We interrupt this program for an e46 repair

I expected more from you, Klaus.

This is supposed to be one piece

All these Mustang parts are rolling in, but I've been chasing down a small vacuum leak in the BMW - it's small but it bugs me. So anyway I was replacing the MAF sensor when I realized that the steering is freaking stiff, stiff like the pump is- done (sonofa...)!  Wife confirmed that it may have occurred as she pulled a fun higher-G turn (no foul, no foul! The car should do it!)

After removing the fan, shroud, and belts, I pulled the power steering pump pulley and shaft right out the front of the housing, spilling ATF all over the driveway. For those of you who aren't intimate with the norms or mechanics here, when the pump comes apart in your hand, that's bad. So up on blocks the e46 went. I removed the bad pump and ordered a new one.

Postmortem

The shaft end was stuck in the pump housing (upper left)

Since I did have the power steering pump out of the car in July when I went through the motor, I just had to know what the hell happened to it. I mean, it was fine. I started the autopsy by removing the pulley and shaft that the pump already fractured and spit out. I disassembled the pump to see what transpired such that the splined end of the shaft broke off.

When I removed the pump cover, milky fluid escaped with a bubbling sigh and let slip the unmistakable burnt metallic scent of catastrophic mechanical failure. The valve body looked surprisingly good, the valves and springs were all lovely, so what gives?

When it comes to making a $200 part into junk, it's usually a 2-cent part that fails.

Pauvre, pauvre, borken pompe.

 Hope the picture to the right is clear enough - here's how it works: the vanes in the pump slide in and out of the hub (in which sat the splined pulley shaft end) when spun outward by centripetal (rotational) force. This drives ATF fluid pressure to the power assist in the steering rack. The vanes themselves are just little square machined bits of aluminum.

Prognosis: And one of those little bastards broke in half, wedged itself between the hub and the housing, and seized the whole damn deal up solid. The engine was still driving the shaft at a zillion RPM via the engine belt and pulley, and the shaft subsequently broke right the hell in half. So now at least I know.

If I had a half decent machine shop and lathe, I think I could rebuild this thing. But I don't, so it's going to become decorative bits on my shop wall.

Hey! Look, the box from OEMBimmerParts just arrived. Time to get this car back out on the road.

Parts!

So this happened today...

Ho ho ho, says the UPS freight guy

Looks like fuel system, gas tank, and front disk brake kit are here! Makes for a festive front stoop. That is all, just wanted to share the xmas-like feeling. This weekend will be fun, because bye-bye manual drum brakes and rusty gas tank.

Project '65 investigation: What's going on with the floors?

Every car has a story, sometimes it's buried under old repairs

Drilling out pop rivets from an old patch done to the floor

Remember when we peeled up the carpet and saw some rust patching? 

Well last week a closer examination revealed what it was: riveted tin-bodyfiller-tin goop-sandwich floor patch behind the passenger set pedestal (not great, since that's more of a cover-up than a proper repair. And it unfortunately leaves existing rust to continue rusting, as well as trapping moisture in between the layers of existing and added material. No bueno.

Today, I got in there, removed all the rest of the interior in the back, and got to finding all the old rust repairs, drilling out rivets, removing all the material, and taking a look at what we're really dealing with here.

Driver side front patch, removed

After all, we don't want the floors to leak or rot out the car after we put all this time and green into it. We want it to last for at least another 50 years, yeah?

What I found: 10 patches done via the aforementioned sandwich method, and a whole quarter floor patch done to the driver side front floor. Unfortunately even though the patch panel was correct (as in, was a real '65 Mustang replacement panel, not tin like the others), it too was riveted in with body filler filling the gaps. I removed it.

Prognosis: the metal is unfortunately rusted past the floor proper on where the floor meets the firewall in the front and slightly where the floor meets the wheel tubs in the rear. 

Where did the driver's floor go? To Illinois, that's where!

It makes the decision to order the one-piece floor replacement easy, but I think I may need to do additional repairs to at least the firewall and maybe the metal around the wheel tubs as well so that the floor pan has metal to weld to in those places.

Did I say this was going to be interesting? We're officially there :)

Driver side rear floor

Passenger side front floor

Passenger side rear floor

Time to start ordering crap

The one great thing that makes the project really nice for us is this Mustang (or hell, any Mustang) has parts readily available. I am so used to single (or zero) source parts on my other, less-mainstream cars that this is freakin awesome to me.

Booyah and salutations to CJ Pony Parts!

So I took my planning spreadsheet tonight and started ordering some things. I stuck to mechanical first, since we're still doing bodywork. Pretty badges, trim, wheels, exhaust, and interior come last.

I scrapped my plans to send out the 289 heads to get hardened valve seats. Even though that seems sensible enough, I don't know if the last engine setup was really ok. From what I remember from riding around in this car in college, it was running a lopey cam with perhaps too much overlap, often ran too rich, and was sometimes hard to start. I read up on the Edelbrock E-Street top-end kit for this motor, and liked that this would remove the guesswork out of much of the motor setup by pre-matching the heads, cam, intake, and carb. Ordered.

Pulled the trigger on the front power disc brake kit and shocks- car's gotta stop and not hop!

The original thing that put this classic in a barn was that the starter quit, and then the rust in the tank clogged up the works. So new starter, fuel tank, and sender.

 Lastly, ordered bushings and motor mounts, since holy dry rot batman- they are sorely needed.

I'll be waiting on the front stoop for the UPS truck!

Just when all hope had been abandoned

So, got stuck in a time vortex or what?

Life gets crazy, and the Mustang project was mothballed while I destroyed, then revived an e46 BMW. What an odyssey. I also learned a lot and in many ways am better equipped for the Mustang. While working on that, many asked me to blog my progress on the Mustang, so here we go- resurrected!

Where we left off...

Mouse nest smell, ugh.

So the car smelled like mice. We took the seats out and tossed the carpet and underlayment. On Saturday morning, I vacuumed out the mouse poop, then took some "Nature's Miracle" urine-neutralizing enzyme solution and sprayed down everything. I listened to "Car Talk" on the radio, and by the time it was over, the mouse smell had gone away. The seats I am not concerned with since we're replacing the foam and the covers.

The question of the floors, answered

There was a question about how much work the floors would need, I thought, a little but not much. It was time to take a look . On Sunday I had some time to spare so I decided to take a closer look, and by "look", I mean with a grinder. And here's what I found:

Oof, uncovered some tin...

And once we peel it up, it ain't pretty.

So yeah, goop and tin were apparently the preferred recipe in the past

Yep, that's a whole - as in "added a whole floorpan to the things I'm buying for this car!"

So I'm going to save the seat pedestals and probably the trans/driveline tunnel, but the rest of this floor is going to have to get replaced. Ordered a set of spot weld grinding bits, this is going to get "interesting."

Next weekend 

Stay tuned, the kid and I are going to take the heads off the 289 and fix them up so we can run the car on unleaded pump gas! Also, more grinding/sparks!