleeding the brakes with my 10yo today, after his team won the flag football game. Good morning.

Now I'm about to install the new parking brake cables...

The R parking cable shows as NLA but Atkins found a batch of them last year when I was cutting mine out. I cut all the old crusty cables out, then started looking for new ones. Mazdatrix said NLA. Local Mazda dealer said NLA. Called Atkins and they said "NLA, but,... we think we just found some in a warehouse". Couple weeks later I had them in hand.
Thank you Atkins, and all the others supporting our cool old cars.

 

How much did you pay?