Second Set of Pictures - 05/26/2006

Steve's car needed electrical work (an understatement). I volunteered my services as he's done quite a bit for my cars.



The front of the car. GS grill will be installed later.



The rear of the car. Every single light terminal in the trunk is so corroded you would have thought it had been submerged in sea water. That's what happens when someone mounts the battery in the trunk and doesn't vent it properly. The entire trunk gets bathed in acidic fumes. Acid etched trunk panels and light bulbs! One socket was completely gone on the brake light section, but the rest cleaned up decently.



Yeah, the battery here is temporary. A proper mounting setup is being worked on (not some cheesy plastic box either).



The engine! It's a wild one!



Another shot of the famous $7000 motor! No, Steve didn't pay that for it. The previous owner did.



62psi at idle. Nice oil pressure.



B&M shifter. I really don't like this shifter, but that's a personal thing.



Phil mounted the MONSTER TACH on what is left of the column shift lever. It's definitely in your face. And it works intermittently.



Yeah, someone broke the plastic plug on the back of the dash cluster, so this is how it is fixed. Badly.



The speedometer cable is NOT fun to get to on this car. The cluster is easy to pull out though, all the hard pieces were taken out of the dash pad already and it just pulled right out.



The factory tach from a Buick GS.



The back. Very cryptic. The left terminal (no nut attached) goes to the negative side of the coil. The right terminal is not connected and the case is the ground (through the main IP cluster ground). Very simple circuit - 3 diodes, an inductor, 2 resistors, a capacitor and a transistor drives this tach.



And it's reinstalled. And it works beautifully. Dana says to sell it and stick a ratty gauge cluster housing he had in there... but I don't think we're going to do that.



Yeah. The wiring. It's bad. Courtesy of the previous owner and to a lesser extent Phil. Phil's heart is in the right place, but he rigged an awful lot of this stuff. I had to remove 2 different toggle switches that went to nothing. Apparently the previous owner had a massive electric fan that he powered off of 16ga wire direct from the battery into the passenger compartment to a toggle switch and back out to the fans (that he drilled holes in the radiator to get it to mount... and yes they did leak). BAD idea. Use relays! But what do I know, right? Another toggle switch went to turn off the brake lights (why the HELL does anyone need to turn these off if they are planning on living a legal lifestyle?). That was fixed and another heavy duty ground was added to the dash to keep the gauges from dying when the lights were turned on. Broken defrost duct is visible in the background.



Yes, the horn relay! The previous owner had zip tied up ALL of these wires under the dash. We cleaned it up to hook it back up. The horn now works. As does the key buzzer to indicate that the key is in the car. This is quite annoying, but neat to hear a 36 year old device like this still works.



Gauges look MUCH better now.



That is a swarm of VERY angry bees. No idea why they are angry or what they are doing. They are just swarming like mad in Steve's storage spot. There had to have been several hundred crawling all over his Lemans door (we crept closer when the anger had subsided). Not exactly conducive to working outdoors with angry bees near by...

Video 1

Video 2

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Last updated May 26th, 2006