kishy's 1985 Country Squire

[WagonMan]

Years ago I bought heavy duty repair clips from NAPA auto parts. I tried to do a search for them, but came up with nothing. WagonMan

[kishy]

Thank you, re: decent photos. I like to think I'm not half awful at it. Some of those were taken with my work-issued Pixel 4, some were taken with my personal Samsung A50. I think I like the Pixel better, in most respects. The camera is one thing that the phone is known for (it has a very good camera), so that's part of it.

Back when I started driving the wagon for the year, had to be around March, I had actually forgotten I had the car. I was on the phone with a friend talking about the impending doom of mechanical work needed on things before I could drive them, and he just threw in, "what about the wagon?", to which I replied something to the effect of, "oh right, the WAGON!"

I put a lot of work into this thing and I happen to like it a lot, so I'm putting every bit of mileage onto it that I can. The head-turning is really fun. A couple guys in a lowered and healthy sounding NA Miata were both absolutely captivated by it earlier...it speaks to "car guys" and "normal people" alike. I get a lot of people asking what year it is, saying their family had one a long time ago.



Anyway...rivnuts/threaded inserts. After reading that above, I thought those would be the answer, since I have the tool and a bunch of them. I gave them a shot and failed miserably, for two reasons:
1. I drilled the holes too big, but even if I hadn't...
2. The Chinesium rivnut installer bent in a variety of places which have rendered it useless. I'm at least 60% sure it wasn't user error.



So I turned to the original plan: U-nuts and grade 8 bolts in M8-1.25. I actually bought them before I put the KYBs in a week ago, but because the prior solution (poorly welded-in nuts) was still working, I left it alone.









Everything's back together and feels (and sounds) much better than it did over the last few days. I did notice something I thought I was seeing when I installed the sway bar links way-back-when, which is that the threaded part is not long enough/the length of the spacer tube in the middle is not long enough, causing it to be impossible to tighten the links enough. The passenger side one just sort of wobbles around in there. It has tension on it, but not a lot. Since it's still basically as-new my solution will probably be to throw a bunch of washers at it, but washers of appropriate size are fairly expensive, so we'll see. I know the holes like to egg out but I've got time to think about it.

[gadget73]

closeness to the edge was my concern with the rivnuts. Don't want to drill through and find there isn't enough material for it to actually work. I have a slightly better tool to install them, but you do have to be careful with the adjustment otherwise things go badly. I over-compressed one and it broke the threads on the puller tool. The handle assembly was fine, just had to get another $15 threaded bit.

or maybe I'll just drill it out slightly and put 5/16 hardware in. I think I have 1/4" in there now.

[kishy]

Well...I'm 31 today.

Received this pretty amazing thing:





There are some inaccuracies a) against the movie car, and b) against a real example of the same year car, plus what I will describe as "Greenlight QC issues" (based on prior experience with the 1:64 models), but it's still pretty fantastic.

[Tiggie]

Happy birthday and a very nice gift too. Greenlight makes some cool stuff.

[gadget73]

cool, you have a real-life movie car tribute

Happy birthday

[87gtVIC]

Welcome to the 31 club. I see the mirrors are different for one. Still way cool.

[sly]

Youngin.

[gadget73]

heh, indeed.

[Mainemantom]

31, enjoy it. If I could only be that age again. I do remember how it felt though. I am over double your age.

[DerekTheGreat]

Happy birfday! REally cool gift. I'd love to have a model that was virtually identical to one of the cars I own lol. I'm 34. Would not want to be 24 again. Diggin' old age but not the immobility that is starting to come along with it. Need to force myself to go to more junkyards and "pretzel up" just to stay limber enough so the ability doesn't fade away lol.

[packman]

To be 31 again *sigh*; wait, there was nothing special about that. Never mind

Whoever got that T2 Country Squire knew their stuff! I totally forgot how many boxes were in that movie.

I did the same thing you did with the LCA shock mounts. My original LCA shock mounts were stripped. I barely squeezed U-nuts in there to remedy the floppy shocks. Fortunately the LCAs I got from the '90 MGM had good threads (there is only 1 or 2 threads on them).

[kishy]

Thanks for the birthday stuff!

Regarding the model, I think a detailed review is justified. The inconsistencies vs a real '79, inconsistencies vs any box Panther, and inconsistencies vs the movie car are sort of serious if we consider that, as a movie car, details matter. I still love the thing, but it's a little sloppy in some respects.

Regarding my actual wagon, I received the special cable (DB25 with only 4 active pins to TA4FL) to connect my OTC Enhanced Monitor to its tiny impact printer. I used it to read the codes on the wagon tonight. For those who may be interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLLFXyQmLgc



It's neat. Really glad I found the cable when it landed on eBay. I had intended to make my own but ran into some roadblocks working out the pinout. The TA4FL port on the code reader unit apparently also can interface to a computer (so, it seems to be a serial port) to output to some software that I can't find. The TA4FL-to-DE9 pinout is documented online, so it's only a bit of a jump to get to a DB25 from there, but I had some uncertainties and decided not to risk killing either the printer or code reader.

As for the car and its codes, well...as I've said a few times it needs to be gone through and tweaked a bit, but it's a pretty consistent performer and works well enough that it doesn't bother me. The MAP code is interesting though. TPS checks out on an analog meter yet this falls on its face at certain throttle positions at certain load conditions, which might just implicate a spotty MAP.

[DerekTheGreat]

That's a pretty nifty tool.

[87gtVIC]

Great video. Appreciate the time put into it. Was fun to watch and see the process. I want one now for no reason other than to print out some diagnostics and codes.