kishy's 1984 Town Car

[87gtVIC]

They cleaned up nice. Like em.

[gadget73]

Pull the clutch off, you'll see what ails it pretty quick. Could just be an air gap adjustment is needed.

I like those wheels, but only when they're in decent shape. A lot of them are just completely roached and they're horrible looking when that happens. I suspect you can de-spoke them for a really detailed cleaning if you want, but I suspect it sucks as much as my Continental wires did.

[kishy]

...I'm thinking of changing the thermostat out since I think this one is a little lazy, engine temps pretty consistently hover around 200-205 and that's even with the bleed hole I drilled in the t-stat, so it can technically flow a teeny tiny bit more than its fully-open capacity anyway...The impeller is smaller, of course, and the water passage is basically not defined at all, so I can see it being a much poorer flowing pump...but poorer enough to make it actually have a cooling deficiency?

...Spectra Premium CU552...The rad is now installed, as is a new thermostat, and I can idle this thing all day long with the A/C on and it won't touch 200...

I have now tested the take-off thermostat (which itself, I put in new when I got the car) and found it was indeed lazy. It did not begin opening until after 200 and had to boil somewhere well around 220 to fully open. Good job Stant.

The new one's behaviour is a lot more "classic". Temps climb steadily, hit about 200, shoots down to 180, then back to 190 and a gradual slide back to right in the middle of 190 and 200. Pretty much exactly what I'd expect.

Furthermore, while I have no doubt the new water pump put on when I did the timing cover improved flow, it does not seem like it improved cooling overall in any meaningful way.

Word of warning about the clutch, inspect the center hub of that thing. The one on my Continental came apart. The middle of the plate is coupled to the hub that actually drives the compressor with a rubber spider. The rubber got gooey on the Conti and expanded inward, catching on the retaining ring that holds the clutch bearing in place. It spun that ret ring until it milled the snout off the end of the compressor. It sounded like a slight clutch drag or ailing bearing, but I found out it was totally f'd when I pulled it apart to swap the clutch for one with a good bearing. There was nothing to hold the bearing back, so the pulley was constantly in contact with the compressor hub. It did that until the clutch face was heavily grooved and damaged. That is what actually caused the compressor replacement. You're not likely to have that, but give it an eyeball just in case its more than a bit of rust on the clutch. You can pull the clutch off easy enough to clean the face up and spin test the bearing just to make sure you don't have any sort of impending doom there.

Pull the clutch off, you'll see what ails it pretty quick. Could just be an air gap adjustment is needed.

So...I missed some of the detail here because I was not able to mentally picture the clutch. Now that I've looked at it some, I believe I do have the same issue as you, though it remains to be seen if it's gone as far yet.

The rubber that holds the hub together has turned to goo in one section (and note that the hub plate thing is sunken in closer to the compressor to one "side" = rubber breaking down).

It appears this is a specialty tool job. Handle thing to hold the clutch hub, and a special puller to get the hub off. Am I wrong?

I like those wheels, but only when they're in decent shape. A lot of them are just completely roached and they're horrible looking when that happens. I suspect you can de-spoke them for a really detailed cleaning if you want, but I suspect it sucks as much as my Continental wires did.

These are not great, but not awful either. The black painted section is flawless and most of the outer lip is great on all of them, but one, where a weight looks to have corroded to it somehow. The spokes have good condition finish, but the area around the lugs and hub bore is iffy.

I figure I can either use them while they're still nice enough to enjoy, or put them in the garage never to see road use again realistically. I prefer option A in this case.

[gadget73]

Supposed to need a tool, sometimes they come off easy. Nut in the middle comes off, then the tool threads into the hub and you turn the bolt in the middle of the tool. There is some other tool to hold the clutch while you spin the nut off the middle but if you've got an impact it should spin off. You can probably make a holding tool out of a flat piece of stock and a couple of bolts run through it in the right places. The official one is a ring with 3 pins I think. I've never had the official holding tool.

[DerekTheGreat]

Why did I not know you had the caps? Don't you know you're supposed to tell me your entire parts inventory with updates in real time?

I don't even remember half the stuff I got, so sometimes when I start poking around it's like Christmas and being 8 years old all over again. Imagine my surprise when I found a spare and known working in 100% correct order JBL amp when I was poking around for your speakers that one day haha.

Side banter: I really need to get organized and create a list, but would prefer an electronic inventory system with a scanner and bar codes so all I'd have to do is can things in or out after creating bar codes for parts and such. Paper lists piss me off. Even the ones you create with excel would piss me off..

If by "other optional aluminum wheels" you mean the "lacy spokes" which look like fancier turbines, it came on those, and I love them. But when the decision had to be made about which wheels to put the whitewalls on, the wire spokes won.

YES! Those be what I was thinking of. Spokes look great on your car and should be mandatory on rag top cars like Ashley's old Townie. How nice are those lacy spokes of yours???

[kishy]

Well...I have a Google Docs spreadsheet running with every single new car part I've purchased, ever. It's quite the sight to see.

Columns are
Part Type | (compatibility matrix for vehicles) | Fitment Notes | Purchase Date | Warranty Until | Brand | Part Number | Installed Date | Veh Installed | KM @ Install | Purchased From | Order # | CAD Each | Discount Received | Paid | Notes

It makes use of conditional formatting to highlight cells (e.g. when warranty date is greater than today's date, cell is green). The compatibility matrix I built allows filtering the parts list only down to ones which fit a particular vehicle (for example, 91 being big brake swapped, cannot fit brake pads that fit 83, 84 or 85 - nor do any of them fit brake pads for the Ranger).

and it has 873 rows, so...

I was giving some very serious consideration to building an SQL database to store this information, because it is very much multi-dimensional and does not want to be stored "flat"...but...I just don't have the time. That was part of a much bigger project to track all maintenance on all my cars in SQL with a nifty little web front-end to pull up records and put them in, which is currently suffering the same fate about free time. As often as I do post here, my windows of availability to do that are usually short little bursts (many of them), not hours and hours on end.

The lacy spokes are decent. As I recall, a little pitting around the rim, but nothing awful. Have all the centre caps and they're decent. The car looked very good on them. The 205 tires mounted on them currently make the car very wallowy though. One might think (and indeed have said) that a 205 vs a 215 is a negligible difference but I strongly disagree. This car is very stable on 215/70R15, and terrifying on 205/70R15.

There's what looks to be a good set of those wheels, but minus caps, and maybe refinished (the gaps between the spokes are not dark like original) on one of the Lincolns at Ryan's.

[kishy]

Yesterday, received the Amazon order of 2x MMP WC 33-96 (96" length of style 33 window channel). I figured 2 was not enough to do the whole car, but Amazon only had 2 showing in stock at the time, so I got what I could. At 15 bucks a piece, they were half the price of anywhere else that carries it, including direct from MMP.

I started with the driver door, main glass. It's looking like I do not need to touch the vent window channels for now, those are still somewhat pliable. However, I will need a length of the smaller WC size (WC 15-72 is on order, hoping that turns out to be usable) to do the main glass side of the vent window post.

I got through the entire driver door main glass, and then about 3/4 of the driver rear door. The amount remaining from the 96" section after doing one front door window is not enough to do a whole main window. It would be sufficient for the front side of the vent window, but as mentioned that stuff is still usable on mine. I used a section of better-than-nothing of the old stuff to finish off the driver rear window and will revisit this when I have more of the product on-hand. "Revisit" will likely mean taking the new part out of the back door, and putting in a new continuous length. But we'll see. The ventshade being present means that needing to transition between two lengths in that area is not such a bad thing.

Passenger side remains untouched at present, both window channel, and install of ventshades, which will be done together. Going to get my hands on another one or two WC 33-96 before I touch that disintegrating mess.

Goop adhesive seen pictured was not used in the installation of the window channels. It was used to fill a tiny hole at the corner of a ventshade, which otherwise would have shuttled rain water directly into the window if open slightly (defeating some of the purpose of ventshades).

Not sure if this is mentioned anywhere yet but for the front door, it was a heck of a lot easier feeding the WC up from inside the door than to feed it down from above. The WC widens out inside the door so it drags less.











Also, echoing myself from the junkyard thread:
it seems like most of the direct (short, as is what they provide in their embed bbcode) links to individual photos are broken.

Our engineers are looking into this issue, and we'll follow up when it's resolved.
Once we have a fix in place, all the short links you've generated/shared will work again.

[gadget73]

I also used a dab of silicone where the pieces met, but nowhere else. It stays in there pretty well on it's own.

[kishy]

As shown in another thread earlier, putting this here...older pic from before the front end surgery:



I have made no further progress with the window channels. Too much going on, too many things to do. It's not exactly a difficult project, just need to make the time.

190,843km: New A/C clutch is on. The hub was indeed chewing the face off the compressor snout. It isn't clear to me exactly what fails to cause that to happen...maybe a shaft bushing of some kind inside the compressor allows the shaft to retract a bit inside pulling the hub up against the compressor. I dunno. I verified that the new one is sufficiently spaced to not cause that while still being in spec for the air gap figures (it's gapped to a sliver wider than 0.035 and the spec is 0.020-0.040").

There is a clutch cycling condition happening. Car gets nice and cold, but the clutch is cycling. Seems to happen more when the outside temperature is lower, clutch runs longer with fewer interruptions when it's hotter out (e.g. 100 degree day vs 80 degree day). This is consistent with the pattern I observed originally: I bought the car on a wicked hot 100 degree day, and the air worked. As we went into fall and winter, the clutch developed a rapid cycling condition (way more frequent on/off than it's doing now).

Given that the system has held sufficient pressure to work for over 2 years now, I would consider an R12 stop leak option and quick top-up, except that interfacing with the R12 system seems to be somewhat challenging. Getting the R12 itself should not be terribly difficult, it's handling it that proves more challenging. No shops (at least none are willing to admit) will work on the R12 system as-is other than evacuating it and 134A converting it, which I'm not really motivated to do as long as this still works. It isn't readily apparent to me if my manifold/gauge set will mate with the R12 system valves. The 134A quick-connects are removable adapters on the hoses.

[DerekTheGreat]

OH, so that's how it comes apart. Not bad.

Your system is probably getting low but the cycling more when colder thing is normal. I believe gadget or sly said there's a spec for it somewhere. Last I checked like a month or two ago my car wasn't cycling at all, was nasty hot out. My garbage has been running 134a though.

[kishy]

The hardest part was getting the snap ring back on for the new coil. Oh man, that sucked. Losing sun midway through the project, antifreeze continually finding its way onto my hand, bad line of sight to the ring groove and snap ring pliers that apparently suck were all working against me. The new clutch makes a nice loud metallic "snap" when it engages.

The oil staining on the compressor is absolute evidence that there is or was a leak at the manifold connections to the compressor. The very annoying problem here is that nobody will evacuate this system so I can reseal everything, and then put the R12 back in it so I may then find some old R12 to add as needed, and I don't have the equipment necessary to do so myself.

The plan was so much easier back when I thought the system was empty. Reseal, vacuum, toss some questionable hydrocarbon refrigerant in, call it done. The presence of R12 and the system working basically mean I can't touch it.

Add hydrocarbon refrigerant to existing R12? No shop will ever evacuate it if I do that. They test the composition before hooking up their gear and if hydrocarbon stuff is present they send you packing.
Add R12? Pretty wasteful if leaks aren't completely confirmed to be resolved in a permanent way.
Convert to 134A (so a shop can evacuate the R12, since they won't otherwise)? Not exactly something I want to do.

Oh well. It gets cold. Good enough for now.
When my rapid cycle (like on-off twice a second as it was before) returns in the cooler weather I'll just pull the clutch connector as I did last time. All that racket when I want to use defrost is maddening.

[DerekTheGreat]

Oh, I hate that type of noise. I took Ashley's A/C compressor off her F150 and unbeknownst to me there are two spacers that have to go on first. If the compressor we bought at the yard was a direct replacement it would've been no issue, however, it was not and so the old garbage had to go back on so it could be driven. I spent what felt like an hour trying to get stuff to line back up enough in order to get that compressor on there. It wasn't until Ash assisted that it went on in five minutes. Hate stuff that seems like it should be so simple yet turns out to be a nightmare. Few things make me want to rage quit more.

That's strange. I know the shop that does my heavy lifting loves R-12 cars. They'll reclaim it to use with other people who still want to retain R-12. You could have them do the work..

[VicCrownVic]

Oh, I hate that type of noise. I took Ashley's A/C compressor off her F150 and unbeknownst to me there are two spacers that have to go on first. If the compressor we bought at the yard was a direct replacement it would've been no issue, however, it was not and so the old garbage had to go back on so it could be driven. I spent what felt like an hour trying to get stuff to line back up enough in order to get that compressor on there. It wasn't until Ash assisted that it went on in five minutes. Hate stuff that seems like it should be so simple yet turns out to be a nightmare. Few things make me want to rage quit more.

That's strange. I know the shop that does my heavy lifting loves R-12 cars. They'll reclaim it to use with other people who still want to retain R-12. You could have them do the work..

You should stop listening to that guy that keeps telling you "That looks like it will fit".
And tell him to bring his own tools next time.

[DerekTheGreat]

Haha it did though! We eye balled the two for a good while. Ashley was sure to point out that is why the part numbers didn't interchange. "You had your answer and yet still wanted that compressor. Will we at least be able to use the hoses?" - No. LoL well all we need now is to buy a Ford truck with a V8 in it.. Or sell this stuff but I dunno how well A/C stuff sells on Craigslist..

Nah, we just need you to bring your hacksaw next time

[VicCrownVic]

...
Nah, we just need you to bring your hacksaw next time

That mini hacksaw really comes in handy. Would have saved that random guy's hand a few years ago.
Heck I even have some sawzall blades riding arou... oh, wait, those weren't in the car I had that weekend. I must have said that at least half a dozen times.