Rear Wheel Arch Repair 1

While I was rebuilding the brake caliper, my friend started working with the passenger side rear wheel arch. The lip was pretty badly corroded so it had to be replaced.

There was a lot of body filler spread all over the quarter panel. Some smaller patch panel had been welded at the rear corner of the arch and the repair had been hidden with the filler. It'll be interesting to see how much of the stuff is on the car when the time comes to paint it.

After getting all the body filler off from the area of the repair, my friend cut the patch panel and marked its size to the car.

The quarter panel hole was cut a bit smaller than the patch panel. My friend stamped the flange of the patch so it would slide under the original steel. The inner wheel arch also needed a small patch to its lip. Luckily nothing more major problems were found. Annoyingly my patch panel did not reach all the way down at the rear of the arch. There was a little corrosion there too so it might need another patch.

The new panel was quite close to the original and didn't seem to need a lot of tweaking to make if fit with the inner arch and the shape of the car. Hopefully the quarter panel would not warp when welding the patch.

Head Aches

After lapping the valves I was ready to assemble the heads. Unfortunately I realised that the intake valves would need 0.1 inches of shims. That's a lot and I wasn't sure if they would stay put. I took the heads and their parts to TuumaCID and found a solution. We measured a bunch of other valve springs and found a set that had the same pressures as my original Comp 942-16 but with 1.800 inch install height. With them I would not need to add any shims.

While we were checking the springs, I also decided to get new rocker arm studs. One was missing and the rest were quite worn anyway so I got a full set. Problems started when I installed them. I removed the old and screwed in the new. At that point I noticed that at least two flanges in the head had cracks in them. The new studs were wider at the top of the threads and opened them up. Great...

Luckily I found help from the same place where the valves and seats had been machined. I removed everything from the heads and drove over to see if they could be fixed. After waiting some hours one of them had been welded. Next we tested the studs again and realized, that the new ones were a lot longer that the old. This actually proved to be a good thing because we could machine the flanges 8 mm lower. By doing that, their walls at least doubled in thickness.

I left the heads to be finalized and after a couple of days they were done. There had been three cracks in both heads and all were welded. Luckily the cracks were in the flanges and not in the combustion chamber. The threads had also been pretty bad and heli-coils had been installed in two holes. The rest had just needed some re-threading. Finally all flanges had been lowered. The results looked really good.

Welded and machined head

Repaired threads

After investigating the new studs, we realized that they were meant to be used with guide plates. The flare in the threads situated the plate correctly. As I did not use them, I needed to place a thick washers on the heads. To make sure no water would leak from the studs, I added some thread sealer and thread locker on them. Hopefully they were finally ready to be used.

Wiring Harness Connector Pin Repair

Now that my engine bottom end was about done I turned my gaze to the heads. They needed some work that I could not do myself so I dropped them to a machinist that would inspect them. This would take a week or two so I had some time to do other stuff with the car.

When I was preparing the engine bay for painting, I removed the wiring harnesses. Unfortunately one pin in the main connector broke when taking it out. I checked a wiring diagram and it was the main power wire from the engine bay to the cabin. This is quite logical as it carried the most current so it would also corrode fast.

I did some Googling and found others that had the same problem. The discussion had some good instructions on how to fix the broken pin so decided to try it. I began be drilling a hole to the connector so I could screw in a new pin.

I had a small hook that had threads in it. I screwed it in the hole.

To make sure the pin had good contact with the wire in the connector, I melted some solder on it. I was not worried about the neatness at this point as I would have to add some more to solder the stud on the pin.

I used a small Dremel like rotary tool to cut the hook.

For the stud I cut the head from a bullet type connector.

The stud slid nicely over the pin and I added some more solder to keep it in and to ensure a good connection.

The repair felt pretty solid and should suffice for now. I might have to do more electrical work later but at least I should have electricity in the cabin again.