My 1989 Crown Victoria.

[slack]

Hmm.. good to know that what happened to mine is just a common occurrence on those pipes . You're probably on to something there with the metals not playing nice with each other.

Hopefully next summer I can just rip the whole damn thing out!

[88Vic]

If my a/c can't be fixed cheap, I'm taking that belt off to bypass it all. I had that tube rewelded, but if it comes off again I'm just gonna have the exhaust patched and the tube blow into the air, not connected at all I guess. Probably gonna go catless soon anyways.

[slack]

Another new steering gear.

No pics for this update (account space is full anyway).

I ended up replacing the steering gear on the car AGAIN. About 6 months ago I messed with the old one trying to get the steering tighter in an attempt to hunt down road wander. This just made things worse and I didn't trust the gear box after doing that so I picked up an AC Delco reman so that I knew I was getting some sort of quality.

Old box came out nice an easy and new one went right in without a problem. I had the whole thing done in probably 2 hours.

After all this, I realized that the travel was actually coming from my pitman arm to center link connection the whole time. The castle nut screws down lower than the cotter pin can hold it in place so it ends up backing out a little bit until the cotter pin catches it again causing slop.

I put two washers under the castle nut so that it would line up with the cotter pin hole (will probably replace the pitman arm down the road).

So far so good, steering is much more true and doesn't really wander anymore. I messed up a little bit aligning everything when I pressed the pitman arm back on so my steering wheel is cocked about 5 degrees when driving straight.

Still not satisfied even though the car runs straight... for the most part... but my 78 LTD drives much more predictably. I still feel like there's some play in there somewhere.

I'm leaning towards control arm bushing bolts not being torqued evenly or something as I sometimes get a "bonk" when braking hard.

We'll see though...

[slack]

A year+ update on the steering. It's still not great and perhaps a less confident in staying straight than it was a year ago. Driving the car locally isn't such a big deal and I even just drove it to my Mom's house 4 hours away in PA this month without issue (Although I had to readjust the steering wheel constantly). What's annoying is how it will be running straight and then it seems like if the road geometry changes, the steering requires another position to keep the car running straight.

It feels tight, maybe too tight? If the road runs flat the car is pretty predictable but if there's some bumps along the way it can be a mess. A few months ago I actually tightened one of the lower control arm bolts because it was on the loose side of tight. This helped a little.

It's been too cold to take a look this week but it's starting to drive me a bit nuts lately.

[gadget73]

sounds like you need an alignment. If the toe is out the steering gets sketchy. Same if the idler arm or other parts are worn. When things are right the road tracking on these cars is very good. Also don't discount massively worn rear suspension parts. If the bushings are totally shot back there, the back end will shift around and wag you down the road. Rear axle location is something thats questionable at best on these cars to begin with, add 30 years and miles and it gets pretty bad.

I'd also get rid of the washers and tighten the center link nut down directly like it should be. If the hole doesn't line up, crank it some more until it does. It would also be worth making sure all the bolts are tight, none of that stuff should ever need to be re-torqued.

[VicCrownVic]

I was just browsing CL yesterday and came across a 1989 CV where the first pic was clearly not an '89 front end. I thought for sure it was not an '89 but flipped trough the pictures to see what the rear looked like and sure enough it's an '89. Then I began to wonder if you were selling yours.
The interior color is wrong, and Cincinnati is a long way from Long Island.

https://cincinnati.craigslist.org/ct...411947405.html

[DerekTheGreat]

LoL anything is possible. Just look at our calico Mark VII. It's now sporting a C6! Well, not actually, just OD decided to retire.

[slack]

Still got my CV!

Long long time since an update. So, I ended up pulling the pitman arm off the steering box maybe a year ago and removed those (now crushed) washers. I installed a new quality pitman arm and torqued it down properly so the center link sat correctly in it. (not sure what was up with the old pitman arm, maybe i had torqued it too far onto the steering gear giving it too much play?)

Car drove decently better. I was finally able to feel somewhat comfortable driving it around.

A few months ago my passenger side front caliper decided to seize up on me heading home. I bought two new front calipers loaded with pads and replaced them. While I was replacing them, I noticed that front wheel bearings were a little on the loose side... I guess last time I had the rotors off I didn't want to over torque them but definitely didn't screw them down enough. I made them a bit snugger so that there was no more bearing play when you grabbed the wheel.

Again, car now drives even better! I think it's pretty close to being back to how it should be while driving down the road. I only notice some annoyances in high wind. We'll see though.

Just Saturday my alternator decided to stop charging. Ran some quick tests with the multimeter and verified that the wiring was still good, just no charge from the alt. (dash lamp works as well). Going to go with a 3g swap hopefully this Thanksgiving break and finally get that done. Been looking at the many threads on it and I think it should be easy enough to do. Can't justify buying a new 2G alternator when setting up for 3G isn't too much more expensive or too much more work.

Edit: Oh and I completely forgot. Just last weekend I put a new muffler and exhaust pipe on. Nothing fancy, had stock stuff lying around. Gave it a good coat of high heat paint and bolted it up. Old stuff had rotted out pretty bad. Y pipe was still good as I installed that not too long ago... (i think.. who knows, it's probably been years )

[Tiggie]

Did yours have the funky plastic outer wheel bearings?

[DerekTheGreat]

Were those factory? I pulled some of those off my Firebird when I did rotors & wheel bearings on it some 4 years ago. Plastic cages.. Wow, just wow.

[BigMerc96]

Timken made them like that for years. They are perfectly fine. That was what was in my neighbor's '00 2wd F150 at 205k when we did the brakes. They were worn down to the point where you could no longer get them preloaded properly and the plastic cage WAS the bearing, I asked him if he had ever replaced them "nah, I've always just cleaned and re-packed them". He had the truck from 2002 and 20k miles, so there is a very good chance that those were the original 200k mile bearings, plastic cage and all.

[gadget73]

Same ones in my S10. The plastic doesn't do much work, it just maintains some space between the rollers. Even if something goes bad and melts the cage, the bearing will have failed already.

[Tiggie]

Timken made them like that for years. They are perfectly fine. That was what was in my neighbor's '00 2wd F150 at 205k when we did the brakes. They were worn down to the point where you could no longer get them preloaded properly and the plastic cage WAS the bearing, I asked him if he had ever replaced them "nah, I've always just cleaned and re-packed them". He had the truck from 2002 and 20k miles, so there is a very good chance that those were the original 200k mile bearings, plastic cage and all.

Same here. 88 had them and they were loose... wobbly wheel and uneven brake pad wear loose.

[DerekTheGreat]

The ones on my firebird had started to wear into the cage.. The rollers were fine yet somehow the plastic came apart or moved and was making contact with the race. I've never seen an all steel/metal type bearing do that.

[slack]

Did yours have the funky plastic outer wheel bearings?

Hmm.... It's been a few years since I replaced the front rotors for the first time... I don't remember any plastic in the bearings or the races though so perhaps they were changed at some point before I owned the car. When I was in there replaced them with the solid metal Timken ones. I know from being loose after the initial install, I replaced the the driver's side inner one with a crap Duralast because it had worn some. Probably did that a year or so ago. Haven't got around to taking it out and putting a better one in as it seems to be holding up okay.

Got the last (i think) of the 3G parts today and should be here Saturday. So hopefully Sunday and Monday I'll get around to installing everything. I have a remanufactured 130A 3G alt for a '94 Mustang Cobra (Driveworks 7771-11-6GAV), new larger 505 belt, 175A mega fuse and 4AWG wire and connectors on the way. Plan on reusing the one plug for my existing alt and will make a shovel connector for the white/black wire as well as jump the yellow to the charge post of the 3G alt instead of going through that mess of 2G wiring that is going on. Maybe down the line I'll rerun the yellow sense wire back to the battery... but probably won't be necessary.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!