kishy's 1984 Town Car

[kishy]

I have 1982 front fenders on my car with a 1986 bumper. It does not stick out.

The fenders are the same, so yeah, it would look the same as any 85-89 I suppose.
I do feel like the stamping was a little crisper on the earlier years but I don't think it was necessarily intentional that it got softer (probably slopped out tooling since the body was in production for so many years), but that's a different issue.

The point I'm driving at is that the 85-89 bumper sticks out (as in, ahead of the header panel) by the same amount as the 80-84 bumper, and that is the dimension that actually looks bad.
The overhang on the left and right sides is the only thing they changed, and the 80-84 bumper width better matches the car. The 85-89 one is oddly narrow, especially when you look at the car from an angle that reveals that it gets chubbier in the doors than it is in the fenders. The car is not a rectangle when viewed from above. More like a pregnant rectangle, I suppose.

But anyway, this is all obviously a matter of opinion and we're all going to feel a little different. For me, the bumper is not something they should have changed.

As for the notion of using the 85-89 fender extension and turn signal on the Mark VI header panel (and pairing that with whichever bumper you wish and its corresponding fillers), yeah, I'm just about certain that would work.

[Lutrova]

I can go both ways on the bumper width question. The narrow bumpers and revised front and rear make the later Town Cars into more of their own thing, while the earlier ones are a bit like shrunken barge Continentals. And it's the same solution Ford had for every other Lincoln in the mid '80s.

What gets me, though, is how poorly the bumper filler transitions from the bumpers to the side mouldings and rocker trim. You have this long band of brightwork running across the entire length of the car, and you have a chrome bumper, but then for a solid half foot that all stops and you just have the body color interrupting all that. They figured out how to continue the line on the narrow bumper Grand Marquis, but whoever did the facelift for the Town Car really phoned it in.

[GM_Guy]

That dual taper & tucked bumpers gotta be some sort of illusion of aero by the designers. The whales get even more of the taper at both ends, which is evident with the lack of trunk space in them. By lack, I mean the flat usable area on either side of the deep well is narrower. I think I bitched about that when I got my whale and couldn't fit everything the same as I could with the box trunk.

[sly]

aero and whale trunks are wider in the deep well part than the boxes by about an inch on either side and the side shelf is narrower by that margin, but the carpet is not as solid in the whales and the bracing for the lid and side impact zones is larger than boxes so takes out some more space as well. But yeah... the taper does cut off a but of corner space near the tail lights compared to the boxes. It's definitely a battle of inches here and there. The trunk package shelf has more headroom to the rear deck in the aeros and whales by about an inch as well. I think the fuel tank clearance is smaller on them than the boxes.

How do I know all of this... fitting speakers in my trunks.

[kishy]

There's a high school kid in one of the Facebook groups trying to get his '84 CFI car to start and run properly, and I did a video call with him to go over a couple things. The '84 Town Car was the demonstration car because all its 'stuff' is present and working, as far as CFI goes. Fast idle, etc.

While under the hood, I made some observations. First, this thing is rustier than I may have remembered in genuinely strange places, like the cowl area above the brake booster. Surface rust, but rust nonetheless. Salt spray probably had something to do with that.

Secondly, there's stuff missing under the hood. I forgot that I robbed a bunch of stuff off this car to make the wagon work better for the road trip last May. So, re-visiting the to-do list:

...
The to-do list to return this one to service when required is as follows:

• Monkey with the exhaust hangers a bit
• Completely go through the front suspension and brakes. Parts are already on-hand to go 95-97, but I'm a little tempted to maybe do something silly and get performance-ish brakes for the stock setup. But mirroring the wagon setup would be ideal (95-97 with performance rotors and pads).
• Thorough review of brake lines since this one still has all of the originals, and flush the fluid.
• Keeping in mind the axle oil was full of glitter, maybe get to work rebuilding my K code rear end to be ready to toss it in when required.

And not a prerequisite to use it again, but a priority is the vinyl top, which I think I'd like to deal with my swapping on a full fiberglass-backed ragtop, if one turns up in decent shape.

In addition to that, need to add:

• Locate and install a cruise servo (I have a couple NOS ones in a tote somewhere)
• Locate and install EGRC/EGRV solenoid assembly
• Test EGR operation as the valve currently on this car is not the same valve that was on it when EGR was last known to work correctly. If unsatisfactory, address as required.
• Probably pressure wash the engine bay, made easier by the fact my pressure washer was successfully coaxed into starting with fresh gas this past fall. My new house also has exterior hot water which is probably going to help.
• Consider swapping the steering wheel for a non-matching but good condition one from my stash, because the plastic just won't stop turning into goo on this one and it's disgusting.
• Power antenna replacement
• Heater core has been leaky the whole time I've had it.
• Fairly sure this has a rain leak somewhere at the top of the windshield, but only sometimes.

In addition to all that, it needs dew wipes and window channels. Previously did one side of window channels, but no dew wipes and one side still needs the channels. I have all that stuff somewhere.

On the 'pleasant surprise' side of things, the hood lift supports still work. Pretty sure these were junkyard harvested after I went through a couple new pairs before giving up on new. Steel hood problems, the thing's gotta weigh a hundred pounds.

[Tiggie]

Is the kid you are talking about the one with the wagon? Sounds like the shop had no clue and made a mess.

[kishy]

Is the kid you are talking about the one with the wagon? Sounds like the shop had no clue and made a mess.

Yes, pretty clean '84 Mercury wagon.
I think there are a couple forces at play here. The guys at the shop don't really know CFI or maybe EEC-IV much at all, but agreed to do work anyway, and the owner is very entry-level with this stuff so he's blindly following suggestions that he doesn't know how to evaluate as being good or not. For example, the car is thermactor and EGR-deleted, but that wasn't done because of problems with those systems, it was done "just because". What's worse, people are arguing back and forth in comments about the merits of doing these deletes, and you have absolute quacks saying EGR deletes make these cars better. It simply doesn't, if it was working beforehand.

Majority of his issues appear to be these key things:

• Seems nobody's ever told him that it's normal to have to use gas pedal to start CFI. It's literally in the manual, you have to do it.
  Subtly more complex than what I've said here, but how I've simplified it isn't outright wrong.
• Fast idle is missing a piece and was assembled wrong.
• ECM power relay pigtail is green and crusty. He has an intermittent no-start and no fuel visible in the throttle body when it happens, so I'm thinking ECM is periodically checking out and not doing the injector thing.

[Tiggie]

I kind of gave up on helping him because he was chasing too many tails. Glad you were able to assist.

[87gtVIC]

A sticky steering wheel has got to be awful to handle.

[kishy]

I kind of gave up on helping him because he was chasing too many tails. Glad you were able to assist.

Yeah, I was not previously in that group and was directly tagged and invited to that specific post by one of our other members from this site.
After I started chatting with him I realized he was in a little over his head, and saw his earlier posts which made me realize things were pretty dire.

Still, though, my chat with him makes me think he wants to, and is capable of learning, and was just getting a bit panicky and feeling a bit hopeless. I've tried my best to drop some of the theory down to his level and hopefully that's the boost he needs.

Found my spare throttle bodies so I should be able to mail him the missing piece. I doubt I'll need all 4 spares to be 100% complete for my own uses.

A sticky steering wheel has got to be awful to handle.

Uh, yeah. Abysmal.
It's the non-leather wheel, which as you likely know is sort of a soft-touch plastic. A little rubbery but firmer than it is soft.
It gets a sticky residue all over it from just sitting - maybe sun exposure, maybe a detailing product started it breaking down, no clue. It feels like what happen to dash pads that have been Armor All'd for years and then suddenly you deprive them of more Armor All.
Isopropyl alcohol does a wonderful job bringing it back to clean smooth unsticky condition, but it just comes back again a little while later.
Can't say for sure the alcohol doesn't encourage it to happen again, but it's the only temporary cure I have at the moment.

[Mainemantom]

A sticky steering wheel has got to be awful to handle.

Yes especially the rubber ones like the one I had on the 79 LTD. That one was the worst I have ever seen. It bled stick stuff overnight.

[gadget73]

the original on my Towncar got the boot for those same sticky gross reasons.

[kishy]

...
Pics of inside of goofy antenna relay? Is it a relay with a bunch of circuitry as well?
...

Better late than never, I suppose.



It's literally just a connector that bypasses whatever wizardry the original circuit design is doing. The antennas which use this fake relay as a connector do not plug into the gray rectangular 2-wire connector that the drum antennas use (on 84 - I believe it's a round 3-wire connector on newer years) and receive 100% of their power direct from the relay socket. There is then a weird relay/module thing attached to the body of the antenna which is probably responsible for polarity reversal to bring the antenna down as required (re: 84 does not have an antenna switch - the antenna goes up with radio on, and down with radio off).

Anyway, today I addressed two issues on this car:

#1: the antenna had stopped retracting all the way, staying up about 4-5 inches.
I had purchased a NOS antenna on eBay listed for a Mark VII without any sense of how different it might be.
In a nutshell, the answer is "different enough". Electrically compatible but won't mount in the Town Car without hacking some stuff up. The differences are at the top end, not just the bracket at the bottom which is easily swapped.
I then also discovered the body is cracked, so...best to part out the antenna and hope the ebay seller agrees retroactively.









I pulled apart the 'old' antenna (which is itself already a newer design replacement part) and found the mast was broken. The uh...tractor-feed plastic thing. So I took the mast out of the new antenna and tried to swap that over, but couldn't get it to feed in. I then realized there were a bunch of pieces of broken mast hiding elsewhere in the body of the antenna as well. Got all that out, fed the new mast in, and the antenna's good to go again.

#2: the exterior driver door handle has been broken for a while. It was functional but had to be tilted and lifted at a weird angle to force it to operate the rod inside the door properly.



The lock actuator in this same door is seized, but this likely resulted from water ingress due to the trashed dew wipes, so I'm holding off on replacing the actuator until I take care of that problem. Plus the disassembly to get back into the door is the same for both of those tasks, so it wouldn't have saved any effort doing only one of them today.

[gadget73]

yeah you have to swap the mast tube over to use a Mark VII piece. Did that on my car a long time ago, the HO donor car was also the antenna donor. Still in there some 18 years later.

The drum antenna is a weird thing. I need to pull the one in the Conti apart and figure out why it stopped pulling down all the way. No teeth on that cord, its just a round thing that sandwiches between two plates and uses friction. I had all of it apart for a clean and lube at some point but possibly I missed something. It was pretty crusty inside.

[kishy]

I brought this one inside today.









One of the perks of having recently put my hands on every item I own is that I have a much better sense at the moment of what I have and how many of each there are. Today's project involves replacing the shift lever spring because I recently found one, and the shift lever in this car has been kinda floppy for my whole time with it, suggesting a broken spring.







It was, in fact, rather broken. Feels much better now.