Happy Holidays from Gearhead Garden!

The annual cruise around the neighborhood is ready!  Enjoy a Christmastime wonderland seen through the windshield of the Formula!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Shocking! - The El Camino needs some attention

 

Seems the Formula has gotten all the attention but I have 2 project cars and the other one wanted some attention.

How did I know?  

Well, I was a bit dense.  Any car guy with a project will tell you that it's sometimes a game of denial.  We simply can't accept that something we already fixed may need attention again.

So it goes with my shocks.  I had changed them but it had been so long that I didn't realize just how many miles they've soaked up holding up the front end of 4000 pound car.

So it was with the El Camino.  Now I should know better having changed the transmission 3 times, carburetor at least 5 times not to mention a myriad of other things.

 

But the shocks, I thought they had plenty of time left.  

Well, truth be told the shocks were one of the first things I ever replaced on the El Camino which puts the timeframe somewhere around 1992.   Before the engine change, before the new paint job and of course before 80,000 miles had passed under the third set of tires.

Yeah, it was time.  More accurately, it was overdue.

The signs were there just not obvious to my rose colored perspective.

The front end sat too low, so low in fact that I could no longer get a jack under the front of the car.  

Hard stops became a bit scary with the car diving to one side or the other.

Then the handling... Any imperfection in the road caused varied degrees of drama.

Yes, time to do something.  So I did and the video below shows the adventure.  Take a look.

The Formula Project: Back under the hood

 

It's been close to 4 years since I brought the Formula home.  4 years and 18000 miles later it's been a tale of love.  But not that sweet unconditional love beaming from your dog's eyes when she looks up at you.  No, no, no.  This is the kind of love that demands all of your attention, a few pounds of flesh and most of the contents of your wallet if you don't put the brakes on every once in awhile.

Love hurts....

One way or another it always does.

Considering my ownership of this family heirloom began with $500 worth of parts and the front of the engine in pieces within 24 hours of delivery the tone was set.

BUT!

Opportunities abound if your eyes are open.  Which led to a new YouTube channel and more relevant content in this blog.

I've been busy trying to make a living doing something other than turning a wrench or saving somebody's server so time's short and so is the money.  That means projects fall into 2 camps; Things I want to do to the Formula and things I HAVE to do.

Seems there's lots of things I've HAD to do in the past 6 months.  Luckily, every one of them has been documented with a video.

Speaking of which, the 3 videos below show what I've been up to.  To sum it up: The car doesn't sound like an old rocking chair anymore, the transmission stopped hitting the floorboards and starts easier now that the PCM has some clue as to what the engine termperature is.

Check it out!

Back on the Road: Formula VS Smog Check - Epilogue

A lot can happen in 5 months...

Back in December when I posted my last entry to this blog I wasn't sure what my future held.  All I had was hope and a belief that if I didn't give up things would eventually work out.

Which is exactly how I approached getting the Formula back on the road.

I'm not especially religious but I do believe the old adage that the good Lord doesn't give you anything you can't handle.

December is a pretty long time between posts but I haven't posted anything about the Formula since October of 2015!  That's because, well, honestly there was nothing to post about.

That changed recently.  I picked up some work in March which improved my fortunes.  Now the Formula was always at the top of my priority list but it became even more so as the weeks wore on and it became apparent that what I was driving to work was not ideal for the purpose.  

The Formula needed to be back on the road...Fast!

Of course that meant getting rid of the demons that had kept it chained to the garage for 2 years.  

Recall that we had already dealt with the Fuel Pressure regulator, EGR, got a new intake elbow and ran a few tanks of the proper octane fuel.  Sadly it wasn't enough.

The emissions testing results from 2015 while less than helpful at diagnosing the problem still pointed to a likely culprit.  A high HC reading, that's raw fuel.  High CO?  sloppy ignition system.  High NOx?  Combustion chamber temps too high.  All of them too high?  That points to a bad catalytic converter plain and simple.  

Lot's of things can go wrong with modern emissions control systems on cars but the symptoms would show up long before a failing smog test.  As in the car literally wouldn't run if you could get it to start at all if it was anything but the Cat.

1995 was an interesting year for auto makers.  It was the last year before they formally adopted the new ODB2 standard in emissions controls.  20 years later it's a pain in the ass.  For example, the Formula has a diagnostic port identical to an OBD2 connector but it isn't.  It's OBD1 which means you have a lot fewer codes to help point you in the direction of what's wrong.  Not to mention finding a scan tool that you can actually plug into it!

Still, there are basic emission codes that can be set if something was really going wrong and luckily none of them were set.  Although that's not definitive either since OBD1 has a far shallower pool of data to draw from.  That means things have to be really going sideways before you get any information out of that port.  By that time the code probably doesn't mean much to you.  

So...

Fast forward to the solution to my problem and we open on me in the parking lot of Mesa Muffler early on a Saturday morning.  


For less than $200 I was able to drive out with a new catalytic converter an hour later.  I immediately took the car out on the freeway to warm up the converter and then held my breath and got off on the exit that led to the emissions testing station.

As I pulled into the station, took my ticket and waited in a long line for my turn at the indignity of an Arizona emissions test my time had finally come.

I pulled up onto the rollers, turned off the car and dutifully retired to a cramped booth while the technician did his best to ruin my day...

He didn't.   At the end of it all I actually shook his hand and thanked him!  The Formula was finally legal after 2 years and all it took was a catalytic converter....



Oh yeah, and a MAP sensor, EGR, Fuel Pressure Regulator, Intake Elbow...

I documented the whole thing in the video below.  I'd have liked to get more of the actual test but I was rather forcefully discouraged by the technician.  

There was still work to do before the Formula started commuting duty, however.

We needed tires, badly.  We also needed a new belt tensioner pulley and weirdly a new gear for the headlight pop-up motor.  

So what's left?

I still need to deal with the fuel injectors as at least one is still leaking.  I still need to fix the headliner, get the hatch repainted.  All the normal stuff that a 20+ year old car would need.

In case you're interested, I've also included  a few videos below of the new tires and how I fixed the headlight motor.  I've been posting regular videos of my adventures with the Formula on my YouTube channel.  Check it out as I tend to update it more than this blog...obviously.

More as it happens!