OK - hopefully I don't accidentally close my browser while previewing my post after an hour of typing and uploading images!!!
A few years ago I flew out from Connecticut and purchased a nice, fairly original 1990 Plymouth Voyager turbo from Jonathan Khoe in California, and took it on a meandering road trip back to Connecticut. Details of that cross county journey are here: http://www.turbo-mopar.com/forums/showthread.php?58455-Cross-Country-Voyage%28r%29-LOL!
Anyway, fast forward a little over two years and the van has treated me great! I have put 30,000 nearly trouble free miles on it! However, the sun burnt paint and anemic transmission have finally worn on me, and the Top Van announcement for SDAC a few weeks ago was the nudge I needed to spruce this van up and make me proud to daily drive it (not to mention have more fun during that daily drive!).
Here's the progress over the last 2 weeks...
The first thing I needed to do was get some shiny paint! The body was pretty straight and only had some minor dings, but the hood and roof were California sun baked and rusted. So I rough sanded the body to find and smooth out all the dings, and then I sanded down all the rust. Here are a few photos of the work in progress.
First find all the dings and try to pop them out and fill/prime them:
Then sand down the rest of the oxidized/rust areas and seal them with rust preventative:
Then a final sanding at the paint shop before paint:
And here it is all painted!
Preview on the new 17's!
- - - Updated - - -
OK, so in parallel with doing the body and paint work, I figured I would put aside the original engine and trans and build a replacement motor. Since this is still going to be my daily driver, I figured I would keep it economical and not go too crazy with the build.
I had a spare 1990 2.5 T1/Auto drivetrain from a 90 shadow es that I thought was in OK condition. Well, I found out today that it's not in OK condition...
I broke it mostly down and then drained the oil. As the oil was draining, I thought I saw a few clump of thicker oil come out. Not good.
Sure enough, once I got the pan drained I saw sludge and metallic material everywhere.
It turns out that whoever built this motor really messed up! It had .25MM oversized crank and rod bearings, but it looks like the crank was only turned .25 on the rod journals - the mains look like they were never turned and the main bearings were completely burnt up!!! The crank has big grooves worn in it from the oversized bearings and is definitely not usable without being turned.
On top of that, this motor has LW rods with pressed pins and 1MM oversized pistons. So now I have to drop these off at the machine shop to get them pressed off so that I can swap them over one of my spare sets of heavy duty rods.
I also had to steal a good std size crank from a spare tbi motor that I had.
I dropped the trans from this same tbi motor off at Cliffs along with a 90 turbo trans to have a nice strong turbo lockup trans built. I'm hoping to improve my mpg along with increasing performance. I'm having a heck of a time finding a torque converter though - every place that I've called or emailed has either not gotten back to me or has told me that they don't make anything for this application. I know others have done what I'm doing, so I'm not sure why I'm having such a hard time!
Anyway, that's about it for now. I'll post updates every few days to keep you all updated on the progress.
Jon