91 Shadow R/T Convertible

[jonnyb]

Not critical at all...was a good tip and lead me to stockish looking creative solution.

Got caught up on yardwork and took a nice vacation out in Rocky Mountain National Park, but now its back to work on this project!

Yesterday I removed the ac compressor and alternator to see if I could pinpoint the source of the coolant leak. Doh! It wasn't difficult to find at all! The water pump housing was cracked:


I remembered that when I installed the housing, the bottom stud seemed to put a lot of pressure on the housing a couple turns before it was actually clamped down. When I went to install the new one, I left the bottom stud loose and tightened the 3 top bolts and I could see there was about a 1/4 inch gap between the housing and the block. No wonder the other one cracked. This is the second block I've seen this problem on. Luckily, it's as simple as adding 2 flat washers as spacers.

It's all buttoned back up now. Next I have to do a little more clean up of the wiring in the engine bay and assemble the front end parts (fender, hood, headlights/blinkers, and bumper), and then button up a few things inside under the dash and the car will be ready for the first test drive!

[86Shelby]

If you're using the diverter that the TIIIs came with, you do need a washer or two on that stud.

[jonnyb]

OK, time for an update.

I got the entire front end back together and all the electrical accessories functioning correctly. The spirit r/t harness was plug and play for the entire front end of the shadow. The hood latch mechanisms were shot, so I bought a couple NOS ones off of ebay. Here's some shots of that new hardware and the rat rod front end assembled on the car:






I also got the rear end lighting all squared away. I thought it would be simple and take an hour or two, but it turned into a 2 day nightmare thanks to an error in the factory service manual wiring diagrams!

Here was the first item I noticed that complicated things. The shadow has 3 tail lights: a reverse light, a parking light and a brake/turn signal light. The Spirit R/T has 4: a reverse light, a parking light, a turn signal light and a brake light, as well as a whole bunch of additional wiring for the lighting message center.



However, I noticed that the service manual has a separate page for Chrysler and Plymouth AA bodies because they have the same tail light configuration as the shadow. I also noticed after tracing the wiring in that diagram, that everything was basically the same an only 2 wires had to be respliced to make the Spirit setup work in the shadow. Sweet! I was in business to an easy swap....here's my notes in the manual:


Basically it boiled down to the 2 lines with arrows that I drew in on the bottom of the diagram. All I had to do was splice the two wires in my thumb, with the two tan wires to the right and I should be in business.


I also wanted to use updated bulbs and get rid of the rusty shadow sockets, so I removed the center of the shadow sockets and inserted the Spirit sockets into the fitting.


Here's a pic of the new harness that I made (bottom) vs. the original shadow harness (top - minus a few parts that were transferred to new harness):


I plugged it all in and the everything lit up, but only the center brake light lit up when the brakes were applied, and when the left blinker was applied the right blinker light would go on, and the right blinker would make the left blinker light go on...ooops...LOL.

I was able to figure out the switched blinker light pretty quickly, but the brake light issue stumped me for hours!!! The factory service manual had a little notation that for Plymouth and Chrysler, a jumper wire in a connector was needed. However, when I looked and traced that jumper wire, it lead to nothing! There were other notations on the diagram that did not exist, so I figured either it was an error on the diagram, or it was some kind of option that I didn't need to worry about. Nope! It turned out the the diagram was wrong and showed the jumper going to the wrong pin in the harness. After several hours of tracing the wiring diagrams over and over, I realized that the diagram must be wrong and moved the jumper wire and bam!, brake lights! Here's the jumper and a pic of the menacing incorrect wiring diagram in the service manual (pencil shows where L50 wire is supposed to go vs where manual shows it going):



I plan to clean up the spare tire well and paint it tomorrow and then hopefully get the back end of the car buttoned up Monday. Then later in the week I'll start getting the interior put together just enough to pass inspection to get it registered. I have too many other projects, so this one will sit looking like a rat rod until I get to doing the body and interior work sometime next year.

[wheming]

What did i miss about that front fender? Something happened to the paint?

[2.216VTurbo]

What did i miss about that front fender? Something happened to the paint?

Yeah well there was a little fleck of dust in the paint so JB decided to strip the quarter down to bare metal and start over because that's how he rolls

[jonnyb]

LOL - the car was repainted at some point and a replacement fender was put on, but it looks like the factory finish wasn't correctly prepped and the paint lifted. Waaaaay back in post 1 of this thread, you can see that same paint peel on the fender.

I'll admit though, I made it worse when I inadvertently blew more of the paint off when I was using my air gun near it a few months back. LOL.

It was too humid to paint today, so I got the interior pretty much all wired up instead. I'm stumped on the tach being stuck at 7K rpm and the oil pressure gauge pinned to zero (verified good oil pressure via mechanical gauge).

I'm getting burned out messing with electrical diagnosis. So I plan to switch gears and get the spare tire well and the header trim piece sanded and painted tomorrow, as well as recover the header headliner. Then I'll do final assembly of the tail end of the car Tuesday.

[jonnyb]

Got the header filler panel and spare tire well painted up. I ran out of paint so the spare tire well is a little light, but oh well - most of it will be covered anyway.



The header filler panel was just too rusty and nasty looking to bolt back onto the refinished header panel. Plus, it looks like this will make for an easier tape off when I eventually spray the whole car.

Then I decided to work on a few interior pieces. The first task was the try to clean the carpet and floor mats. For those of you who have been following along, you'll probably remember how nasty the interior of this car was when I started. So I had little hope of being able to use either the carpet or the floor mats. However, after an hour or so of heavy duty power washing, the results are more than I had hoped! The carpet will need a little more attention when I redo the interior next year, but for now it's definitely workable. Especially since the floor mats came out so good. Here's the before and after pics:



Passenger side of carpet and passenger floor mats sprayed:



All mats sprayed:


And carpet...good enough for now.


This morning I turned my attention to a little rust issue on the drivers rear quarter. There was a silver dollar sized rust hole where the bumper cover retainer screws mounted. So I cut the rot out and welded a small patch panel on and smoothed and primed it. After letting it dry for a couple hours, I installed the rear bumper and bumper cover. I'll do final sanding and will paint with the rest of the body. No pictures of any of this.

I also bolted the header filler panel on and sealed up the header panel today. It looks a little funny as the only exposed freshly painted item on the car, but I had to do it. LOL.


I started to mess with the headliner for the header panel cover and visors, but the visors are pretty shot:



So I decided to quit for the day and celebrate our great country's independence! Fired up the grill and cracked a cold one! Enjoy and be safe!

[85glht]

The visors don't look that bad....

Looks good Jonny!

[jonnyb]

Well, with the exception of the back seat and the interior panels that surround it, the interior is back together. The visors were by far the biggest pain in the butt visors that I've ever recovered, and I'm not super happy with the way they came out. Oh well, good enough for now!

I also got all the ground effects back on and threw a little rattle paint on that front fender. It was a blue that I had laying around and it doesn't quite match, but again, oh well, good enough for now. LOL! I'll put some pics up of everything this weekend.

Yesterday and today I was messing with another wiring gremlin that has me stumped. I mentioned earlier that there were a couple problems in the dash and I have all of them ironed out except for the oil pressure gauge. It really bothers me because that gauge is one of the main reasons I switched to the spirit dash! I'm going to post a thread in the electrical section shortly to see if anyone can figure out what I'm missing.

Other than that, I only need to bleed the brakes one last time and then put on the 16" pumpers with the new tires. I'm planning on getting temp tags for it this week so it should be getting its first real test drives this weekend.

[wheming]

Jon, i recently fixed my oil pressure dash gauge in the van that has not worked properly in over 2 years, even though i tried a new sender.
Want to know what i did?
Changed the sender again, and it worked.
The new sender i tried previously (like almost 2 years ago) had to be bad out of the box, so i assumed there was some wiring issue.

[jonnyb]

Jon, i recently fixed my oil pressure dash gauge in the van that has not worked properly in over 2 years, even though i tried a new sender.
Want to know what i did?
Changed the sender again, and it worked.
The new sender i tried previously (like almost 2 years ago) had to be bad out of the box, so i assumed there was some wiring issue.

LOL - nice! Lucky you. However, that can't be my problem. I posted info in my help thread in the electrical section, but here's the skinny...I have swapped known good working parts (inst cluster and oil press sensor) from another spirit rt and they did not fix the problem in this car, and have swapped the parts from this car (inst cluster and pressure sending unit) into the spirit rt and they worked. So it has to be something with the wiring.

[jonnyb]

Got the temp plates and car passed inspection. Going to transfer plates from my crossfire over to it this week (yup, sold my SRT6 roadster today...sniff, sniff).

I'm switching gears to doing some resto on 86 GLHS #141 for the rest of the summer, but will get back to interior and paint work on this one next Spring.

Jon

[2.216VTurbo]

Kinda funny story when I sold my SRT-6 a few years ago....


Karlton (you probably knows him from the Srt list, my old car is that resprayed Ferarri gray car in Vegas) was a spine distributor that I was working for and he was making a TON of money selling products. Biz was very good, his and her Ferrari's kinda good. A few years ago he invited me to a track day with all his Dr Buddies (and all their Ferarri's) at BigWillow road course, bet you'll never guess who had the fastest time of the day amongst the group So he was impressed with MrSix. Fast forward a couple years, biz came crashing down with the economy and he sold the Ferarri's, assorted toys and the house. One thing that was in his budget was a $12,000. SRT6 so we struck a deal. Part of the deal was I'd meet him at his home track, Spring Mountain Raceway in Pahrump(45 min north of Vegas, a private country club track. Private garages, pool, Jaccuzi, putting greens, full bar, cigar bar. it's NICE!!)and show him some racelines and get him aquainted with the new car. He hands me the cash, puts on his helmet and tries to get into the car. Nope To tall, belly too big and even with the seat all the way back he just doesn't fit There was a few minutes of uncertainty and I for sure did not want to turn loose of the stack of Benjamins in my pocket! Somehow we got him shoehorned in there and he fell in love with the car right away. After that day he had a shop pull out the seats, turns out they are on 2" sheetmetal 'pedistalls' he had those cut off and his belly would clear the steering wheel no problem after that. He set about upgrading the car with smaller supercharger pulley, coil over suspension, bigger brakes(I tried to talk him outta that mod, higher temp pads would have been sufficient), respray etc etc. The Six is still making him happy 5 years later and AFAIK, the heads have never been off the motor. He beats the crap outta it on autocross days but he also regularly beat Vipers with it. Been a great car for him.

[jonnyb]

Yeah, most guys over 6' remove those blocks from under the seats. The woman that bought mine was 4'11", so she had no problem fitting. LOL!

Ugh - powder coaters burned me today! I'll get to that later though...

For now, I'll post happy pics. Here's some shots of the headliner and visor restoration. First one stripped and starting to get covered:




Ready to seal back up:


One down, one to go:



And both done. As I mentioned before, they came out OK, but there was some sealant stuck to the cardboard that I didn't remove, so it caused them to be much thicker than they should be and they look like they may pull apart because of it. So I may be pulling them back out and pulling them apart and trying to remove that goop to see if I can get them to close up tighter and look better.


Here's a shot of the recovered headliner:


Here's shots of the carpet and seats going in (these will come back out when I redo the interior next year - just needed something for now for registration and inspection):



As I mentioned before, I pretty much have the entire interior back in the car now and it passed inspections. I'll take some pics of it as it sits this weekend.

The only other item I wanted to complete before stopping work on this car for the year was the snorkel resto. Here's what I was working with:




And here's what I used to restore the plastic (it's one of the original dash vent from the shadow dash that I'm not using):


Some cutting, two tubes of plastic weld and lots of sanding it the snorkel actually looks almost new and snaps into the airbox like its 1991! LOL. So I dropped the snorkel plate off at the powder coaters to have them match the valve covers and valley cover that they powder coated for me, and here's what I got back:



They destroyed it!!! Bent, dented and goodness only knows how they managed to roll that one side into a circle! The owner tried to tell me that's the way I dropped it off. Thank goodness I just happened to take a pic of the part as he was tagging it when I dropped it off. I showed him the pic and he said "well, I guess this one is on us." He then tried to tell me that he could easily straighten it if I give him the plastic snorkel. Ummm....no thanks! I can't even imagine what they might do to that brittle plastic trying to straighten out the metal plate.

Good thing for my good friend Kelly Gomer and his T3 stash! He has a spare one that I'm going to use and yes, I'll be finding a different shop to take the new part to get powder coated at!!!!

Jon

[2.216VTurbo]

Powder coat cures at a pretty high temp, over 400 IIRC. I'm sure the heat rolled the edge and killed it. Might be a challenge for the next shop as well?

[spirit1991]

More than likely the snorkel plate was ruined during sandblasting. I've had several plates powdercoated with no problems. And those were all two tone powdercoat as I had the lettering done one color then the rest done, which means it was baked twice

[jonnyb]

More than likely the snorkel plate was ruined during sandblasting. I've had several plates powdercoated with no problems. And those were all two tone powdercoat as I had the lettering done one color then the rest done, which means it was baked twice

Thanks for the confirmation. I brought the part to another powder coating shop and they said something similar. They said it looked like some damage was from sandblasting, but the rolled end looked like the other place tried to straighten it for some reason and then tried to bend it back, which is exactly what I thought it looked like as well. The new place guaranteed me that it was pure neglect and not any kind of normal problem a good shop would encounter.

Seems that the place I took it to just went under new ownership and has a lot of new unskilled workers, so I guess I'll be steering clear of them from now on. I'm hoping to pick up the replacement plate from Kelly this weekend and get it powder coated next week.

[jonnyb]

No real close ups, but had the car in the line-up for our annual NESDAC bbq. A T3 swap is fairly common now a days, but when the doors were opened and folks saw the spirit dash, quite a few oohs and aaahs were heard. LOL! The fellow member who I got the car from was amazed and thought for sure I would have stripped some parts from it and sent it to the crusher (maybe he's related to AJ who made the same comment earlier in this thread...LOL).



I'm planning on starting back up on this car this weekend. The plan is to get all the door wiring complete. The p-body has windows and mirror controls on the center console - the spirit has them in the doors. The plan is to try to use the p-body door lock switches in the armrests for the window controls (will have to lean over to passenger side to push that button to get pass window down...oh well) and to mount the door lock switches where the window crank holes are for a manual window p-body. I haven't tried it yet, but the spirit side mirror control looks to be a direct drop in for the shadow door, so hopefully that will be the easy part.

Since the shadow doors are longer, I'll have to extend a few of the wires in the doors as well (power door lock wires for sure). Hopefully I'll have some pics of all that fun this weekend and will have a positive update!

[jonnyb]

Got tied up with work last week and then went out and had some fun this weekend instead of wrenching on cars. So I didn't start the doors until yesterday after work.

The power side mirrors were a piece of cake - complete plug and play. All I had to do was swap the power mirror control off the spirit door onto the shadow drivers door - it's the same exact size and shape as the shadow piece. The power door lock wiring was also almost plug and play. It had to be extended, but it was only two wires per door so no big deal. I also got the lock switches mounted in the doors where the manual window cranks would go, but I'll need to do some tweaking to figure out how to make them look clean on the door panels.

The toughest part (only because I started down the wrong path) was the power window switches. Due to starting to get tired of working on wiring for this car (LOL), I initially thought it would be easier to use the full spirit switch assembly (4 window switches plus a lockout switch), but after playing with trying to mount that in the armrest for a while, I decided to take a look at using the original shadow switch that was mounted in the center console. The power/ground and 4 wires for the front two windows matched color for color with the spirit wiring, so I spliced it in and only the switch on the drivers side worked. I looked and the wiring diagram showed power via the lockout switch. Once I connected the lockout switch wire to power, I was able to operate the window with the switch on the drivers side, as well as with the switch on the passenger door. Yay!

In progress pics. Original idea using spirit switches (removed foam from armrest and was going to try to carve it to fit the rear of the switch). Way too hard and would look weird with 4 switches in 2 door car (or should I try to adapt lebaron convertible style rear power windows...LOL?!?!):



Hmmm...let's look at the original 2 door switch instead:


Just the switch - looks pretty close to fitting with only a little trimming needed:


Snap a line at 2", get out the die grinder and voila!


I didn't quite trim one of the tabs enough under the cover (there were 3 tabs that needed to be trimmed), so it's not quite flush, but good enough for now! I'll run a flat board over the rough edges, and trim that one problematic tab when I finish the interior next year. Tonight I'm planning on cleaning the original door panels and buttoning up the doors. After that, the only other thing I want to do is throw in a spare radio so that I can have some tunes, but other than that, the interior is as done as I need/want it to be for now.

I took the car out for a ride yesterday. Man - stock tunes are boring! LOL! I sure hope the boost comes on quicker and harder once I turn it up. It does pull nice from 4-6K while it's hitting that 11psi max boost. I'm going to get an alignment next week. After that, I'll take the car for it's maiden long voyage and give it a good beat down testing on the ride back. Once it passes muster, I'll be turning up the wick.