Sheepers other MS75 crown coupe

[sheepers]

replaced all the lip seals on the crank and both ends of the gearbox.

tapped and fitted some 1/8 NPT hose tail fittings to the fluid cooler lines and then i put the box in the car. 

it fits.

dont have the gearbox crossmember in yet, ill make the mods to that tomorrow night. 

 

2019-08-08_07-51-57 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2019-08-08_07-51-47 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

 

[sheepers]

finished modifying the crossmember and put it back in the car.

everything's done now, fluid lines hooked up, kick down connected, shifter connected and spedo cable hooked in.

just need my drive shaft back (should be Tuesday) then its test drive time.

cant hook up the converter lock until i figure out how the fluid pressure circuit works which ill know when i drive it. 

 

2019-08-10_12-08-21 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2019-08-10_12-08-29 by sheepers, on Flickr

[sheepers]

got my driveshaft back and put it in.

filled it up with trans fluid and took it for a test drive.

 

everything seems to be working fine and the trans shifts perfectly.

kickdown is working

shifter selects all the gears correctly

i hooked power up to the overdrive solenoid and that's all working mint

its like a different car. motorway crusing is lush now. no more 10billion revs at 95KPH.

here's an art picture because i didn't take any of a gearbox.

 

2019-08-13_07-49-37 by sheepers, on Flickr

[sheepers]

hey also,

here's a technical tip for those of you interested in the finer details of auto trans setup,

if you want it to not leak fluid out the bottom, do up the drain plug.

 

you got that? 

[sheepers]

Righto,  so ive been driving this to work every day for the last month ir whatever.  Hasn't missed a beat.  

Its fucking slow.  Fuck me is it slow but that's not such an issue,  it's fucking cool and I like driving it. 

The front end is a bit all over the show If you have to hit the brakes on the motorway so ive replaced all the bushes.  Castor arm bushes and upper inner bushes were completely fucked.  Im fairly certain they were original ones. 

I'll do the back next weekend and put thre disk brake diff in at the same time. 

[sheepers]

stories from M lyfe.

the heater tap started leaking. the heater tap is inside the passengers foot well.

like any true M series connoisseur i know it was leaking within seconds of it happening because i smelt it.

i knew, instantly, the the M was about to try and fulfill the prophecy of its lineage, and its tradition, and attempt to BHG. 

but old M masters like myself are made of sterner stuff than that, it'll take a better trick that that old chestnut to bring the prophecy to life. 

so, i caught it before it had a chance to get hot, no harm done.

MS75 heater taps are vacuum operated, incorporate a 90 degree bend in them and just to really make sure there is no way of substituting it with something available its closed with no vacuum.  all available vacuum operated taps that i have found are open with no vacuum. 

there are no taps available that event fit in the space available, let alone have the right vacuum configuration. 

so ill just have to buy a gates one, cut and weld the vacuum actuator to be on the other side of the  lever and put in the engine bay somewhere.

if i can stand up for long enough to do that job ill do that tonight. 

 

 

2019-09-19_07-33-00 by sheepers, on Flickr

[sheepers]

so 1 x generic falcon tap and some cutting and welding and we're back in business.

tap is in the engine bay and its fairly ugly but there isn't fuck all i can do about that.

 

2019-09-19_08-00-10 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2019-09-19_08-00-03 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2019-09-19_07-59-55 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2019-09-19_07-59-47 by sheepers, on Flickr

[sheepers]

did the bushes in the rear today.

nothing special, usual shit of drilling out the rubber, cutting the sleve then smashing it out.

new bushed just push in.

haven't drive it on the motorway yet to gauge betterness but given how squishy and fucked the old bushed were i suspect it'll be a big step forward.

 

2019-09-28_06-51-37 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2019-09-28_06-51-27 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2019-09-28_06-51-19 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

 

[sheepers]

yea ive just been dailying this and going places slowly.

its just got its first warrant after compliance which it flew through no drama.

now thats done i thought id put on the new big brakes that i bought for it a while back.

usual story, LN106 hilux calipers with DBA272 rotors (which the guys at castle hill Auto One in Sydney got made as a small batch because DBA dont make them anymore) and R32 GTR pads.

bit of trimming of the backing plate and it all bolts on.

these calipers work a million times better with the 1" master cylinder than the factroy two pots do.  much better pedal feel and way better progression of the brake pressure.

anywho, its all back together and working so now ill spend some time bedding it all in but its already a zillion times better.

 

2020-01-27_12-25-25 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-01-27_12-25-36 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-01-27_12-59-14 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

also these aren't the wheels im keeping on the car. it will in the near future get some jet black steel smoothies with small moon caps so you wont be able to see the red calipers. 

 

[sheepers]

because the v8 is giving me the shits i wanted to actually achieve something so i did some work on this.

spent most of the day cleaning and painting this fancy grill for it.

as usual i was to fucking useless to take any photos of what it looked like before i started but just imagine it looking fairly shit.

2020-04-01_04-43-05 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-01_04-43-15 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-01_04-43-22 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

 

[sheepers]

somehow fitting a new grill turned into painting the front bumper.

as you can see in the photos above it was a bit fucked and bent and rusty so i gave it a quick bash and flicked some paint on it. its a long way from good but itll do for now.

it looks good in the photos but its pretty rough IRL.

when i paint the whole car the bumper will get dipped to take care of some rust on the inside so i didnt bother going to far with it.

 

2020-04-02_03-56-43 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-02_03-56-50 by sheepers, on Flickr

[sheepers]

i put the front bumper back together and put it back on and it looks ace, i did however forget to take a picture so yea....

 

anywho i did some other stuff.

the rear muffler was too big, hit the ground a lot and made the car way to quiet so i fitted a smaller one. it doesn't hit the ground and the car is louder which is good.

 

old muffler with custom flat bottom,

2020-04-06_05-10-26 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

new muffler.

2020-04-06_05-10-17 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

so the next thing i wanted to do was make new bits for the tops of the rear bumper. the ones i had were fucked so i made some new ones out of 8mm aluminium plate.

ill let the photos do the talking but some points to note,

the only file i used for this whole process is the one pictured which is called a dreadnought file if you've never seen one before. there is no better file for working with aluminium, you can get a great surface finish with these files if you know how to use them and they will remove heaps of material very fast too. things they dont like however include filing steel, that will fuck them.

the other thing is that i used my 60mm DA sander/polisher to go from file finish to polished because DA sanders are the best thing in the world, get some. 

 

2020-04-06_05-10-09 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

 

2020-04-06_05-10-00 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-09-29 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-09-46 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-09-38 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-09-20 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-09-06 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-08-56 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-08-46 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-08-35 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-08-25 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-08-15 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-08-06 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-07-48 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-07-39 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-07-31 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-07-22 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-07-12 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-06-55 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-04-06_05-06-45 by sheepers, on Flickr

[sheepers]

Installed electric fuel pump and removed mechanical which im pretty sure is the original one. Did alright for 48 years.

Also moved the seat back 50mm so im not so cramped. 

It's not so bad with an auto because lack of clutch allows at least one leg some room.

But it's nor a big job to move the seat so I did it. 

 

[sheepers]

I found the details on the shocks and springs I used in this.

Front springs are Dobi front XG ute -XE V8 C19-006.   These springs can be "tuned" to height because they have two redundant coils that can be removed without changing the angle of the tail. 

 

Front shocks are bilstein front HQ Holden 24-002899.

Rear springs are Dobi Toyota tarago 83-90 C59-045. These were reset lower by about 80mm.

Rear shocks were custom made. 

[sheepers]

Also,  here's the front end all back together with the new grill

[sheepers]

i didnt like the colour of this bolt.

i decided it was the wrong shade of red and you know when somethings gets in your head and you cant let it go? well the colour of this bolt got to me.

so i decided to take it out and repaint it. 

 

2020-05-03_04-47-41 by sheepers, on Flickr

[sheepers]

i was worried about the added load to the other bolt once i took this bolt out.

 

2020-05-03_04-47-41 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

 

so i did some analysis on the loading.

 

its pretty interesting what results came out from my experiments. ill save you the details but you can bet that things weren't good with that one bolt removed.

in fact, according to my calculations the structural loading on the rest of the frontal impact zone, even at moderate speeds, went way past the design loading that the other bolt was capable of withstanding.

as you can clearly see from the graphed results, things were bad.

stupid graph by sheepers, on Flickr

 

so, what to do?

ive been in this situation before, some of you may recall my dilemma with the lower suspension arms that failed due to over stressing one mounting point.

you can see the stress point in this xray of the lower member.

tooth failure by sheepers, on Flickr

 

 

there was nothing else i could do.

 i had to remove the other bolt.

and another bolt.

 

and the other bolts.

 

2020-05-03_04-48-20 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

seeing as how the bolts were no longer stressed and everything was at equilibrium i knew i could rest easy.

 

then i had a thought, since all these parts are now lying on the floor maybe i could tidy them up a bit?

so i proceeded to move the mess from the inner guards to the bench.

2020-05-03_04-48-20 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-05-03_04-48-02 by sheepers, on Flickr

2020-05-03_04-48-09 by sheepers, on Flickr

unfortunately removing the mess from the inner guards left them without any rust protection over the bare steel.

 

ill need to figure out some way of protecting the bare steel...............................

[sheepers]

picked up some more paint and put a coat of epotec 408 on the inner guards.

i wiped a coat of brunnox over the rusty bits then gave them a scrub with scotchbrite and prepsol to prepare the surface.

then blasted a whole bunch of primer on them. im not painting the insides of them because why? they are in pretty good shape and im just going to drive it so no point.

 

2020-05-04_05-37-17 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-05-04_05-37-24 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-05-04_05-37-31 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-05-04_05-37-38 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

then i set about fixing the radiator support panel. 

the car has had a stack at some point and it was never repaired really at all. it looks like they heated it with a torch to bend some bits of it then just left it, no paint over the bare steel, nothing.

it was pretty bent up but i got it ok. its hard to tell from the photos just how fucked it was but its pretty good now. ive just for to fix the worst bit at the bottom and its done.

well, its good enough for a radiator support panel. 

 

2020-05-04_05-37-47 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-05-04_05-37-54 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-05-04_05-38-09 by sheepers, on Flickr

[sheepers]

got the rad support panel straighter and then prepped it for paint.

put a bit of brunnox on anything that was rusty and painted it.

i also put a bit of filler in the inner guards and put some more paint on them too.

 

2020-05-05_05-17-58 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-05-05_05-18-06 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-05-05_05-18-14 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-05-05_05-18-21 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

 

 

[sheepers]

did more.

firewall needed fuck all to get it ready for paint. i took a few brackets off that i wont need and that was about it.

also put some filler in the holes i welded up on the radiator support panel and put soome more paint on that as well.

 

2020-05-06_12-04-06 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-05-06_05-47-56 by sheepers, on Flickr

 

2020-05-06_05-48-02 by sheepers, on Flickr