Tomble's 1983 Mitsubishi Starion GSR-X fumbling

[tomble]

Alto's fixed, I got a high velocity fan for the garage oven, and I'm gradually regaining motivation... it's Starion time!

There's a million things to do and that's got my ADHD arse stuck in a loop. It's so easy to walk into the garage, point at stuff "that needs doing, that needs doing, that needs doing"... and overwhelm myself and walk out.

What I want to get fixed Right Now™ is the exterior; get those rusty doors repaired, the dents out of everything, and the final prep and colour on it all. But there's very little of that that I can actually do myself. Sure I could get a welder and all the fixings and give it a go, but chances are that'd just cost me more in the long run. The door rust I could probably do and maybe some of the dents but the damage to the bonnet and fenders, and the panel alignment at the front... I'd love to DIY it all the way up to the painting stage but I'm pretty sure I need a professional from here on out. That means money which isn't quite available at the moment.

It's not ideal to do the interior before the dust-creating exterior but that's the direction I'm going in for now. There's a lot of stuff on the shelves that are This Close to just going back into the starion and out of my brain, and that really appeals to me!

---

The very first thing I did to get back on the horse was something I'd started thinking about a year ago.

There used to be metal stoppers in the floor pan for draining water. They're all rusted to crap and out of production, so I measured them and sourced some grommets to take their place. This worked pretty well, except for six in the main floor pan which have a cylindrical wall rather than just a sheet metal lip.

I didn't want to cut off the cylinder part but after some test fitting I figured that if I forced and schmoo'd them in with RTV black, they'd likely stay put.

 

Another thing I'd been researching a lot was what sound deadening to use.

There's two real product types to consider.

1. Butyl+aluminium dampeners. These absorb vibrations and are easily the most effective way to reduce sound. You only have to cover 25~% of a panel to get almost all of the benefits. The benefit trails off significantly as you add coverage after that point.
2. Sound blocking material. Some kind of material that absorbs the sound waves from the air itself. The problem with this stuff is that you basically need 100% coverage. Even if you get to 95% coverage, that final 5% is going to let a surprising amount of sound energy through, to the point where you might not even notice a difference vs 0% coverage.

So, I basically ignored the latter. For the former, there's a few people who have been trying to set up testing rigs to produce actual numbers for the various sound deadening products out there. One of the most promising products was Resonix, who of course produce their own tests. The problem is that the product would cost over A GRAND to import into NZ. Additionally, the products that Resonix and other enthusiasts tend to test are largely limited to sale in Europe and the USA and are overly expensive to ship here.

I was considering an Amazon Basics brand that Resonix rated highly but in the end I just did the basic bitch thing and got the dominant brand, Dynamat. Its performance is high and even though it's expensive, the brands we get here are either rebadged and impossible to get numbers for, or not as effective. In the end, if you're in NZ, unfortunately Dynamat is probably the best value unless you're on a strict budget.

Also unfortunately, I'm unlikely to ever know if Dynamat was the correct decision. It's either going to be noisy in the car or not and I don't see myself replacing it for shittier stuff just to measure dB!

I got the bulk pack. Most internet sources said I'd need double the amount, but I know that only a small amount of coverage is necessary, so I was hoping this would be enough to stretch. Laying it out in the lounge, I realised I'd overestimated the amount I'd need.

It quickly became clear that I had more than enough to replace the factory sound deadening, put extra sound deadening on every panel in the car, and have some left over.

In fact I'd easily have enough to go well over 25% coverage. Well, better not waste it!

First I got everything clean.

To start with I was careful about how to cut and position it all. I still hadn't truly absorbed that I had enough of the stuff, and I'd read that this was a bitch of a job. 

Once I was happy, I went in.

I peeled back a corner of the product and stuck it firmly before slowly peeling more and sticking as I went. I didn't run into many air bubbles but a prick with a pick was effective at getting rid of them.

I got a free roller from hyperdrive for buying the pack, and this was great for flat surfaces, but for getting into curves, I found that the rounded back of a screwdriver handle was better. In all, the product was easy to stick firmly down. It's also quite forgiving; I was able to peel some off after half an hour without it damaging the paint or leaving any schmoo behind.

I'm glad the roller was free because I wouldn't recommend buying it. You could easily get away with something rigid with a soft surface, like a vinyl applicator.

I opted not to cut any holes for the drain plugs. My reasoning is that if water gets in the car such that I need to drain it, then the seats etc are coming out regardless, and at that point I'd rather just use a shop vac than go through the hassle of removing the plugs and re-schmooing them down later.

Plus, the deadening acted as extra insurance against them popping out over time.

My first goal was to replace all of the factory sound deadening... and here that is!

I don't know what other people were complaining about when they installed it. It didn't take all that long, I wore disposable gloves but didn't feel anything remotely sharp enough to cut me, and getting it all rolled down properly was easy. Cutting it is easy with scissors and craft knives.

I also wanted to cover other panels and areas of the car that never head deadening, such as the roof, but I really did overestimate how much I needed.

I also bought some of the aluminium tape that Dynamat offers.

DON'T DO IT.

It cost $35 for 9m and I only got half the floor done!

It's also totally un-necessary. I just did it to avoid getting butyl on my clothes and shoes as I moved around in there.

I think any old aliminium tape can be used, and found these black rolls for $6 each. Exact same dimensions, but 10m long. 

It's a shame that some of the tape is shiny dynamat branded and some is black, but it's covered in carpet, doesn't matter in the slightest, and to be honest I think most people wouldn't even notice if they were staring at it.

 

---

 

This is the firewall padding.

It's stained, gross looking, discarding everywhere, and the car was filthy when we received it with a full ash tray, chicken bones on the carpet... 

I'm replacing it.

I found a thick sheet of Mass Loaded Vinyl online which was priced well and almost the exact dimensions I required.

I laid the old padding on top and traced around everything with a paint pen.

I initially was going to use spray paint but less messy brains prevailed.

Cutting it out was easy with scissors, and I used a drill for the smaller holes. The mid-sized holes were hard to get clean cuts on but I managed.

And it fits great

 

This is the carpet.

Was it black? 

Was it grey?

Was it beige?

Great questions.

The main thing is: it had CHICKEN BONES integrated into it when we received the car. Yeah, nah.

A few places in oz sell replacement carpets so I chanced one of them. I opted for cut pile for a more lush feel, and some new padded backing as well.

Dry fitted:

I'll still need to harvest the plastic door trim bits from the old carpet (or more likely, the red starion). And of course I'll need to cut it some places, most notably for the shifter, handbrake etc. I'll also want to install the same hook and loop setup that the old firewall stuff had to connect the two pieces together.

I'll hold off actually installing it for now because I'll want to route the loom and boot/fuel cables and what not. But it looks like it'll come up really nice.

 

[tomble]

So yeah as I was saying, the carpet needs cutting, and it's probably best to have some stuff to cut around.

I cleaned up the handbrake cables and installed them. I thought I'd need to do some awkward plating jobbie on the springy part with half the cable dipped, most likely with unsatisfactory results due to the difficulty of cleaning all around the windings; however, it actually cleaned up really well with just a scrubby brush. It looked really rusty while dirty but it only had some light surface stuff. I wire wheeled then CRC black zinc'd it and happily the paint retains enough flexibility such that it doesn't crack off the springs (not immediately anyway... maybe it'll fatigue off quickly when on the road idk).

The car had PVC tubing to protect the cables as they ran through one of the support structures in the car, happily I did not misplace them.

Installing the cable was easy enough. I had to disassemble some of the brake gubbins to get access to the required bolts and there was some contortion involved. I think I messed the order of operations up a couple of times but I got it all in.

The rubber grommets separating the inside and outside got RTV'd in per the manual, one was cracked up a bit but the RTV should hold it together.

The red car got raided for (a) lost bolts and brackets and (b) as a reference for how stuff hangs together. Happily, some of the stuff in the red car is in better condition so I mixed and matched to get what I needed.

The handbrake lever was somewhat rusty, just surface stuff but it needed addressing. I could not for the life of me get the plastic/leather sheath off of it, so I ended up just sitting the lower half of it in evaporust for a bit.

It's not super ideal but I decided against disassembling it and to try just getting it done intact. After evaporust, I wire wheeled then CRC zinc'd it and made sure to actuate it before the paint hardened. Later I greased it up and it feels perfectly smooth. The bushings still have no play and everything seems good. Happy with that, for the time being. 

After extracting a snapped bolt from aeons ago and zincing some more bracketry, I was able to install the handbrake stuffs for good.

 

Then I moved house. 

My new garage is a little larger, has better ventilation and has no places for me to hit my head on. It does not look this tidy now.

[tomble]

The garage was an immediate bomb site after moving in. Despite the size increase, I'd done a really good job tetrising everything way in the old garage, and now it was just a mountain of boxes an mix shit. Half of the boxes are well labelled and organised, and the other half is what happens when the reality of how much packing there is to do hits your optimistic timeline theory.

I didn't find my Alto's crankshaft key. Found my 8mm tho.

It was my first time moving a whole ass house and garage worth of stuff on my own. My box truck rental went from an optimistic "four days is more than I need" to "I wish I had this for a week". It also was preceded by a shitload of packing things and followed with a bunch of unpacking. My poor programmer's body was battered and broken.

The cat loves the fireplace though so it's all worth it.

The garage remained a caver's paradise for probably months before I slowly got it in order. Even then, "order" was largely just "this pile of stuff in the middle of the floor doesn't impede my movement". And after that it took me a while to remember I'd actually packed the starion itself full of parts and boxes as a makeshift trailer. Aaaand then a bit longer to actually regain motivation to work on it again. Let's just say it's been a hell of a year for me. Pic is the current state of the garage because I didn't think to capture any.

@kws convinced me (after seeing his marina in person) that it's best to have a registered car in poor visual shape that you can enjoy than a jackstand queen. So if my original goal was "get really fussy and 100% it", then it is now "aim for good enough and we'll improve it in time". Seems kind of silly in hindsight but it's better to recognise a self-made bottleneck now than never.

As usual, analysis paralysis is the phrase of the decade, but I've got a lot of interior stuff that I'd love to thin out. That means the carpet should get sorted. Which means the stuff under the carpet should get sorted. Okay, let's start there.

I gathered the looms out and figured out what went where. I'd originally been 50-50 about remaking the loom but with the new scope of the work now clearly established in my mind, the path is obvious: (1) of course I'm not remaking the fucking loom, (2) clean it and put it in the car! So I cleaned it and put it in the car. Once again, red car was invaluable for locating exactly where the bends and clips and whatnot go and also for pilfering miscellaneous brackets and gubbins. Surprisingly, there wasn't actually all that much under the carpet to sort out. 

Aside from the loom, the only other thing that should probably be available when fitting the carpet is the ETACS unit under the passenger seat which controls a bunch of random shit like the door alarms. Both starions' units were a little surface rusty so I gave the original a wire wheel and a black zinc. I wasn't super happy with the black given that it was originally just raw plated, so I grabbed some silver zinc for later. 

Next, I fished out the horrific old carpet and underlay (with gloves and mask on). I started with the underlay, using the old as a template for the new. The underlay doesn't have perfect coverage and isn't moulded at all, which makes it easier to cut into the required shapes. In the end, I had just enough.

Just enough.

The carpet is moulded but isn't perfect. The original is a single piece of carpet, while this comes in two pieces. There are no holes for anything and it's also slightly oversized to be safe. I dry-laid them several times and decided to start at the back. Flipping the old and new carpet over, I used the old carpet as a sort of template, but struggled as the moulding isn't perfectly the same and is hard to chase. I used a white paint pen to mark where I thought cuts should be made.

Then I moved the carpet into the car, patted it all out, chased where things seemed to line up, etc... and made my first cut. From there I could more easily reference where the other lines were and adjust, cut, adjust, cut, until it fit perfectly. No dramas at all!

I did the same with the front carpet, but cut a couple of seat holes in the wrong place. Fortunately they're either hidden or intentional-looking.

Then I thoroughly cleaned the inside of the car and the new carpet before "final" installation, including chucking the foot rest and ETACs unit in. I'll probably come back with some spray glue to lightly hold stuff where it should live, and a heat gun to help mould some of the trickier bits of carpet to fit a bit better, but I figured it should rest a bit and have more opportunity for incidental feet, brackets etc. to help squish and hold it into place. The edges near the doors also need final trimming and a plastic rail stapled to them, but that can wait as well - the door sills still need fettling + paint.

It's really nice having the interior feel... soft again. I had the seats and leather trim in there briefly for the move and it was really nice being able to sit in it.

Additionally, the process of taking apart the red car's interior creates pressure to get stuff installed while the reference is still there / still strong in my mind.

So, I'm going to continue to prioritise the interior, and take it as far as I can. I know that certain things won't be able to go to 100% or stay there permanently (eg. aforementioned door jams, windscreen, anything that pokes out to the panelwork like tail lights etc) but it should be really good for progress and for deleting things from my brain and the garage. The exterior will likely get a DIY 'won't rust' job that will take it over the registration line before I go back and get it properly done when funds are available.

 

 

 

[tomble]

Rewind a bunch and I had to figure out what to do about this.

This was quite a while ago - over two years in fact, joisus - so the memory is a bit fuzzy.

I remember that I looked into master cyl rebuild kits and what have you, and I couldn't seem to find one that wouldn't cost the world to get over here. The brake booster though, absolutely nothing.

I also (back then as well as now) am not experienced enough to go "ah yeah mate that's a 42-HVY in the Kelby style, just get one from a 3rd gen hiace and it bolts straight in mate". 

The local clutch and brake people, who have been helping out with a bunch of stuff and shout out to them (MP Autoparts), were able to send them off for a rebuild for a reasonable price (especially considering the cost of finding my own seal kit and then having to figure out wtf to do about the booster) so I just did that.

The reason I never posted about it is because it's been sitting in a box ever since. The wiper cowl area in the starion still needs painting, and access is already tight. The booster makes it tighter.

Totally unrelatedly, earlier this year I got the crusty brake assembly bracket and wire wheel + evaporust'd it (in stages because I'm not made of money) before licking it. With paint.

Evaporust is so cool. Even this super old stuff that's pitch black does wonders when left for a couple days. I know now that there's DIY stuff that is just as good so I'll definitely play with making some once this stuff finally dies.

Fastforward to now, and I want to get this assembly in the car. It's kind of important to do so before the dash goes in, after all! So, cowl access be damned, it's going in.

Problem: it's secured with the studs on the booster, creating a sandwich out of the firewall, and there's an engine in the way. You see, I'd plopped the engine in the bay and secured it with straps to prevent it from wobbling around all over the place. Free transportation! But, now there's just enough of a clearance issue that the booster won't fit.

I therefore put it off for a week or so, waiting for an opportunity to get the engine back out.

Guess who forgot until today that the engine, when on just its two side mounts, can tilt backwards and forwards an alarming degree with mild pressure.

The steering column can then be unbolted from its bracket, as the brake assembly's bracket really likes creating sandwiches.

I found a new circlip for the pedal to connect to the booster and there's another job done.

 

Meanwhile, the back of the car has had a bunch of love. 

I stole the red car's rear window washer tank as it was in better condition. The pipe for it was fed through the bodywork, aided by a piece of wire and some tape.

There's a bunch of bracketry around this area for the tools, spare, speakers, etc that's mostly in good condition but has the odd annoying spot of corrosion.

None of it is visible, but I of course scuffed it all and licked it. With paint.

I dug out the hatch struts. The RH one is in good condition, but the LH one's plastic wrap that contains the wiring is in pretty average condition. I considered using the red's one but it was sticky and leaky and made squelching noises. It didn't push back as hard as the black ones when depressed. In fact, the red car's RH strut doesn't return at all.

Haha, suck it, red starion. Look at that PVC pipe it needs. What a loser. The chad OG black struts are perfectly fine!

 

The final thing that runs to the back of the car is the pair of cables to open the fuel door and the hatch.

It took a while of digging but I eventually found the original levers from the black starion, hoping that they were in better condition than red's. They're honestly about the same, just surface rust and scratched-up plastic.

Not wanting to bother with disassembling rivets, I just wire wheeled and zinc'd it. I made sure to wiggle stuff while curing so that it didn't bind up. After that I hit it with some plastx polisher which didn't really do that much tbh.

For the lettering, I used a paint pen to fill in the recessed area and then carefully went over it with a solvent-moistend rag wrapped around a flat head screwdriver. I had to start over a few times before I was happy with it. I might go back with some clear coat or something to give it a better chance of staying white.

[tomble]

More rewinding, I was put in contact with a nice fellow in Auckland got in touch about some black leather bits he had available. Now that the car is going to be grey, I'm even less enthused about a grey interior, so I snaffled it up. 

The leather is in decent condition, or at least MUCH better condition than the cracked and damaged original grey leather stuff.

The catch: it must have been introduced to a flood at some point in time, because the metal bits in the bottoms of the seats are absolutely fucked.

Fortunately, the grey leather seats' metal stuff is in good condition. So I get to add upholstery to my list of fun things to learn and suck at.

I disassembled the black and grey passenger seats early on and set about restoring the bits. 

It immediately started to pay itself off.

 

The top half of the seat is alright. There's corrosion on the bottom brackets, but nothing crazy, and I didn't feel the need to disassemble much here. Just the back of the seat, which revealed further rusty bracketry, but not enough to really do much about.

 

I simply painted what I could see with rust converter, and the main brackets got wire wheeled, masked and painted black.

 

The rails are all riveted together, and I just don't want to deal with that stuff (yet). So I simply dunked it all in evaporust, cleaned, rust converter'd, wire wheeled and painted it.

I made sure to move the bits around after painting so nothing bound up, and vowed that I'd fill it with grease later.

 

The black seat leather was then carefully extracted from the base.

The leather at the site of the bolt holes etc is pretty rough. Mostly intact, some thin or ripped bits. The rust impregnated itself quite well to a lot of it. I used a combination of careful evaporust dipping and some soapy scouring pads to remove the crusts.

You can see where some of the internal seams (where wires once laid) are torn, I'm curious as to what physical stuff went down to cause that. There'd be some mechanical forces involved, after all fabric doesn't like moving across jagged rusty wire, but I don't think that explains all of it.

Fortunately, theres very little of these places actually visible once all the trim etc is on.

The... uh... leg thingy also got some treatment. I was going to use the grey seat's bracket but it was such a straight-forward hunk of metal that I just re-used the black one.

 

A long pause happened here because of life and procrastination, but eventually I put my A back into G... and pressured girlface to help. There are a few wires that run through the seats in loops to pull the centres of them in, and these loops had mostly been destroyed by the rusty wires. Girlface fixed these by hand-sewing new fabric in.

Gorgeous.

The black vs grey base, uncovered - I was really impressed at how good the grey base was.

 

I didn't do too much to the grey base; just slathered on some rust converter and used our steam mop to restore the foam. 

 

Then it's time to use my aliexpress upholstery set!

Was not looking forward to this part but it was probably one of the easiest parts tbh. The clips are surprisingly non-fiddly.

I managed to re-use stiffening wire from the grey seat and get things buttoned up okay.

The hardest part was actually just wrangling the leather (which has shrunk with age) onto the base (which i'd fluffed up the foam on). Getting this lever into the hole took half an hour alone.

 

Eventually, after a lot of cross-referencing the other seats and some repeated steps, the bracketry was on and lubricated with lithium grease, and the top went back on it.

 

Looks great

I need to fix up a couple things, the leg thingy lever is a bit tight and doesn't want to disengage. Also the slide-everything-forward-for-passengers-lever is a bit touch and go.

For the driver's side I might just be a bit more frugal with the paint as it could be adding extra friction, but I'm hoping it's just a spring or something that I've mis-configured.

[tomble]

So we did the driver's side and that went all fine. This seat had a glued padded thing instead of the push-through wire thing, so I guess it got some love at some point in the past. I reupholstered the black leather/vinyl onto it using the old method. It's all 10000% faster when you know what you're doing!

The wires in rear seats were simply too fucked and dangerous to put back in as-is. 

With a fair amount of wrangling, I got the rusted remains of the wires out of the edges and centres of the black leather. Not many pics sorry! I also removed them from the grey leather seats and was able to re-use them, falling back to some stainless wire where I ran out of good sections.

There were 5-6 looped sections on each side to get in, which was a bit of a wrangle. This seat also still has pretty fucked loops as well, but not bad enough to outright replace, so I consider this a somewhat temporary job - there's rust flakes etc embedded and they'll probably interact with the wires in fun ways, but that problem is for next decade.

No pix of it in the car just yet because I want to clean up a couple brackets first...

[tomble]

@yoeddynz took offense to there being too few holes in my firewall.

I uhh, forgot to drill a pilot hole. Or back off after slipping.

After kicking myself I deburred, put some rust converter on to protect the steel, touch-up painted and it doesn't look like something heinous happened there at a glance. To the point where, seeing that above old pic, I'm surprised it started out that bad!

The other side looks perfect though so let's focus on that.

Then I printed out a grommet in TPU - I'll find some bolts for the other two holes before I gasket seal it all in.

But yeah definitely blame @yoeddynz

[tomble]

I'd rather put the engine off for longer and unload other stuff from my brain first, but best to crack into this earlier in the year to (a) maximise the chances of being done this year and (b) enable a motivation boost when it becomes a running car.

So, here we go!

It's a G63B, the predecessor/early version of the 4G63. Sometimes called the 4G63B for that reason. Mitsi gurus likely know all about how interchangable many of the parts are between these engines, and a common enough mod is to swap a DOHC onto it and convert to EFI etc. Something for a future year perhaps.

 

My goal going into this is to just freshen her up and put her back in. Explore just enough to figure out what seals and gaskets and whatever I need, spot anything that's broken, be able to clean in the nooks and crannies, all that. Definitely not separating the head, honing anything, doing a rebuild or anything like that. Just in and out, a quick 20 minute adventure.

First task is to get it on the stand. And that means removing the torque converter and flex plate. The bolts for the converter require the removal of this access plate I'd left on.

The bolts are then accessible, turning the engine to access each (and fighting the crank wanting to turn with the ratchet while the whole engine wobbles on a pair of chains suspended in the air)

 

I had to run off to the bolt shop to get some suitable bolts; the stand needs to bolt directly to the block this time around, whereas I was able to just sandwich some bolts through the alto's transmission holes. So I took some accessories off while it was dangling.

I don't think I'l put the A/C system back on for the initial rebuild. It has its own dedicated belt so easy delete there, and that's a lot of radiator and line bits that I can just ignore for now.

Bolts acquired.

Speaking of bolts, my system till now was to use sandwich bags to contain everything, with sharpie labels. Initially I'd also punched bolts through cardboard with a drawing of where they go, which I think works well built is more of a temporary thing. Bolts kept coming out when I moved the cardboard, it took up space, not great. The bags were better but they're annoying to sift through and can get separated. I found that I could find any given bolt bag at any point in time, except the one that I currently needed.

Employing a suggestion from the Croker vs Rover channel on YT, I organised everything into... organisers. I used masking tape for labels because my label maker ran out :\

Everything is now super easy to find and it's all still visible without opening the organiser lid. They're stackable so can take up very little space, very hard to lose or separate, won't rip, it's easy to swap out bins once they empty... should have done this ages ago.

 

Back to the engine.

It's old, it's tired. The coolant passages are crusty at best, blocked at worse.

There's evidence of leaky stem seals.

The oil is a bit toasty but there's nothing obviously wrong under the cover.

Note the little jet valves, an early emissions/efficiency thing (MCA-Jet).

With the timing cover off, there's evidence of more oil seepage. The oil pump seal (not pictured but behind the bottom right toothed wheel, which is also for one of the balance shafts) is leaking and there's no doubt some oil coming in from the rocker cover.

More interesting is that the second timing belt which drives one of the balance shafts is completely missing, and that the shaft can't be turned by hand. I think it was intentionally deleted, and the other shaft is only still connected because the oil pump is a part of it. 

Water pump is gross but no obvious play in it. It'll get replaced anyway.

 

After sleeping on it, I decided that those valve stem seals should probably get replaced. All the gasket kits seem to come with a head gasket anyway, so it seemed reasonable. I'm trying to be careful about scope creep but this also lets me check the bores properly.

So a mate came over and we separated the head from the block.

#1 and #4 look fine, you can still see the cross hatching.

But #3 and #4 have some markings that can just be felt under nails.

It doesn't feel particularly bad, going purely by vibes it feels like a hone would clean it up just fine.

The underside of the head holds no surprises. The gasket has held up fine.

Here's a closer look at the other end of the jet valves.

Apparently their smaller diameter means air/fuel rushes through them faster than through the normal intake valve and causes the combustion chamber mix to, uh, mix better. 

Then engines started staggering two intake valves to achieve the same effect, making them obsolete.

Supposedly these are liable to clog up or get stuck so there are delete kits out there (basically bolts with o-rings on them) which I will possibly make use of.

 

 

I want to remove the oil pan (which is a bit banged up) so figured I might as well pop a cap or two while we're in there.

First step is to forget to put down anything to catch the oil and water before turning the block.

Grandad's old scraper comes out for another job

 

MMmmmmmm.

 

 

Uh-huh.

 

 

I see.

 

 

Okay.

 

 

That's a conrod bearing and a cap bearing, each from the centre of the engine.

The conrod bearing catches on the nail, though the crank surface is smooth.

At the cap bearing, there's some texture on the crank as well.

There's no magnetic bits in the burnt toast, but scrunching it between ragged fingers reveals shiny metallic fragments.

 

Bearings? Possibly.

[tomble]

Or maybe turbo housing/impellor shavings?

 

 

We couldn't separate the two halves of the turbo, either - pen fluid, heat, massive pipe wrench, percussion. Wouldn't move a mm.

 

I found a turbo that's supposedly fine on facebook marketplace so should hopefully be fine there.

But I'm keen to hear thoughts on the engine.

I'm very reluctant to consider a swap at this point given the goal of the year and the amount of problems I'm juggling already.

I'm also somewhat reluctant to source another starion turbo engine, it's likely to just be another loot box to gamble on after 40 years unless I shell out for a known good one from a reputable source.

So currently I'm leaning towards rebuilding this one. It'd be OEM or OEM-like grade stuff, I don't have the spare money for anything crazy. I haven't checked all the bearings yet but so far vibes say that the crank is saveable. There's no heat discolouration anywhere I can see, and the engine did technically run without any obvious noises. The bores look like they can just be honed, to save myself buying new pistons. I'm hoping this is just a case of new bearings + new rings + honed bores + polished crank. 

[tomble]

I stripped down the block and had a better look. Honestly, it didn't seem bad to me. The bores looked ok, maybe a hone would fix it, but Kelv reckoned maybe it needed oversized pistons. The crank had a mild scratch I could see, and the rest of it was just dirty and gross. Rusty water passage ways. Seems saveable. But only the engine reconditioners could know that for sure.

One further question I had was what to do about the 'silent shafts' / balance shafts. One turned freely and is connected via the main timing belt to the head. However, the other one was locked solid and its dedicated belt was missing. I used a slide pull to get it out and the bearing/mating surface looked totally munted. I know that these are often intentionally deleted, so I wasn't too worried, but needed guidance there.

So I took it all down to Kerry Lindsay's and they surprised me yet again by having a much better outlook on it all. Mr Man was happy to see that two of the bores still had cross hatching, and believed that the other two may well just hone perfect. He also hand-waved the balance shaft seat, "oh yeah we can fix that np".

We formed a plan: hone the bores, see if we can keep the pistons, buy some if not, polish the crank, skim the deck, fix the balance shaft seat, clean it all up, and as with the Alto I asked that they do the rotating assembly for me. The guesstimate ballpark price was reasonable.

I got the proper quote a little later.

• Good news! The bores honed up nicely. Don't need new oversized pistons! 
• Bad news! The pistons are fucked and out of size due to overheating. Need new pistons anyway. :\

So, that ended up costing slightly more than rebuilding the entire alto engine with new parts, heh. But I got a peanut slab with it.

Anyway that's all back now. 

 

They even painted it for me. I guess my engine colour is decided now.

 

Apparently they spent a while cleaning out the waterways, as there was a buttload of rust in them. He reckons they've got it and that it'll be fine but to expect the odd red fluff to fall out here and there :')

That's currently just sitting on my bench while I juggle everything else in my life and my ass into gear to do the next bits. I've got almost everything I need now, just need to tear apart the head and get that looked at too. Since the pistons were fucked from heat, and the block got skimmed, and my 5-year-old Alto had some valve seat repair, I think it's only smart to make sure the head is OK before I go further with it.

The other thing I need that's making me cautious is documentation. I have an '83 workshop manual but it's for the USDM (which uses a different 2.6L engine), and Kelvin is doing his magic his side to get me some stuff, but I'm really in need of something that goes into detail on the head, silent shafts, all the seals and gaskets and where RTV should go etc etc.

So putting a call out there for anyone with SOHC (4)G63(b) material! :X

 

[tomble]

Meanwhile, 

I turned my attention to the ECI injector / throttle body thing. While I'm going for 'get it running', trusting a 40 year old carb that's been neglected for 20 years to still be fine is asking a bit much.

 

I mean, this isn't exactly a good sign of health.

 

One thing I noticed is that while I love having clean parts, I hate cleaning them. Having a dirty work space reduces my enjoyment and my motivation to enter said space. 

I have a lot of dirty parts to clean.

And I've always wanted an ultrasonic cleaner... so...

It's a 15L unit and to be honest I think I went a little overkill. I'm still playing with it but it seems that the most effective thing is to put the part in a glass jar/container with an excellent degreaser. Kerosene/fuel is considered to do wonderous cleaning in less than a minute.

 

So the ECI injector unit. I'm no knowledgable expert but I believe this is a somewhat early attempt at electronic fuel injection and combines it with a carburettor. But with electronic bits. Like a cyborg.

I have a PDF of a training guide for it, but no rebuild instructions. Fortunately, a man called @ProZac made one a decade and a half ago and it can still be accessed via the wayback machine. He even reverse engineered what orings and seals to buy. Thanks mate :0

Purchase for $43.41 from http://www.sealinnovations.co.nz/ who replied to my website message with a personalised quote so fast that I thought it was an auto reply. Delivered the next day in a collection of baggies with hand-written part numbers. Damn.

The gasket is obviously well out of production. 'Zac says now's a good time to harvest the old one to size up a new one so that's where I started. Mine is in bits and is quite fucked as you'd imagine.

I utilised my inner 5yo to sketch out a template...

...then I spray-glued it to a piece of 0.8mm oil gasket paper.

I punched out all the holes and curves, and used a craft knife to get the rest.

I then realised that the spray glue worked really, really well... far too well...

Oh well, I now have a template for the next one

Disassembly. The skode was real. Every surface of this was covered in black residue. Almost every fastener was a phillips and got to the absolute breaking point of stripping before giving way. Two I did end up having to break out the impact driver for.

The butterfly valve came out without any headaches. It's slightly chamfered to go in one way, almost invisibly, but fortunately the markings make reassembly easy.

The shaft gets a soft blow to knock it out, and the retaining clip brings the seal with it on that side, handily.

The previously photographed water port got a clean out.

These injectors have some moulded seals, which fortunately are intact (I'm sure they're meant to be less plastic though) as they are no longer produced.

Once everything was clean, reassembly ensued. I lightly greased all new orings and seals to make sure nothing caught.

A quick before and after for the fuel injector assembly.

The fuel pressure regulator gets new orings...

The idle up controller gets reassembled (after a mild panic where I wasn't sure how!). 

Unfortunately, the rubber bellow thing has a smallish tear/hole in it. And probably should be softer. But it's at least adjustable, so hopefully can be compensated for... if not, it is at least readily accessible if I were to find a new one.

Then the butterfly shaft goes back in with new seals on either end. The valve plate is massaged in and fastened. Everything gets blue loctite.

The reinstallation of the Finger Fucker 9000 removes any remaining play in the shaft.

Then after re-attaching all the various bracketry, TPS and key, etc etc we have a nice healthy new ECI injector unit.

I'll likely take some readings and do some tests on it before it goes on the car, but for now, it can move to the 'don't have to think about it' shelf <3 <3

 

[tomble]

Crap I've left this too long and have to resort to photographic evidence to jog my memory.

Oh yeah, gasket cleaning.

Before I got the engine on the stand I wanted to get the rear main seal on. The old seal came out fine, with the retaining ring intact.

My paper gaskets had all basically turned into some kind of super-compound that loved bonding to aluminium. I quickly gave up plastic scrapers, which did nothing, in favour of very carefully taking my time with razor blades. Then brass wire wheels.

Then, when I gouged into the front housing using said wheel, decided to wait for something proper to arrive.

I had the wrong manual (USA edition with wrong engine), but with it and some google-fu, I felt confident enough installing the seal and housing.

 

I don't remember what I used to seat the seal and its retaining ring... but I remember puckering.

 

 

I'd ordered a seal kit from the UK - Ajusa brand, spanish, had a good reputation and definitely has all of the bits I need (and some I don't) so I don't feel so bad about how spendy it was (it cost more to ship than for the actual kit :\)

I applied thin permaseal grey to the seal housing's gasket and bolts, then used the bottle trick to slip it onto the crank.

Easy!

 

With that done, I can focus on stripping the head. Because the pistons were heat damaged, I really wanted to make sure the head was professionally checked.

I'd purchased a spring compressor for the alto but it was too large. Still, I kept it because I knew it'd have a job with the starion.

Unfortunately, it just didn't seem to work.

I mean, it compressed the springs just fine. It's just that the spring retainer etc just seemed to be totally bound up such that I couldn't get at them. The valve would just free-slide without anything on the other side. I tried putting a block of wood in the chamber and hitting with a soft mallet etc but it was just freaking me out so I gave up on that...

... and bought a "proper" reach-around one on special from supercheap.

I initially thought it was fucked because there was no way I could apply the force required to actuate the handle, and just manually tightened it until it cracked the spring.

It turns out that the valve retainers are SO STUCK that they just almost totally resisted my reach-around. I had to apply a stupid amount of force, use a dead blow etc to crack them. Super un-nerving!

It took a lot of effort but I managed to get the four exhaust retainers free, and the same effort combined to get the first intake retainer free. Then I simply just could not get the other three intake springs to co-operate. The entire tool would just flex.

So with 5/8 valves free I just gave up and brought it to the reconditioners as-is.

They had bad news.

They saw two cracks between cylinders and didn't bother properly cleaning for a third, but reckoned it was probably there too. I hadn't bothered to check myself.

The reconditioner asked, "I don't suppose you have a spare lying around"?

I did not.

He anticipated this however, and gave me a good price on a new casting. Also a really good price on assembly - the cam shafts and valves were all fine.

This one doesn't have ports for the MCA-Jets so I don't have to worry about what to do with those

My new head bolts arrived from Japan about the same time, so we can get started putting things together.

This felt like a two person job so Girlface and I got into it. First we cleaned the mating surfaces and repurposed the dowels before positioning the new gasket.

Then we oiled up the new bolts, and with wailing and gnashing of teeth, we did the torque dance.

Yay! The head is totally mated and happy.

 

... Wait a minute. There were washers on those bolts, right?

 

Right?

 

 

Sigh.

It might have been fine? But why risk it. $100 of bolts in the bin but a learning lesson I guess.

 

In the mean time I put the new OEM spark plugs in that I'd bought a few years ago in as a consolation. They were all within what the internet thinks is the right specced gap so that was nice.

 

A few days later and another $100, plus a new 12-point socket, we've got a new set of 4g63 bolts from kiwi cylinder heads, and we're ready to go again.

Lubed them up, dropped them in, finger tighte..... uh... hmm...