A Newer Project!

[SuperNovaSS]

Well done Steve. The most impressive thing to me is your wife lets you do this in the house. Is that Cards Against Humanity in the background? Good game.


Jason

[njsteve]

LOL. Yes it's my daughter's game.

The wife texted photos of the process to my daughter at college showing her what we were doing in the dining room. (that's her version of a support group).

The text went something like this:

<span style="font-style: italic">&quot;It's such a shame your father doesnt have a workshop to do this...oh wait he does...and a basement, too...and a garage....&quot;</span> [img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/rolleyes.gif[/img]

[67 442]

I like the clip section you were using for the pocket.
Always a interesting read on your projects.

[njsteve]

I used whatever clips were in the wife's kitchen at the time. Did I mention how understanding she is? [img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/grin.gif[/img]

[njsteve]

I stopped by the bodyshop today to get an estimate for replacing the &quot;targa panel&quot; that has the factory defects from the adhesive bleed-through. I left the replacement panel with him so he could start prepping and painting it. Here is a shot from when I spent several days last summer removing it from the sawed-off roof section of a donor car. The bodyman indicated that it will be much easier for him to remove the existing panel from the car since it does not need to be salvaged and he can use heat from the painted side to loosen the adhesive.

[njsteve]

I tackled the spark plug and wire set challenge yesterday. Boy is that an insane job. Plugs 1,3,5, and 7 can be done with a minimum of effort, while lying across the front end of the car with your arms pretzeled along the side of the engine. Plugs 2, 4 and 6 require the smog tube to be disconnected from the manifold to give you some room to get your hand in. Luckily the bolts came out without breaking due to the low mileage.

Number 8 has to be done from under the car, sticking your arm straight up alongside the block. The hardest thing is using two fingers (because that's all the room you have) to pull the plug wire off the plug and coil. I could have used some of Bruce Lee's <span style="font-style: italic">&quot;One Inch Death Punch&quot;</span> training to get the finger strength to work in that tiny work area.

And of course, GM had to sharpen all the edges of every pointy piece of metal and shielding in the general area of the plugs and wires. At the moment, my right arm looks like it lost a fight with a rabid honey badger.

The original Denso PTJ16R15 12563707 plugs were still in the engine. They look like they were burning nicely but the gaps had worn to over .060 over 14 years of running. I replaced them with some regular copper ACDelcos. She idles much more smoothly now.

[SuperNovaSS]

Did the dealer receipts show any spark plug replacements?


Jason

[njsteve]

Surprisingly, no. Probably because that would have taken some actual knuckle-busting labor instead of allegedly hooking up some flush-o-matic 5000 machine.

It took me around 2-1/2 hours to change the plugs. (including the 15 minutes of trying to find the spark plug and socket that fell down and wedged itself on top of the starter. Luckily I disconnected the battery before starting the job. [img]<<GRAEMLIN_URL>>/rolleyes.gif[/img]

[jannes_z-28]

Nice to see your work of detail.

In my 2001 LS1 that I bought 10 years ago to put in my '69 Camaro I still have the original Denso spark plugs. They look fine and it runs fine, so I haven't had any reason to change them.

[njsteve]

I think the problem they had with these initial platinum plugs was that the tiny little &quot;puck&quot; of platinum on the tip of the electrode ground would fall off through wear or with via someone checking the gap with a feeler gauge and dislodging it. If you look carefully you can see most are missing their pucks, hence the wide gap.