Buyin’ stuff

Posted on March 4, 2012 by

Stopped by a local paint store today and picked up a large can of “Restor-It Epoxy Sealer” off of Bill’s recommendation. The ‘demo piece’ of the stuff they had there had a fully rotted piece of wood soaked through and through with the stuff, and it was hard as a rock. My hopes are that I can use the stuff to harden up the Morgan’s original wood frame to a state where it won’t fall apart.

Posted in 1966 Morgan +4, Restoration | 4 Comments

Wires everywhere!

Posted on February 27, 2012 by

Another multi-day post, this covering the whole weekend.

Saturday and Sunday were, for the most part, spent cutting down the Solstice ‘interior’ wiring harness to just the bits I needed. As you can see in the photos below, I took out quite a bit. Most of what’s there still is for the pedals, but there’s a few other bits related to things like the cruise control, ignition, parking brake lever, and fuel tank / pump. Those were left in mainly so it’s easy to replicate / replace them when the items get carried over to the MogRod.

One thing worth mentioning was that Bill Wilson, the local Morgan owner I met recently, stopped by with his wife on Saturday to check out my Morgan and the rest of our garage setup. It was great to see him again, and I’ve got some more things to follow up on with him in future (like the possibility of a wood frame available locally).

After some back-and-forth posting over on Joe’s ‘Bowtie 6’ web site, I’m going to be reading up on the Solstice’s cruise control system to see what’s needed to carry that over to the MogRod setup. It seems the main point of interest for that is the BCM (Body Control Module), and what’s needed from it.

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Rearrange and clean up

Posted on February 25, 2012 by

So this post actually covers today and the past ~ week.

We start with rearranging and cleaning up the general work area. For too long we’ve had piles of car parts out along the back walkway of the house, consisting of Solstice, Bronco, Morgan, and even a few Barracuda parts that have collected and sat. We decided it was time to clean up that mess and get things organized and out of the way. The timing was good on this as I’d just removed the whole wiring harness from the Solstice, so the main body could be moved aside and not be an issue.

We cleared up the shop lift area, and the space between the lift and the fence was deemed “car storage central.” The Solstice was rolled out there, still on dollies unfortunately, and put into place. I then proceeded to build up the two-layer shelving you’ll see in the photos below. Once that was in place I moved the Morgan panels to the top shelf and the mountain of Solstice parts to the lower shelf. Then I lobbed off the front of the Solstice frame ahead of the steering, and used the newly opened space to stack and store my project Benelli motorcycle.

The Solstice out of the garage, I moved all our major tools back in and set up a table with a door on some saw horses. This is where today’s work went into action. I started disassembling the Solstice’s wiring harness down to the major sections; once I had the engine bay harness off, I started picking through it and removing sections deemed ‘unnecessary’ for the final build. As I went through identifying parts, I labeled both the ones I was keeping and the snipped-off ends of the ones that were removed. There’ll be more in-focus cleanup to happen when this all goes back onto the engine, but that likely won’t be until the engine’s in the Morgan. A few bits gave me some trouble identifying them, but that turned out to be A/C related connectors, which were, of course, removed as well.

At this point the ‘engine’ harness is pretty much sorted out, next up will be the harnesses for things like the pedals and, should I feel up to it, the cruise control system.

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Steamin’ along~

Posted on February 20, 2012 by

Bit of spring cleaning and reorganizing today, but before I go over that, I had a really cool ‘chance encounter’ this morning.

One of the things we were getting rid of was a large stack of maybe a hundred old redwood fence boards, and since one of our neighbors didn’t want them, I suggested we put them up on the free section of craigslist. I did so, and before dinner was over I’d already gotten three or four replies (something that surprised me, honestly).

I contacted the first person on the list, a Mr. Dick Vennerbeck, who’d said he was interested in using them to make an eclosure for a generator (if I recall correctly), and just happened to catch my ad right after he’d gotten home from working on a steam engine. This sounded pretty damn cool in my book, and we arranged to have him stop by this morning to pick the wood up.

Fast forward to this morning, Dick shows up, and we start talking as we load the fence panels (along with some other scrap wood) into his pickup. Turns out this Mr. Dick Vennerbeck is part of the Kinectic Steam Works, a group whose work I’ve marveled at before at a Maker Faire a year or so ago. We talked for a bit about both our project vehicles (his steam powered boat and car, among other things he’s worked on), and gave me some good ideas for leads on potentially getting a wood frame made up for the MogRod. I’m looking forward to meeting Dick again in the future, it’s not every day you get to meet someone with such a cool story to tell and a such a unique set of skills. I definitely think I got the better deal out of this craigslist ad, and not just because he gave me a pair of really damn good work gloves in exchange for the fence panels!

Ok, so, the spring cleaning. We’ve needed to reorganize the place for some time, and the Solstice parts-car needed to be moved out of the garage to a space out in the shop lift area. Getting the wood out of the shop lift area cleared up the remainer of the space needed, so I started shuffling about all our stuff and pulling things out of the garage to make way for what’s left of the Solstice. I was hoping to put this off until I had a set of wheels on the car, but my parents had requested I move it now for other reasons; I was fine with this as the Solstice is at the point where nothing else top-side really needs to come off.

The Solstice itself actually moved pretty easily, I can’t imagine how many hundreds of pounds of metal and other parts I’ve removed from the frame.The only thing that gave us any trouble was one of the four cheap dollys we’d picked up from Harbor Freight, as a wheel had bent in and made it totally useless. A bit of creative positioning of the remaining three dollies, and my father and I easily moved the car out of the garage, along the front of the house, and into the space along side of the two post lift. We’ll be building some simple shelving above the car to store the various Solstice and Morgan parts out of the way, so that’ll keep me busy tomorrow.

All in all another productive and interesting day.

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Dewired, Tired, Inspired

Posted on February 13, 2012 by

Two notes for the day~

Decided to get something done with the car(s) today, and chose upon getting the wiring harness off of the Solstice. Well, a few hours later, it’s off, my arms are cut to ribbons, and I feel a small sense of accomplishment.

In other news, a random meetup with a friend I haven’t seen in a while led to me meeting today with another local Morgan owner. My father and I had a nice chat with a Mr. Bill Wilson, who has a pair of Morgans which I stupidly didn’t take any photos of. I’ll remedy that the next time I meet with him.

Posted in General, Solstice Parts Car | 2 Comments

Caution, your firewall is disabled.

Posted on January 16, 2012 by

I’d managed to test-drive the Barracuda yesterday (new power steering setup), so that freed up my plans for today. Decided to dig in to the Morgan, instead of putting the suspension together on the Solstice. The firewall and transmission cover were my goals for the day, and those goals were met!

Most of the work centered around getting all the remaining bolts and items holding the firewall to both the frame and the center insert. Turns out there were a lot more bolts than I expected, but for the most part they came out pretty easily. The small bolts holding the inner and outer firewall together turned out to be a bit more difficult, but since I wasn’t planning on reusing them, the air-powered cutting disc made short work of all them.

Before I could remove the firewall, I had to feed all the wiring harness back through it. I didn’t want to cut it up in case I want to use any of it for reference (not likely, but may as well put the effort in). Upon finishing up fishing all that mess back through, I gave the firewall a good tug and it popped right out along with the center insert. I snapped a few shots of them and put them out in storage for the time being.

The transmission cover only had a few small screws holding its two pieces in place, and after a few minutes those too came free and the pieces were removed. Now I’ve got a good view of the whole drivetrain, and I have to admit, seeing the transmission set back from the bell housing does indeed look quite odd. It’s going to be interesting fitting the Solstice’s transmission in, and I’m just hoping it’s not so wide as to compromise what little footwell space there is in the car.

Next up in my plans will likely be back to the Solstice to start getting it ready to be a rolling chassis again.

Posted in 1966 Morgan +4, Restoration | Leave a comment

Ready and (control) armed!

Posted on January 13, 2012 by

Yay! Big thanks to Gene at GM Parts House for getting all the replacement Solstice suspension parts out to me so quickly, with any luck I’ll start getting these put on the Solstice remains this weekend. The axle shaft will likely stay off, as there’s really no point to be installing it just yet. The control arm and knuckle will be the first things to go on, and hopefully after that I can get the shocks installed soon after. I still need to sort out shipping the wheels with my uncle, however.

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Shocking delivery!

Posted on January 1, 2012 by

It’s shocks!

They’re off of a ’09 GXP, and will be going on the Solstice frame as soon as the rest of the parts show up from GM Parts House.

Thanks Charles for the great deal on these!

Posted in Solstice Parts Car | 2 Comments

Shocking update!

Posted on December 28, 2011 by

Just ordered a set of full ’09 GXP shock assemblies off a Solstice Forum member for less than the cost one sub-part of a shock assembly of a parts warehouse. Glad I thought to ask there!

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Buying gifts…

Posted on December 26, 2011 by

… for the Solstice~!

Just ordered about $450 worth of suspension parts from GM Parts House so that I can get the thing back into a rolling chassis mode.

I’ve also ordered a set of Saturn Sky wheels from a member over at the Sky Roadster forum. That had the added quick of the seller being in the same town as one of my uncles, and coming to find out the two already knew one another as my uncle was the track coach for the seller’s son.

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