Fixing up a '71 Grand Safari

Just caught up. Looking good! The reason I “liked” your previous post where you cross threaded the hole in the transmission was because it takes real character to get on here and admit the little stuff like that which means a lot to folks like me who are routinely screwing up. Nothing goes smooth like the tv shows does it?! Great work nice thread

 

I prefer watching the TV shows where things go wrong. When nerves go on edge and paricipants start arguing and fighting, that's when things get fun. That's why I keep nagging on you to get those Indians who think they're Chiefs back into your shop for assembling your new lift. This time, provide them plenty of alcoholic refreshments and get it all on film. I guess, you could call your new show "Firewater Garage" or related and upload it on Youtube. The more thumb up likes viewers click, the more royalties you get dumped into your wallet. There are plenty of people who're making decent money, through doing stuff like this. I recently posted a couple Angry Grandpa videos, here. They've done so well that either they bought that '55 Chevy with those like clicks or have had a sponsor fan buy it for them.
Here's an Indian you could borrow from jmt455. Working one-handed qualifies him for the audition. He doesen't look mean enough and works too meticulous, though. That might be due to what's in the can

 

Funny you should say that. When the shop was in it’s prime customers used to say that all the time. We had a lot of fun. What nobody really understood was a show wouldnt have worked. We couldn’t have edited enough of the profanity or incriminating evidence for a decent 30 minutes of airtime. But Alas, much like fate of the Native American all those Indians from the old shop have either moved on to the spirit world or been relocated by the government leaving me, a lowly brave Doomed to wander the flat earth half drunk and tribe less. Haha. Who’s thread have we jacked here?! Soooooorrrryyyyyy

 

The avatar made me do it

If I'm not mistaken, it doesen't matter, on Youtube. If it gets big, that could be a problem for Discovery Channel. You would then have to edit over choice vocabulary with car horns, whistles or whatever you have available. It would be easier for the author of this thread, to start his own channel. The problem he'd have, though, is that his show would lack the profanity necessary to get ratings. Sadly enough, that's how things are, these days. He'd have to substitute the abscense of expletives with quality performance of some kind. Sort of like how Jay Leno does his show. Since none of us are known to have Leno's big money, we'd have to somehow improvise

 

I have automotive acumen, check it out: Muffler Bearing! Please deposit large bag with dollar sign on my back doorstep.

If anyone hasn't seen it, check out Tom's Turbo Garage. Although I don't care for his project material as much the guys level of professionalism and quality make me want to watch what he works on. I did really like his Miata LS swap, however.

 

I drove The Caprice to my friend Matt's house so he could take it to his shop to do the final tuning. This was about 18 miles away and was the first time I'd driven the car on an interstate type road. It turned 1450 rpm at 70 miles per hour. I found it hard to keep at 65 mph. You're barely touching the gas even at those speeds and it kept wanting to creep up to 75 and 85 mph without me realizing it. I understand now why the transmission shop believed the torque converter was not locking up. The gearing is so high that it doesn't even lock up until you get closer to 60 or 65 miles per hour. I was releaved to find out it not only engages, but disengages when you apply the brake pedal. There's zero driveline vibration and the tires are balanced well, so though I'm not happy with the BRP kit I will say that they did seem to get the driveline angles correct as the kit advertises. Everything is very smooth. After the tuning the throttle response is much better and the electric fans are working correctly with both fans running on high and low speed with no clicking coming from the relays. Here's where the car spent the week.





Matt had to drive 35-40 miles each way to get to the shop. He got a pretty good picture of the new gauges. I still haven't had time to get into the fuel gauge issue yet.





He put the car on the dyno to tune it for wide open throttle.





It ended up making 269 horsepower and 304 foot pounds of torque at the wheel with 2:41 gears. That's plenty enough for what I am wanting to do. I will eventually swap out the 2:41 for something closer to a 3:42 with a limited slip.







Matt made a couple trips to the shop in The Caprice. Once, the throttle shut off and threw code P2125, but when the key was turned off it started back and ran fine. Really bad weather and storms all week prevented him from driving it into work a couple days. On the 2nd day home from the shop the throttle began turning off every few minutes, getting more and more frequent. I thought I was going to have to go haul the car home, but the problem ended up being the cruise control wires. I forgot to put black tape over the ends when I zip tied them out of the way and Matt had moved some wires under the dash causing the cruise control wires to short out against the steering column. Tidying up the cruise wires solved the issue. It also developed a small transmission leak at the line on the radiator. I tightened that up and it seemed to have stopped the leak. Also, the dead parking light bulb came back. After looking into that issue it seems I have a short in the parking light wiring just as it comes out of the bulb socket. I'll have to see where the break is and fix it. Matt took it through emissions and it passed with no problem.



Getting back to the gas tank filler neck problem from last weekend; After a lot of effort I realized that even if I could get the bolt out there would be no way to get a nut on the back of it to tighten so I would going to have to take the bumper apart. Even if I could have gotten a bolt and nut back in I was hesitant to grind the head off of that bolt with the gas tank so close. That meant I had to take the bumper off. It was easiest to take the bumper shocks out of the frame to remove the bumper. The bumper shocks mount to the back of the frame, but also have a 10mm bolt that goes into the bottom of the frame facing up. Both of these bolts twisted off on each side which left a stud sticking down, which made pulling the shocks out of the back of the frame very, very difficult. I eventually got them out with various sized prybars, pushbars, screwdrivers and anything I could find to leverage against. I was just about to tie the bumper to a come-along when it finally gave up and decided to let go of the frame.







Here is a better shot of the afflicted area. The bolt on the right came out fine. The hole under the bolt on the left is the access hole I drilled. It ended up being drilled for nothing. The reason it is offset is because there is bracing in the way and that was as close as I could get.





I knew if the clip on the back of that bolt broke then many of the clips for the other bolts would break. There are 19 bolts holding the bumper to the inner structure and 9 came out without breaking the clip. I had to drill the heads off of the rest. This job took all day long and I still didn't get completely finished.





Whoever designed this bumper certainly wasn't on the varsity team. I've taken apart bumpers from quite a few 50's, 60's and 70's cars and I have to say this is the worst design I have seen. The location and design of the braces and clips definitely make things much more difficult than they needed to be.



This particular bumper has the stock mud, mice nest and feces and rocks feature. This bumper came from a parts car I had stored in a barn. I installed it on The Caprice after April totaled it several years ago. The mice in the barn had made a terrible mess and I'm not entirely sure they didn't use this as their official burial grounds at some point.





After a good cleaning with a brush I literally hung the inner structure out to dry.





I got all new clips and bolts. $50 dollars worth. As if this entire process wasn't frustrating enough, I got hit with a big bill on top of it. I'm sure many would say this wasn't necessary, but this is how I wanted the project to be done. The filler neck mount I'm making is the cleanest design without cutting or welding onto the body and this is what was necessary to make that work the way I wanted it.

 

$50 for a handfull of hardware is quite steep, even if these are Made in U.S.A.s. Which is hard to prove, anyway. Was this through the internet or over the counter? In the long run, it might be feasable to just go to a junkyard and collect these yourself

 

That's great progress Brandon! Smooth on the hwy and passing emissions! Bet that 3.42 rear end will really wake up that car.

 

YES! You need an LS in a Miata to get it down the road properly!

 

I knew you had those highway gears, and that they were going to cause your converter trouble, but in the grand scheme of things, I admit, a gear change is likely #5, 6, or 7 on the big project list. The work you've done so far on the swap and dash itself is fantastic and, I'm sure, gonna be light-years ahead of my Ranchero EFI project I have down the road, which will include a 4R70W trans and Bronco 3.50 gears in the 9".

 

Looks like you're nearing the end of the road with this project. You sure have made some amazing progress, especially for a guy working in his driveway. Pretty neat.

 

I had to delay progress on the car for quite a while. I was about to lose accrued vacation time at work so I took a week vacation and built bunk beds for the girls. I had hoped to begin this project after The Caprice was finished, but several set backs has caused The Caprice project to take longer than I had planned. My father-in-low let me use his wood shop for the project. The problem was that he lives 3 1/2 hours away in Indiana. It was 10 and 12 hours days for over a week and just like all other projects, took longer than I had hoped and I wasn't able to get finished. After spending about 80 hours that week working on the project I then had to drive back up on the following three weekends to finish the project. The worst part was the final weekend when I drove back up after letting the paint cure for a week. It had been raining all week and the ground was so soft even the gravel was sinking in the mud. I ended up getting stuck in the mud at the shop while trying to load all the pieces in a huge storm. I had to borrow a chain from a neighbor to pull my Suburban out of the mud and by the end I had to go to a local store and buy all new clothes for the trip home. Here are some photos of that effort.














Because of my erratic schedule for the last month the following projects were not all worked in order. I just had to work on different parts when I was able, but in order to make them more coherent I'm going to group the photos of each step together.

When my tuner drove The Caprice to his shop for the dyno tune he started having issues with the pedal going dead. We finally decided that the cruise control wires, which I haven't yet hooked up, were shorting out and causing the problem because after moving them out of the way the problem went away. I picked the car up from his house and drove it home where it sat in the driveway for a few days. I finally got the back bumper reassembled and back on the car, which ended up taking several days because I had neglected to notice ahead of time that the bumper was held together with two different length bolts and I had trouble finding them. When I did finish the bumper I decided to drive the car into work for the first time. The weather was frigid cold, in the 'teens, but I decided to try it out anyway. When I pulled the car around to the front of the house the pedal went dead and blocked in April's car. After trying everything I could think of I unplugged the throttle body and plugged it back in and it began working so I thought I had a bad connection at the throttle body. The next day I warmed the car up, moved all the car seats for the girls over and when we started to take off the pedal was dead again. As frustrating as it was I was thankful it died in the driveway. For the next couple of days I used what little time I had to read as much as I could about the problem and having already tested my pedal and tac module decided to remove the harness between them and do a continuity test. Luckily, I found one connection with no continuity. I say luckily because had there been no problem with the harness it would have been a lot of work to continue to diagnose the issue. It turned out there was a cut wire in the harness.


The ironic thing about this harness having a wire cut is this; The tac module was under the hood on the original '04 Avalanche but I mounted the tach module under the dash, much closer to the pedal. Because of this the harness was much longer than I needed. I had considered shortening it, but I thought that since it was original I should leave it alone to lessen the chances of me messing it up and causing a problem. After all of the cutting and soldering and splicing on the entire original harness, the one piece of harness that I didn't end up modifying is the part that caused me trouble. If I had shortened it to begin with I would have cut out the problem area and probably never have noticed the damaged wire. I bought all of these pieces from a salvage yard that had separated and cataloged all them, so even though they were all from the same vehicle they had been stored separate. I suspect that it was during this time that the harness had been damaged. The below picture is after I removed the factory wire loom and black tape and shows that the one wire was completely cut in half, though no other wires had any signs of damage at all.


Even though I thought I was done with splicing wires I once again had to reconstruct the solder station, though this time a smaller version.


Since I already had to splice one wire I decided to go ahead and shorten the entire harness.


After getting everything back together, the picture below shows how much of the harness I cut out.


As I began to drive the car to work I noticed that the high speed fans were coming on even though the highest outside temperatures that week were in the 20s. I was at first concerned that the car was overheating. After looking into the issue I finally determined that the system was not setup correctly. First, the parts house didn't have the correct thermostat back when I had bought a new one for the engine so I ended up with a 205 degree instead of the correct 187 degree thermostat. Second, LS style engines run hotter than older GM small block engines that I am used to, so I had the tuner set the low speed fan to come on at 197 degrees and the high speed fan to come on at 207 degrees. This meant that the thermostat was keeping the engine from cooling below 205 degrees and the fans were trying to keep it below 207 degrees, so they were fighting each other. Once the high speed fans came on, they never shut off until you cut the car off. It is normal operating temperatures for these engines to run between 200 and 220 degrees. I purchased the correct 187 degree thermostat and plan to meet the tuner to have him reset the cooling fan settings to a more appropriate setting. Hopefully this is all that will be needed to resolve this issue.


I found out that my setup had an extra gasket. The thermostat had the gasket around it and the housing also had a gasket on it. I think what happened is when I ordered the thermostat the first time they gave me the wrong year. Earlier models used a thermostat housing gasket and later models used a thermostat gasket. I ended up installing both because of the mismatched pairing. To replace the thermostat I bought a new catch can and reused all of the lost coolant because anti-freeze is very expensive these days.


My wrench finally decided to quit working. Fortunately a video on the internet showed me how to repair it.




Another problem that arose was the brake warning light began to come on. The proportioning valve and parking brake wires are spliced together and go into the warning light on the dash, so I had to check both systems. While I had it apart, I found out how the parking light system works on older GM cars, which is backwards to what I had presumed. When the light is grounded it comes on. When the ground is broken, it goes off. The tang near the top is where the wire from the dash light connects. It is insulated and held in place with plastic. Notice this piece comes straight down and turns right in an L shape, where it makes contact against the bottom piece of copper, which is in a backwards-L shape. When the parking brake is released the arm comes up and pushes on the bottom, turned-down piece, which pushes it back and breaks contact between the two pieces of copper, causing the light to go out. When you push the parking break down the arm is pulled away from the bottom, turned-down piece and contact is made between the two pieces of copper, causing a connected circuit to the dash light, which of course causes it to glow. After spending way too much time laying in the floorboard and under the car, I finally got the issue resolved.


The following project, which shouldn't have been hard at all, turned into a huge problem. What should have been the simple removal of two bolts turned into completely removing the bumper, drilling out all the bolts, going to every parts house in town and some outside of town and finally having to order hardware from an online company because no one in town seems to know what a "body bolt" is. The local hardware store didn't have the sizes I needed. At long last, I had all the hardware I needed, the bumper but back together with all new, non-broken clips and time to get back to work on it. The filler neck was sitting loose behind the license plate.


I bolted the first piece in place and thankfully the new bolts were long enough to accommodate the extra thickness of the new mount.


After a lot of on again, off again, measuring and drilling and welding I had both arms mounted.


At first I had planned to make extra supports for the brace but I found it was plenty sturdy to hold everything in place securely.


In the end my goal of using existing bolt holes worked out. If I ever change the bumper all I'll have to do is unbolt this mount and attach it to the new bumper (unless the clips are all broken on the new bumper, too, which is likely).


Here's what it ended up looking like from the outside. Next on the list is diagnosing why the fuel gauge doesn't work.

 

Did they argue over which one gets the upper bunk?

 

Hahaha, no, the youngest is too small for the upper bunk and she was just glad to not be trapped in a crib anymore.

 

The bunk beds look like they turned out nice. Good work.