Finally got around to taking some pics of the new Power Steering install, as well as some of the wiring cleanup I’ve done.
Archive for the 'Cars' Category
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Over the last few weeks I’ve been spending time here and there just tying up lose ends on the S14… basically just going over every litt inch of the engine bay with a fine tooth comb making sure everything is put together correctly and tucked out of the way.
I started on the drivers side and I’m working my way across the engine bay. the passer’s side still has a few days worth of work left in it before I’ll be happy with it.
Last weekend I finally got around to fixing the convertible. I got a spare fuel rail from the Fujii boys and replaced the #1 injector.
That’s what I found when I pulled the cap off. The little metal washer had rusted right to the pin on top of the injector. While I was in there I changed the fuel filter and the spark plugs too. The car is now running better than it has since I bought the thing.
The battery kept dying in the pickup, I determined it was from the aftermarket tach installed by the previous owner so I decided to install the SR5 cluster I purchased.
Installation was tricky because I had to swap odometers with my old cluster so that the mileage remained correct, Also this new cluster was out of a vehicle originally equipped with a V6 and my truck has an I4. This mean that the tachometer needed to be re-calibrated, thankfully I could use the aftermarket tach to “tune” the new one.
Above, you can see the adjustment potentiometer. No one else (to my knowlege) has ever published the adjustment value for the I4 engine, I found lots of people asking online but no answers. So after I adjusted mine I was kind enough to pull out the gauge and measure the appropriate calibration value.
The 3 circled screws on the left image need to be removed, once that’s done the the two locations on the right can be measured for resistance. The original V6 was tuned to 44.9K ohm, and I tuned the I4 to 63.8K ohm. It will likely vary from vehicle to vehicle but the most important take away is that it’s a difference of ~19K ohm.
crappy pics I know but I think it’s a big improvement.
Only thing left to do is swap over the oil pressure circuit I got a new sensor since the old one was just an on/off switch for the idiot light. the new cluster has a pressure gauge. I bought a new sensor too but the electrical connector is different so I’ll need to swap that too before the gauge will work.
Tore out all the “poorly implemented” wiring in the pickup but I found myself with a number of electrical connectors that weren’t hooked up to anything. The Factory Service manual doesn’t show these… anyone have any guesses? I’ve figured out all the blue connectors, it’s the white ones I don’t know about.
Since I’ve been driving the 240 convertible every day I decided to order some speakers to replace the stock ones. I ordered some 4×6 Alpines for the front and some6.5″ Kenwoods for the rear.
Today I decided to tackle the front speakers, it was way more work taking off the door panels than I had anticipated (mostly due to the convertible seatbelt assembly)
While I had the door panels off I decided to fix the door inserts. a common problem on the convertibles is that this fall off, they’re stapled from the factory, and since you basically pull on these whenever you close the door they don’t hold up. I pulled all the staples and used some really short screws, it held on nice and snug now and I’d suspect it will last quite a bit longer than the staples did.
Here are a bunch of photos for the wiring harness conversion, it’s a lot more simple than it looks, if you can wire a car-stereo than you can do an engine harness, there are just a lot more wires and you need to do a bit more digging to determine what goes where.