daeron

GD: have you ever considered sourcing those cars out??? I mean, start up a service whereby you locate good chassis, get the underbody coated, and resell them to people wherever they live?? I mean, you could get it to a point where you simply revive the vehicle or not, depending on what people would want.. half what you buy, people will be towing home to a donor car for engine/drivetrain/whatever.. and the other half need to at least make the drive cross country with SOME degree of reliability.. (recommend brniging a toolkit, spare parts, etc..) It just seems that you could probably find a couple hundred bucks in there for yourself on each car, and basically turn your tinkering and such into an income-generator.. even if not THAT profitable, it is a hobby thats making a dime rather than costing it.. A bare minimum investment involving cross linking your area craigslist ads to classifieds here on the USMB could land you a few hits that would be relatively easy to "broker," and I think you would be a good one to be giving "expert" advice on the condition of one of these cars. Who knows where it could go from there?

'87 pseudo GL-10.. (sunroof, cruise, computer, digidash.. but FWD, 3AT, NA:banghead:) 143,000. I got her in aught-four with 106K on it, and have put almost 40 in the last 2 years.. despite being parked without license or insurance for about ten months. Non-roo, the only cars Ive owned were my 75 datsun 280Z, broken speedo cable and an odo that goes up to 99,999.9, the odo reads 15,000 rebuild her, then about 15K later, get a speedo cable, and its accurate! my geo had like 140K on it, and that was enough to kill the engine in a way that made it constantly destroy timing sprockets and woodruff keys.. Geo Storm, so it was an Isuzu.

You summed my thoughts up exactly, but I am still too much of a novice to take MY opinion all that seriously Thanks for the quick response... People have asked me how the gas cap was causing my problem, and I havent had a good answer, either. I am at a point where I know enough to figure out just about anything.. but where alot of people (read: men) would let their ego take control and blunder into things at my stage, Tim Allen-style, I choose to get hung up on doubts, as to whether or not I really DO know what I am talking about. In other words, thanks for reading between the lines and recognizing that I was fishing for you to confirm my suspicions. O2 sensor has already been hit with Deep Creep, hopefully it shan't be too difficult to remove tomorrow. I really oughta just pick up a y-pipe assembly from the boneyard, as mine is riddled with leaks.. last time I ran a sea foam treatment, about 25% of the smoke was coming out from under the car, the rest out the tailpipe. They could market that stuff as an exhaust leak detector there are two or three issues in the pipes themselves, and a gutted cat that has rust-holes on the weld lines... I know this is going to effect the scavenging, and also the o2 sensor reading.. BUT while i know it could be enough to alter the way the car runs, could this be an issue that would either cause problems with my o2 sensor or (less likely) cause my ECU to READ problems into the o2 sensor? the ecu does a relatively "dumb" check of the o2 sensor that wouldnt find something like an exhaust leak in a million years, right? as for the other three sensors.. I am definitely going to just go ahead and get the stuff outta de boneyard. its been a back-burner issue for long enough that I am fed up with it, and at this point, i want the ECU to give me the all-clear. Providing that the o2 sensor swap makes that go away, it looks like my greatest hurdle between me and that all clear will be removing the IAC valve.. that doesnt look like fun, without removing the PS pump or some other components. Might it be easiest to just remove the TB first, or would that give rise to possible gasket issues? I have no disposable income right now (the ten bucks that I might have to spend on something before my next check is going to a badly needed oil change.. its just now 3K since I changed it, but I added seafoam last time I changed it and had no intention of going even 1000 miles before changing again... ) soi buying a new gasket is out of the question. I spend a LOT of time on this forum.. but i have ahrdly done any actual work to this car. You folks have heard about it every time I have.. so draw your own conclusions. If I had a wrnech in my hand as often as I have a keyboard in my lap, I could probably have 8 cars by now. If only I could find a way to make this whole forum thing make me money.... Anyhow, Im going to the shop tomorrow and will bring along my camera. hopefully I can get some pics of the NOS soob stuff thats up there. I think its mostly OHV stuff, but i've no idea of what era. (speaking of making me money.. ) now I am off to print a hard copy of my FSM section... no PC at the shop.

I figured I would start a new thread, since my problem has changed its nature a bit. old thread I found a gas cap and put it on, the sputtering issue has decreased its severity, and its frequency of occurence DRASTICALLY.. but it isn't gone. I have elected to do what I can to eliminate all SPFI issues.. So I run the gamut of computer checks. I am going through this independently of the thread, but i thought I would start it to get comments while I worked. First, read memory mode. In my memory, i have only ever seen the CEL when I had triggered it through some odd change, or while I was replacing and calibrating the TPS. I am relatively certain the battery has been disconnected since then. Read memory mode indicates a code 24, Idle Air control valve. This is one of the ones that is as likely to be a wiring issue as it is an actual valve issue, but if I am not mistaken all I need to do to rectify valve issues is remove, soak overnight, clean and replace, right? the IAC is the longish cylinder-shaped bit on the front of my TB, correct? It looks like the wire runs straight up into it, and I am running out of daylight to find the connector back from it. It also looks less than easy to remove, that bottom screw might pose a challenge to my limited supply of philips head screwdrivers here at my house. I tried to clear the memory (both plugs connected, engine ran until the CEL came on... ) and it didnt clear squat.. so I have to deal with that. thats the only code in read memory mode. Okay, D-check puts out a 32, a 33, a 51, and a 61. All code readouts are taken directly from the '89 FSM "chunk" 32-O2 sensor (abnormal sensor signal)-my dad has a couple O2 sensors I think will fit the bung.. they are old narrow bands from his RX-7, but if the shoe fits, wear it right? I am going to try swapping one of those in tomorrow, hopefully. 33-car speed sensor (no signal is present during operation) Clueless how to proceed, will read the FSM on this. 51-neutral switch (continuously in on position) 61- parking switch (continuously in on position) these last two are simple switches in the shifter mechanism are they not?? I may hit the JY and nab them outta the 89 DL that was there, it had a 3AT too. Daylight fading, I intend on reading the FSM procedures on all codes.. but haven't as of this typing. Thoughts and comments are appreciated, I got stumped and distracted before I fixed these D-check issues about eight months ago.. and this is the first time I have come back to it. Also, no MAF codes whatsoever. I have a spare MAF now, should I just grab the IAC off the car in the boneyard tomorrow while I am there, just in case? allright, daylight fading, time to read. post your knowledge, USMB! thanks in advance (no pun intended)

I infinitely prefer to use the rope trick, and some heavy pipe. rope trick: take a sprak plug out, slowly push a bit of rope into the cylinder, and then just turn it counter clockwise. You really have no idea how much force you can exert when youre laying on your back.. multiply that times a four foot bar and you are in business. If I'm using a piece of skinny or weak pipe as a cheater bar, I often get a piece of concrete rebar and put it in the other end of the pipe, making sure to overlap the rather/breaker bar handle and the rebar if possible. This stiffens the cheap pipe and helps keep it from bending. I dont think I have EVER had to resort to the starter bump to remove a crankshaft bolt, and not failed at that as well. The only time I can remember trying it, the crankshaft/timing sprocket/woodruff key on the engine in question had all been loctited together as a fix for a terminal engine problem... and it took a 3/4" impact gun being supplied by 5/8" air line to get that bugger loose. i am imagining somewhere on the order of 800+ pounds of force (not torque, not ft-lbs, pounds) to break that sucker loose.

in case you werent aware, tirerack.com has a spec chart that you can find that lists the outside diameter of every tire they sell.. you can see that spec sheet for all the tires in your size range at once, or all the tire sizes of a given tire at once. It shouldnt be too hard to find it, just start out by "shopping by size" and specify your 185/80.. then go from there. And from what I was aware, there were two different stock sizes, depending on trim/model, or something.. but they were 185 and 175, 70-series. thats why the label under the hood says stowage of punctured tire (except 185 series) or something like that.. the 175 fits, the 185 just barely squeaks in, and youre liable to break a retainer clip for the washer hose..

I failed to spell it out in my first post, because i got distracted looking for a pic tp link to....But my point was, I bet they are mikuni downdrafts. they certainly look like no downdraft weber I have ever seen. The primary reason I make the guess is, that was a common "weber-like" carb for japcar maunfacturers to use in the 60s and 70s.. triple solex/mikuni 44's are viewed in a higher light than the same sized webers.. I cant remember who, but one of them had jets available only in increments of 5.. i am guessing that likely to be solex.mikuni, but my carb knowledge is all a little more abstract than it could be.. I have never owned a car with a carburetor.

Re reading all that, I kinda sounded a little condescending. It was unintentional, I was trying to illustrate with words. Thanks for the photo, mike.

This is a screw that impedes the motion of the throttle.. in other words, its the little screw at the end of the bit on your TB that the cable attaches to.. you know, the part you grab and rotate to rev the engine when youre under the hood? there is a screw that limits how far you can push that thing open. this is not any sort of idle adjustment. I went ahead and quoted GD's entire statement on the matter, just to be perfectly clear. re read what he said, and then think about what you are trying to adjust.. you probably are not thinking about the right screw.

do what I said. relays are just little switches. The switch is controlled electronically, instead of by your finger. The "BMW" relays are ABSURDLY common, (its a bosch relay.. they get branded all sorts of ways, audi, hella, bosch, unbranded, VW.. ) and available new at a store simply by bosch part #, kind of like a light bulb. Most of the relays I found in the junkyard even had handy pinout diagrams on the side of the relay itself. sometimes those germans have good ideas.. They also come with an amperage rating printed on them. No guesswork involved, just cheap junkyard parts source... I have three or four spare relays in my glovebox, and in my toolbox.. and if i ever want the "peace of mind" of having a "one-owner" relay, i can do so easily..

from what I have heard, the hill holder (unless you cant drive a stick, and actually NEED it) is rather superfluous. I have read about many people with bizarre problems, which were remedied by dismantling a non-functioning hill holder. Not that those problems had anything in common with what you are experiencing.. but i figured I would throw that out there.

:confused: I have supported you and backed you up when you were getting mindlessly flamed, so I certainly hope you wont take it the wrong way when i say... What are you, on DOPE?! The rad needs air flowing over it. It doesnt matter if that air is being supplied by the motion of the car, a clutch fan, an electric fan, or a million mice all simultaneously farting on it. a small electrical motor might make some radio "noise" but thats about it, it can in NO way change the flow of ions on their way to a chassis ground. The entire fan is plastic half the time, outside of the motor!! Clutch fans make noise, (which is frequently undesirable) directly rob the engine of kinetic energy, and unfortunately fail at the least convenient time. Are Subaru fan clutches particularly bad? no, not that I have heard.. but fan clutches are mechanical, moving devices. By nature, they break. Yah, so does an electric fan. I have never in my life had an electric fan go bad on a car.. sure, im only 26 but I have certainly seen at least four or five fan clutches go out on various vehicles. Your likening of an electric fan to an electric supercharger makes me think of something.. ALOT of electric fans are one-directional... Meaning that, the design of the blade is such that it wants to spin a certain way. Since it is a DC motor, you can reverse the spin of the motor by reversing the polarity.. and my car had an aftermarket electrical fan put on it. My brother mounted it where the stock electric was, in front of the PS pump/thermostat housing. However, the fan blade was oriented to be mounted in the front. When the fan was wired in the CORRECT polarization, it moved ALOT more air than it did when it was reversed... unfortunately, it was moving that air forwards in relation to the car.. in other words, the wrong way. It was trying to push air out of the engine bay rather than suck it in. I am trying to find a way to describe this in words, and its difficult.. To re-phrase, If i want to mount THAT same fan back on my car, I would need to either A) Leave it alone, polarize it the right way (swamp the + and 0- that my brother used) and put it in front of the radiator... or take the blade off, flip it over, leave it polarized the same way it was, and mount it on the INside of the radiator. When I had the fan in my hand, and I was hooking it up to the battery charger for power.. reversing the polarity didnt just change the direction of flow... it ALSO changed the volume, because the blade was intended to rotate one way only. That being the case, i couldnt just swap the + and - to make it spin the other way.. (like my brother tried to do) I have to also remove the blade and flip IT, too.. Please, someone tell me if that made sense or not. If it didn't, I will go through it and re write this post. Okay, and back on topic.. Just for posterity's sake I will mention that I always loosen my pulley bolts BEFORE loosening the belt... and always do a final torque AFTER tightening the belt. This eliminates the need for that flat spot on the shaft, since the belt will hold your pulley immobile for you.

Okay.. not TOTALLY gone, but a VAST improvement, again JUST from replacing the gas cap. I only make the update because I was told it shouldn't make much of a difference.. The issue was intermittent, and it has only recurred once since I put the cap on. Not only has it become less frequent (it was at LEAST 50% of the time before) but it is also much less severe. Thats all for now, I just want this info out there so that people hear that yes, their soob DOES need to have a gas cap on to run perfect. Well, mine does.

If you originally had the tall one, I suppose you could spacer the pulley out on the short one. But think about it.. we are talking about the alignment of the belt pulleys. If it isn't right, you will eat your alternator and water pump belts like they were beef brisket... Also, note that the short water pump has holes in the nose, for bolts and nuts.. and the tall water pump has studs. Integral difference between the two, easy way to tell by eyeball. In fact, i am bookmarking this thread for future reference. Grossgary, thanks for the pic.

You need to delete some of the private messages.. it stores both the messages you send, and the ones you receive.. and you can only have up to a grand total of 50. I tried to send you a messaage but your mail folder is full. Check my last post in this thread, it has a link to a place where you can download the HTKYSA directly.. I think 24 megabytes is too large for me to send as an email attachment. That sounds like most of us, back when we were little wrench-monkeys. I know I learned about cars by doing the exact same thing while my dad was busy cursing at our Ford van, or one of his Datsuns, or his XT-6 (not so often there, it was brand new.. BUT it did blow an engine after about two years... we suspect a case of bad motor oil, because an oil change coincided with a ford V8, a soob flat 6, and a craftsman riding mower engine all blowing within three or four weeks of each other.) The journey of a thousand miles begins with a small step, right?

I love it Those carbs in the pic that GD posted, of the dual port head (not the standard dual carb setup) REALLY REALLY LOOK ALOT like sidedraft Solex/Mikuni carbs that came on datsun roadsters as a performance option.. very similar to the weber DCOEs that are another popular datsun performance carb. Mikuni is a japanese firm that made knockoff Solexes.. Solex being a British carb (I think?) There is a pic of the underside to give you an idea.. google image search mikuni +datsun and you should have plenty to look at. A guess, but probably a good one. The sort of thing my dad calls a swag.. Sophisticated, wild-a$$ guess.

FREAKY!!! this entire post was played out in my head, as a train of thought, at about four o clock tuesday afternoon.. 12 hours before i read this post... for the record, I will reiterate that the occasional pop into neutral at a red light (so i can take my foot off the brake) is the ONLY "shifting" I do with my auto.. I just find it pretentious for people to flick the things around, and i dont want anyone who would agree with me, getting the wrong impression of me. If I had any choice in the matter this thing would have been a fivespeed last july. unfortunately, life doesn't let me make plans like that. No, something always comes out of left field and screws up MY plans.. allright, plaintive whining mode, off.

Hear, hear!!! EXCELLENT stuff, my uncle has three antique boat trailers (yes, when you have a sixty year old motor on a sixty year old boat, the package IS worth much more if its all on a sixty year old trailer, too) We live in south florida.. boat trailer? salt water. RUST! Whenever my uncle has had to repair his antique trailers, they get a coat or two of wurth underneath the blue paint that the treailer is supposed to be colored with. no more rust! not even after repeated dunkings in salt water! and these trailers have been sitting now for about eight years since their last dip, about ten since the paint job. the datsuns parked all around them are literally rotting by the pound, but the trailers have less oxidation than the aluminum boats that sit on them.

hmm.. my clutch fan is held on with bolts and nuts, so I need to use two wrenches.. and I have never had an issue with it at all. Had the thing off half a dozen times. My brother (PO) replaced the stock electrical fan with an aftermarket one, and at one point I replaced that with a JY stock one.. so I have an electric fan I could easily put on there.. but I have never felt it worth investing my time in. Maybe my hands are just *that* small... Thats one of the reasons I love japanese cars. I don't NEED all that space.. and these cars fit me. I am 5'8" and weigh 140 pounds. I am sized like a japanese person

The most shameful defeat I ever suffered in my Zcar (im no street racer but off a line, empty 2-lane highway, 1AM, everyone does it SOMEtimes.. right?? ) was to a fivespeed taurus SHO about that vintage. THAT being said, the older taurus auto trannies went out like light bulbs. I have a friend who got her grandma's for a graduation present, and she and her family drove it up to NC for summer vacation.. My mom owned one at the time, and we had already put the new trans out of our neighbor's old one into hers. (They blew one, too) SO, I warn her dad (big ford guy, but otherwise cool as a cucumber) that the trannies aren't the greatest.. somewhere north of brunswick on I-95, their trans took a dump. Ever since then, Gary has believed anything I say about cars, period. Using taller tires is an EXCELLENT idea....... a set of used tires (or cheap new ones) may well be worth the investment.. any chances you have a spare set of wheels laying about to mount them on??? because you could probably depart pretty radically from the size you would want to use ordinarily and not have too much issue... Speed, not acceleration, is your friend on a trip like that...

so the moral of the story is, find someone with an '04-'05 STi to take the photo next to, and eff the dealers and what they think

Well, i haven't logged enough miles since I put a gas cap on it to say for SURE, but that would appear to be my answer.. It will take a day or two to rule out the possiblity of a relapse, but it seems to have fixed my sputter!!! I still desparately need to run a D-check and determine/eliminate my O2 sensor issue.. While I was in the boneyard, I snagged a MAF, as well. That was actually easier than the cap.. the cap wasnt on the tank! my local junkyards have become real nice about things like that, removing dipsticks, oil caps, radiator caps, brake fluid reservior caps, etc etc... as a RULE!!! so I grabbed the MAF off the '88 DL that I found (quad headlight setup??? was that stock for a DL still in '88?? the VIN said 88 and there were four headlights..) I walked the WHOLE rest of the yard, then started checking other cars near the DL to see if maybe a nissan cap or something would fit... then on a hunch I checked the backseat.. yoo-reeka! I can't believe they do that. Anyhow, will update tomorrow and let y'all know what happens. My butt-dynamometer tells me I am back to "normal," though.. and the butt-dyno has felt this issue from its inception, before it got severe at all. I had to tell the butt-dyno it was imagining things, until the first time I got bucked...

I am really not dissatisified with my stock headlights.. once you get them well adjusted, they light up pretty good.. I wish I could rig it to run both hi and low beams when I turn the hi beams on, though. If I could do that, I really wouldn't bother upgrading anything... ..but THAT may just be, because I drove my Zcar around for five years before the soob, and the headlights in THAT are quite frankly, dim. They are so dim they're almost musty... I would turn them on and it almost felt like it got darker... so who knows.

I tried to email you the file, but it may be too large for gmail to attach it.... My email was being funked up when I tried sending it, so I dunno what the deal is. Did you get any emails from shawnmcarey@gmail.com? if so, did any of them have the .pdf attached to it? Does someone here have a website that has the HTKYSA bookmarked?? I know I downloaded it from a members website, but I cannot recall who. Edit: Oh yeah, i found a link on a search earlier, before I was dragged away from my computer.. Thanks goes out to Baccaruda for this one, posted in this thread... right click here and choose "save file as" or whatever your broswer's option is.. end edit. any volunteers?? It appears that I cannot select a page range and save only the suspension chapters, so my only other option would be to span it over multiple zip files to email it... I never did get around to setting up any sort of webhosting.. :\

Second that motion. Do we have a third?