Dateline – 1/16/2016 – Finished up under the hood and
started work on the trunk this weekend.
I had a few odds and ends to do under the hood, like putting on some
hose clamps, finalizing some hose and wire routing and hooking up the water
control valve for the heater.
If you go
back to Jan 14, 2014 (Wow! Two years
ago!) http://leapingv8s.blogspot.com/2013/01/starting-work-1-item-at-time.html you will see that I created a system that
uses a Chevy Astro vent door actuator to activate the heater water control
valve mounted in the engine bay. That
actuator is not heat resistant so it needed to be mounted in the inside of the car,
so I mounted it on the brackets I build to hold up the right side dash board
and the new fuse blocks. The activation
cable runs a straight shot through the firewall right to the water heater
value.
Except for the exhaust manifolds, and a few things I need to
do once I have the hood installed, I’m think I’m done with the engine bay! Yes!!!
I also started working on the trunk. First, I had to paint the area around the back
on the trunk that was still in primer.
After getting that painted, I installed the fuel tank manifold
system. If we go back to October 28,
2013, http://leapingv8s.blogspot.com/2013/10/welcome-to-20132014-project-car-season.html you can see the tank delivery system I devised.
I took all of this out when I got the car painted, so I reinstalled it
this weekend.
I also needed to put in the interior air circulation box. Every car has places that allow the air
inside the car to exit out so that you do not build up pressure inside. On my car, the exit points are in the rear
trunk lid crease. The air travels
through a vent in the top of the rear deck (seen here http://leapingv8s.blogspot.com/2011/12/great-movement-forward.html),
into a box about 1 1/2 inches deep under the deck. This box was really rusty so I cleaned it up
and fiber glassed it (http://leapingv8s.blogspot.com/2013/03/odds-and-ends-and-odds.html). In October, I mounted the four, one-way doors
using Kevlar fabric (the original was rubber impregnated silk). Here are pictures of the finished item out of
the car:
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| Air circulation box outside of car, clean and painted. |
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| One way doors as seen from car side of box. |
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| One way doors as seen from trunk side of box. |
To mount it in the trunk, I needed to put a seal around the
mating surfaces and then carefully bolt it back in. I created the seal using Eastwood Flexible
Strip Caulk (http://www.eastwood.com/ew-flexible-strip-caulk-bk-2-lbs.html)
because I knew it would make a good seal and would conform to the surfaces. After getting the box installed, I ran tubing from the vents (the things that plugged up and caused the box to rust in the first place) through the trunk and out a hole to the rear wheel well.
Next I needed to put in the fuel vapor control system. This system is very interesting. There are two vents on each gas tank. One is at the top of the tank, the other runs
from the filler nozzle. The one on the
tank allows air to enter the tank and keep it from developing a suction. The one on the filler is used to catch any
gas vapor the exits the tank. These two
vents connect, via tubing to a manifold that sits against the back window base and
then runs up the left side C pillar, then back down to the trunk where it exits
into a tube that runs to the engine bay.
The manifold is designed so that if any liquid gas gets caught in the
lines, it will drain back into the tanks, ensuring that the line stays free for
vapor to flow through.
Over the summer, I had sandblasted and painted the
pipes. Now I had to reinstall then. It was a bit tricky because I had done a lot
of work on the back deck, so I needed to drill some holes to allow the pipe to
go through.
That was as far as I got on Saturday. I don’t have much left to do in the trunk at
this point:
- Wire up the fuel control solenoids
- Install the tail lights and wire them
- Plug in the fuel gauge senders
- Install the truck fuse block (I added this so that I can put in electronics in the back if I want)
- Install the tail lights
- Clean up the loose wiring.
- Install the trunk hinges
