Hurmeez

Perhaps there's a mirror on the ceiling to let you see the actual "pit box" as it were? Otherwise you can't see it from the driver's seat enough to actually stop on the mark

There's something about wagons for sure. I wish I could save the patina somehow but I don't really think it's possible. Every panel is going to need work and fake patina is not my cup of tea. Definitely going to keep the two tone paint though whatever happens

Good shout. Been caught out with losing too many posts so I copied it over from my notes. Must have pulled the font in too. I'll sort that out

Tell me all about how it's way too far gone and I'm dreaming. Everyone else that's actually seen the car already has so you'll be in good company.

Starting the repairs where they're most obviously needed, I got stuck in replacing the front passengers side floor. I still had the template from doing the same job on my Mk2 so I used that to bead roll up a new panel. This was welded in pretty roughly in hindsight, but I was hoping to get the major repairs done pretty quickly and not get too deep in the weeds as had happened on the red car. I also made a start cutting out the rotten parts of the outer sill ready to weld in a reproduction panel I'd already bought for the Mk2. I can't remember why exactly, but this was when I paused and went back to the Mk2. Shortly thereafter, the house flooded and a lot of reprioritisation happened. Moving house meant I no longer had space to store both cars. Given how much the red car meant to me there was never a question about it taking priority under cover, but finding a home for the Mk1 was trickier. Eventually I had to resort to a kind family member offering up a corner of their paddock. It was far from the ideal place to preserve the car, but it's better than losing it entirely. There she sat for three years until last week when I moved it once more. This time to my old man's place. The time in the paddock has definitely not been kind to it, but my resolve to fix it is unshaken. I'm still going to finish the red car first, but hopefully by then we'll have saved up enough for another new place with enough space to store both cars at the same time. The plan is to make the red car as good a daily car as I can (efi, modern seats, more extensive suspension changes etc), and keep this car fairly standard with period mods, I.e. Standard interior and steats, carbed 2L pinto and type 9, standard suspension with lowering blocks etc. I think it'd be cool to have both versions of essentially the same car. Don't expect any updates here any time soon though, but definitely one day. Give me another few years.

While digging all the shit out of the interior I found an old bus ticket from a Ruakaka school with a name on it. I found the person on Facebook (now somewhat older) and sent them a message asking if they knew any history about the car. They put me onto their mum who told me about owning the car from 86 through to the early 2000s before they couldn't afford the repairs anymore and had to park it up. She deregistered it and it ended up passed along at some time or another. She even found an old photo of herself and the car from back in its heyday. The rego starts HG which has special meaning for me anyway (related to my username), I have contact with the last registered owner, and it used to drive around where I grew up. This all points to this being a car I have to save.

I was scrolling Facebook during smoko as one does, and up came a marketplace listing for a Mk1 Estate with FREE as the price. Assuming the price was just bollocks to get people to click, I had a look anyway cause it's not often Estates come up. Once I was actually on the listing, I realised it was genuine and ol' mate really was trying to get rid of this car for free. I also quickly realised it'd been listed literally a few seconds ago. Thinking it'd be useful for spares or even just as a reference for my Mk2, I flicked the guy a message to find out about what the deal was. He'd picked it up as a Covid project but upon collecting it realised it was beyond him to fix and he'd let it sit. As long as I could pick it up that morning, it was mine. He even had it on a trailer ready to go. I wasn't about to pass up that opportunity. Got the go ahead from the boss to take a long smoko and shot off in my trusty 1.8L legacy to do its best. After giving the poor clutch a good hiding I managed to get the car home and off the trailer. The rooted wheels and tyres that came on it were no good for getting it off the trailer, but with a bit of sketchy scissor jack action I got all the wheels swapped to my turbos and rolled it off. It wasn't in fantastic condition but after getting rid of all the dead leaves and general shit, it was actually in much better shape than I expected. Both chassis rails were mint all the way back, inner guards were fine. In fact, the only really unsalvageable panels were the front guards, front floors, door skins, rear hatch, and the outer sills. All panels you can either buy reproductions of relatively cheaply, or I already have spares of. Or I can make of course. Next I dug through the interior a bit. Everything was present in varying states of disrepair. There was some awful shag carpet in the back that quickly found the bin. The seats were all there, headlining, rear trim, everything. The only thing missing was the dash cluster. Given this car is a Super Estate, it would have had the six dial cluster which is sought after for RS replicas. I'm not totally surprised it'd been knicked at some stage. Feeling pretty stoked up to now, I had a look under the bonnet. True to word, there was a 1.6L Pinto with otherwise totally standard manifolds and accessories. I'm not sure if the 1.6 is standard for this trim, but I'd have to assume so cause why would you swap in the smaller pinto if given the chance? Even the wiring was fully intact in here, with only the battery missing. For a laugh, I hooked some jumper leads up to the battery terminals, pulled the plugs, and bridged the starter solenoid. Bugger me, it turned over. No smoke from any wiring, no awful noises. With the plugs back in it even sounded like it had at least some compression as well. I made sure there was at least some oil in it, cleaned the points a bit and threw some fuel down the carb. Kicked it in the guts again and fuck me, it caught! A few hours of fiddling later and I had it starting on the key first pop almost every time. Note also the dash cluster my father in law also had lying around which plugged straight in. With how well everything is going, this car is quickly making its way up from reference car to a project in its own right. Join the discussion

So following on from the last post, I had Rod come round and make his inspections. Overall he was happy with my process and workmanship, with just a request for doubler panels behind the butt welded sections of the quarter/A panel/windscreen post to turn them into lap welds. I'd planned to butt these welds so I could properly panel beat them (the C pillar especially) and eliminate the potential rust trap, but I'll do what I'm told to keep the man happy. That done, I'm ready to paint the inner panels and weld it on. I'm not going to though. Firstly, I'm a master procrastinator and I'm stalling the wire wheeling and acid washing I need to paint it properly. Second, I think it's wiser to leave these panels off for now while I do all the same work on the opposite side for ease of reference. I've got lots of photos, but you can't beat being able to see the actual parts in question. So what am I actually moving onto? I thought I'd go for a change in scenery and start working on the fuel tank. I've known since I decided to put the V6 in it that I'd need to modify the fueling system to use a high pressure pump. Firstly I decided I'd rather not use an external surge tank. I prefer the simplicity of an in-tank setup. There's gotta be a good reason all the OEMs decided decades ago to do it that way. So I set about pulling the tank out of the back of the car where I temporarily installed it for storage years ago. It was strangely heavy and made a hell of a bang when I pulled the last bolt. Turns out, it's sat full of floodwater for the last two years. When I went through the engine and box and drained all the water back in 2023, I completely forgot about the fuel tank. I left it with a rag stuffed in the sender hole after originally cleaning it which had since worked as a wick, pulling water up out of the tank and maintaining a perfect damp breeding ground for rust. It managed to rot a bunch of holes clear through the top of the tank. Needless to say, I was pretty annoyed with myself. Nobody makes these tanks new anymore, so if I've cooked it I'll have to wade into the world of trying to find a second hand one. But instead I thought of it as an opportunity. I knew I'd need to modify the tank for an in-tank pump anway, so I might as well cut all the rust out and make a new top that fits my needs. With the offending section cut out, the inside doesn't look too bad. Plenty of surface rust and build ups, but these crumble away to nothing, and the underlying steel doesn't look too bad. Probably good enough to be salvaged with a tank sealing kit. So I made a start on the replacement panel by roughing in the bulk radii. Then the trick was how to make the raised sections. The best way I could think of was to cut out the inner section of each and gently fold up the edges. Then I cut out filler pieces from new material and folded their edges down to meet those on the parent piece. These could all then be welded together and hammered smooth. You can see I made the semicircular section larger diameter than originally. This was pretty much just a stab in the dark as to the dimensions. I found various jars and pots around the shed and decided which was the smallest that still fit my hand. Then I took the diameter of that, added a healthy margin, and made it the diameter of the flat section. This way I can get inside the tank after welding the top back on to hammer all the welds properly. Next was to make the pump hanger setup. I looked at a few OEM hangers on Google and decided a Mazda 626 wagon unit looked ideal. It's relatively compact, a good diameter to fit my existing allowance, and all steel so it's easy to modify. The sender also allegedly has a similar resistance sweep to the factory Escort one so it might work with the factory dash without too much electrical trickery. Of course there's also the bonus of being the exact pump from the original engine's donor car so I know it will flow enough. First thing was to make a doubler ring with captive nuts. This was a simple enough job with the machines at work. Then I roughly cut out the center of the flat land to eyeball the pump location, before drilling some holes and bolting it into its final position. Once I was happy with its placing I plug welded it in place. Finally I hammered the rough cut edge over and around the doubler plate to give it a nice OEM style radius on the penetration before grinding the excess flush. Very nice. To make the pump work properly, I need to extend the hanger to drop the pump down to the bottom of the tank. This was just a simple little extra section welded in. I've set it up such that it's touching the bottom with no gasket installed. This way, no matter how much the gasket squashes it won't be able to hammer the pump into the bottom of the tank. You'll note too that I've got some non-fuel rated low pressure hose on the pump outlet purely for mockup at this stage. While I was there I extended the float arm too so it should still bottom out near the bottom of the tank. Fuel injection pumps don't handle surge well, so it's imperative I baffle the inside of the tank properly. I'm basically just going to make a little fenced off section of the tank around the pump with some small bleed vents around the base, and maybe a few additional baffles around the tank to hold the fuel near the pump. First I need to clean out all the surface rust and shit from the inside of the tank. Ahh bugger. Turns out the surface rust is actually pretty deep, and there's a bunch of pinholes across a wide spread of the tank. There's not going to be any point trying to fix these. As soon as I patch one section, it'll just blow a hole through the next. Like I said before, no one makes these tanks anymore and there's bugger all second hand ones on the market, so I guess I'm embarking on a tank building odessy next. What fun.

Watching the 9k rev video at smoko and I can't help grinning like an idiot. You must be positively fizzing at the bunghole from the driver's seat.

I thought I heard somewhere that disabling direct injectors alone can cause them to melt and start leaking combustion pressure? Something about them being designed to be cooled by the fuel flowing through them and not standing up to combustion temps without. Have you ever heard anything like that or am I making it up?

For what it's worth I used some generic double sided foam trim tape from Repco to hold the plate on my mum's Accord when I was a kid. Gave the bumper and plate a bloody good solvent based clean and stuck it on. Lasted for years for the rest of the life of the car until it was condemned for windscreen surround rust.

I'm sure the sweet backing track played a not insignificant part in the ET as well. Yeah allegedly Colt used to do regrinds, though that looks like another example of coming to the K engine party a decade or two late. I've since found a site called CatCams that offers off the shelf billet cams as well, though the way they've displayed their specs is somewhat confusing. Likely an issue in understanding on my end there but. A cousin that happened to build a K engine a year or two back reckons Kelford might have existing regrind profiles too which would be far more convenient, so I've sent them an enquiry in the meantime. Beyond that I suspect you're right, getting the car moving under its own steam should be the first priority and there's a good chance I'm happy with the performance as is.

Regarding needing cam position sensors, would it not be a good idea to do that anyway to allow sequential injection/ignition? Or is sequential more of a discrete position requirement per cycle rather than a continuous reading needed for position control?

Fair point. It's obvious in hindsight but of course the OEM would optimise the cam profile for the drive system's abilities and visa versa

So after doing myself a mischief on my bike a week before Christmas, I've been laid up for a few weeks unable to do any meaningful work. Instead, I've been reading old threads and day dreaming a bit. VVT is very alluring. When it comes to NA optimisation, it looks very valuable in terms of getting the most out of otherwise an otherwise limited platform. For better or worse, I decided years ago to put a Mazda V6 in my Escort. Based on Yoeddynz's Viva thread, and excellent exhaust sound videos on YouTube, it looked like a fantastic option. Of course in the seven years since then, the engines have become increasingly scarce at Zebra, and technologically even more dated. That, combined with limited aftermarket support, means if I want to get more out of it than stock, I'm going to have to do a lot of custom stuff, and ideally with low risk to the engine. I've only got one spare block and I haven't seen one at the wreckers in years. So far the plan is to follow the fairly standard formula of better intake (ITBs) and exhaust (custom headers), but beyond that I'm pretty limited. No one really makes cams, so if I want to keep it NA (which I do for now) that's pretty much it. I could skim the heads to try and bump compression a bit, but that would lead to timing troubles as well. Which after a bit of waffling brings me to the actual point. I'm wondering if it's worth looking into retro fitting VVT. As standard, the timing belt drives the intake cam, which in turn drives the exhaust via a fixed gear. So the options in order of effort would be as below: 1. Modify the intake pulley to fit a vernia cam gear. No one sells them so I'd have to make my own. 2. Modify the intake and crank drive pulleys to fit a VVT version from a different engine. I'm thinking JZ or 4AGE or something. 3. Modify intake and crank drive pulleys, as well as decoupling the exhaust cam and fitting a dedicated pulley for that side too. If I were to skim the head, I'd probably have to at least fit a vernia gear to the intake to correct for the shorter belt run. Options 1 and 2 of course would mean both cams are still tied together. I'm not sure what the performance implications of that would be. Option 3 comes with much greater effort, including but not limited to making an adapter to poke the exhaust cam drive out through the head, swapping to smaller cam pulleys to allow clearance, finding a longer drive belt, etc etc. Granted, this is all hypothetical and mostly a thought exercise, but I wonder how useful it actually would be. Given stock cams, would it actually make any noticeable difference? I'm probably still years away from turning the key, and for all I know it'll be plenty grunty for my driving abilities as standard without further modifications. Regardless, it'd be fun as an engineering exercise either way, but I'm interested in wider opinions. Of course the real answer is probably ditch the dated engine and fit a 1NZ like God intended, but I'm a firm believer in the sunk cost philosophy so let's pontificate based on the V6 for now.