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This is Yet Another Parts Car I drug home to get some parts I needed. As usual, the rest is up for sale. If you need something, ask me about it. As shown in the pictures, the car had no front sheetmetal when I got it - the previous owner had removed and used them to repair accident damage to his car. The car is a 4 cylinder with a 5-speed manual transmission. It's nicely equipped with power options, and the interior is in decent shape. PhotosHere's the car as it arrived in my driveway.
Here's a few pictures from the first day of dismantling work where we gutted the interior. A special thanks to a very camera shy Trey "Wilson" Sheppard for giving me a hand with this work - he did a great job pulling things out, and lots of great interior parts are safely stowed in my shed awaiting someone who needs them. I don't think anything was damaged in removal - quite a feat for all the plastic panels and small plastic bits in the interior.
Here's the instrument cluster with all gauges and the typical 85-mph speedometer from that era. The tachometer is the 4 cylinder 6000 RPM one. The cluster is in good shape with no scratching on the lens and no damage on the back.
This is the warning chime module. The part number cast into the plastic case is F29B-10D840-AA.
This is the delay wiper module. The sticker that was on the end says this is part number B7ZF-17C476-AB.
This is the cruise control module. The sticker on the side says this is part number E9ZF-9D843-AA. I also have the rest of cruise control system set aside for my use in another project, including the connections to the main electrical system, and the steering column + wheel with the cruise switches mounted in the wheel.
This is the air bag control/monitor module. It is stamped with the number E90B-14A624-BA in red on the connector end. This appears to have been used on a number of Ford vehicles in this era, and apparently is mainly used as a diagnostic controller - the steering wheel mounted airbag on this era Ford vehicle is pretty much directly wired to the sensors and firing the airbag is a simple matter of the switches inside one (or more) of the airbag sensors closing and providing power to the airbag module. After it fires, it blows a fuse and it's done until the system is repaired.
This is the rear axle. I'll decode the numbers and put it up here later.
More dismantling work. The interior is totally gutted, and gas tank is out, the driveshaft is out, the parking brake assembly is out, and the power brake booster and master cylinder are out. If you look closely at the muffler in the first picture, you'll see that it's a genuine Flowmaster - someone was having some fun with their little 4-banger Mustang! Too bad it was mounted improperly and had a nasty stress crack starting near the rear outlet and running around the corner of the case towards the top. The crack showed evidence of exhaust leakage, and there was stuff rattling around internally, so I simply gave it away to some kid who bought a few other parts from the car. He was in desperate need of anything semi-functional to keep his Mustang going, and it wasn't worth anything to me except as scrap. It may not be perfect, but it'll help him to avoid getting a "noise ticket" for a while, so I decided to be nice.
Here's the engine and transmission removal. First I pulled the transmission crossmember and let the transmission hang wherever it wanted to. Then, I lowered the car until the front subframe was almost touching the trailer bed, unbolted the subframe, and it lowered it (with the engine and transmission still bolted to it) down onto the trailer bed using the length of the attaching bolts. I pulled the bolts out, jacked the car body back up again for clearance, and used some tie-downs to pull the engine + transmission + crossmember assembly all the way to the front of the trailer. Later I pulled the trailer into the street and used my engine hoist to move the entire thing into the back of my truck for safekeeping until somebody bought it. The entire process worked surprisingly well and allowed me to not clear my driveway and unload the car there to do the engine and transmission removal. The tag on the transmission decodes to a 1989-1990 Mustang 2.3L 4 cylinder, which agrees with the seller's story (which was told to him by the previous seller) that the transmission had recently been replaced with another used unit. For the curious, the tag data is below. The Ford part number is "E9ZR-7003-AA" and "13-52-194" is the code most folks use to ID which transmission this is. The others are date and other related codes for really fine-grained information about when the transmission was built and other production-related data.
Separating the engine and transmission turned into something of an ordeal. Between the starter and bellhousing-to-engine bolts, there are eleven 13mm bolts holding the transmission and engine together. That's right - eleven. Eight bolts for the bellhousing and three bolts for the starter. Including two at the bottom of the bellhousing. Why in the world a puny little 4 cylinder needs that much to hold the engine and transmission together is beyond me - the V8 bellhousings have five bolts and the V8 starters have two bolts - for a grand total of seven, with a couple of small sheet metal screws to hold the bottom of the motor plate to the bottom of the bellhousing. First off, because of clearance issues on the starter/exhaust side of the motor, you had to use a wrench to get at most of the bolts, which made for slow progress. Then, the real problem hit when trying to get the bottom two bolts out. The oil pan on this motor is a pretty beefy cast aluminum piece, and the two bottom bellhousing bolts thread into bosses on the rear edge of the oil pan. For reasons yet to be understood, those two bolts were stuck solid - the heads rounded off and they didn't budge. I tried to use an air chisel to dig into the edge of the head and get them to spin - the air chisel bit broke and they still didn't budge. I tried to cut the heads off with a Sawzall and found out that these attempting to cut these bolts would remove all of the teeth from a brand new metal cutting blade in about 10 seconds flat! After lots of head scratching and foul language, I finally had to grind the bolt heads off with my little 3" air cutoff wheel. Once the heads were gone and the bolts become studs, the bellhousing slid off with nary a trace of the usual electrical reaction that causes steel bolts to seize up in aluminum housings. The bolts were not tight either - once the bellhousing was off, they threaded out by hand. How in the world the aluminum threads in the back of the cast oil pan managed to generate enough grip to round off the bolt heads is something I may never understand - I know how much force I put on the socket wrench, and after watching what happened to those Sawzall blades, I know how hard the metal was on those bolts heads was. In the end, I simply blamed Ford for way over-engineering that engine to transmission mounting system. On a V8 those hard-to-access bottom bolts aren't even there... Oh well. The good news is that other than a few stray marks on the bottom of the bellhousing from the Sawzall and the cutoff wheel slipping, things came out pretty much unscathed - well, except for those two bolts... :-)
I needed my trailer right away, so I moved the car onto another one of my "completely ghetto"/"trailer trash" tire stands to hold it up until I could cut it up and dispose of it. My neighbors just love it when I do this stuff... :-)
I finally got around to carving up the carcass - this car is no more. See below for a list of what's left from it if you are interested in any parts.
What's Available
What's Gone
Purchasing OrderThis was car #30. There was nothing particularly special about this car. |
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Comments? Kudos? Got some parts you'd like to buy/sell/barter/swap? Nasty comments about my web page so far? You can email Mike or Debbie.
Page last updated 04/26/2008 11:41:08 PM |
