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Just turn the cam pulley that slipped until it’s back in it’s proper place. Spin it in the opposite direction that it went when it slipped, meaning that if the mark moved toward the front of the engine bay, turn the pulley toward the back of the engine bay until it’s lined up again. Then put the belt on and continue as normal.
I think putting the amber lights will be damaged by the chlorine. I’m going to presume that you’re referring to the lens, rather than the bulb as the part that’s amber. If that’s the case, you could get some clear plexiglass and cut it to size and just replace the amber lens with clear plexiglass. If it’s a clear lens with an amber bulb behind it, just put in a clear bulb.
Alternately, you could go to {insert local auto parts store here} and get yourself a pair of aftermarket fog lights and mount them underneath the bumper facing toward the rear to act as reverse lights. Just wire them into the factory reverse light wiring and you won’t have to do any other modifications to the lights.
The 4.6L engines from that vintage had a poorly designed intake manifold, which was prone to leaking. There’s an updated part that is plastic and aluminum, rather than being purely plastic. It’s possible that you’ve got a cracked intake manifold or a worn-out IM gasket. Of course, you’ll need a fresh gasket if you replace the manifold as well.
When you’ve got the steering wheel disconnected from everything, be gentle when you turn it or else you’ll damage the clockspring. You’ll feel it when the clockspring reaches the end of it’s travel.
If memory serves, those cars don’t have a front camber adjustment on the factory struts. Well, it can be adjusted but the strut has to be modified first by grinding the lower bolt hole into an oval shape.
If your exhaust system is swollen up like a balloon, there’s got to be a reason for it. Check to see if the exhaust is restricted downstream from the muffler. Also, check to see if maybe it’s got a misfire somewhere in the system, causing combustion heat and pressure to enter the exhaust stream rather than pushing down a piston. You’ll need to replace the exhaust, make no mistake about it, but I’d want to find out what caused it to swell up before I replaced the exhaust system.
An easy test to see if the problem is a clogged cat is to remove the upstream O2 sensor and see if it runs better once everything gets warmed up. Granted, the local police may have some words for you about driving around with a hole in your exhaust, so you may want to keep the driving on public roads to a minimum. I’ve diagnosed a couple clogged cats over the years using this method, as it gives the exhaust some place to go rather than backing up inside the engine.
I’d much rather spend the extra money for the higher quality part so I don’t have to do the job again in a year or so. I hate doing a job more than once, especially on the same part. We’ve got a saying at the shop where I work. “Go ahead and buy the cheap part, and you can pay me to do the job twice when the el-cheapo brand part fails and I have to replace it with a better one”
Personally speaking whenever I replace brake pads on my own cars I always replace the rotors. I really don’t like working on my own cars, so the least amount of time I can spend turning a wrench on them, the better. It takes a lot less time to take a rotor out of a box, clean it off and put it on then it does to remove the old rotor, set up the lathe, cut it, clean it off and put it back on. Also, if you’re doing the work yourself rotors aren’t all that expensive unless you’re working on a sports car or a high end luxo-barge. I think when I replaced the pads and rotors on my Impreza all the way around it set me back something like $130 for two sets of pads and 4 brake rotors. Your mileage may vary.
Also, I’d recommend you do the work yourself. Brake work, while easy to make mistakes on, isn’t really all that hard. As far as replacing the caliper goes, if the piston retracts easily and smoothly, with no leaks i wouldn’t replace it. As long as it works, leave it alone. If you need a step-by-step on how to replace a caliper, I can write one of them up for you, just let me know.
That can cause some uneven wear. What happens is the slide pin seizes inside of it’s bore in the caliper bracket, which will prevent the caliper from sliding correctly, which in turn will cause the brake pads to wear unevenly. There are a couple of things you can do about this. The cheap, but time consuming route is to take the caliper off the bracket and then take the bracket off the car and clamp it in a vice in such a way that you can easily get at the slide pin with a pair of vice grips. Take a torch and heat up the part of the bracket that the slide pin goes into while trying to twist the pin with a pair of vice grips. Also spray some penetrating oil on the pin to help free it up. Once you get the pin out, clean it up with a wire brush and also clean out the bore as best you can. Hopefully I don’t have to tell you to wait until everything cools off before you start cleaning things. Once you get it all cleaned off, get a new dust boot from a local parts store, put a thin coating of silicone paste on the pin and put it back in it’s bore.
The more expensive, but faster method is to buy a new bracket with new pins in it. You may have to buy the caliper to get the bracket, so be aware of the potential cost of doing it that way before you make your decision.
The shop where I work has, as it’s company policy, to use a 65 ft-lb rated torque stick (which is painted yellow), followed by a torque wrench set to the manufacturer recommended torque spec on every lugnut of every car that comes into the shop for any reason. After the first person uses a torque wrench, they have to call over a second person to go back around the car and re-torque all the lugs to the factory torque spec. Like I said, this has to be done on everything that comes into the shop, even if that thing is an 8-lug pickup that only needed a light bulb, we’ve still got to pry off the center caps, and hit all 64 lugnuts with a torque wrench.
That being said, I trust the shop supplied torque equipment (sticks and the wrenches) about as far as I can comfortably throw my apartment building. I bought my own set of torque extensions and I’m the only one who uses them. I’ve verified that they torque to what’s engraved on the stick with my torque wrench, so I trust my torque sticks implicitly. I did have to modify them slightly though. To keep myself from getting fired simply for owning torque sticks in a color other than yellow, I repainted mine with yellow spray paint. It’s fairly obvious that they’re not the shop supplied ones if you look close, but I keep them in my toolbox unless I’m using them, and from 10 feet away, you can’t tell the difference.
At a previous shop I used to work at there was a body shop that was about a five minute walk away. I once decided to play a trick on the new guy, since he was standing around doing nothing anyway. He wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer and one of our conversations went like this.
Me: Hey {new guy who’s name I can’t recall}, can you go down to that body shop and get me six feet of shore line? You can get coast line from them if they’re out of shore line, but I’ll need twelve feet of it.
Him: Ok. What’s it look like so I know that they’re giving me the right stuff?
Me: It looks like where the water meets the sand on a beach. Coast line looks like that too, but it’s thinner.
Him: Ok. Back in a little bit. (he then walks to the body shop)
10 minutes later, when he comes back
Him: You son of a bitch. I asked them for shore line and they laughed at me.
Me: I told you it was where the water met the sand on a beach. What did you think they were gonna do?Good times to be had picking on the trainee. I’ve also sent people for light bulb repair kits, cans of prop wash, a metric adjustable wrench… I told one of them that his muffler bearings had gone bad. There’s lots of fun things you can do to mess with people.
Just to get it running, all you’ll really have to do is make sure that it’s got fresh gas in it, a good battery, and that the other fluids are topped off. That should be enough for the drive home. To make it a reliable car to drive when you want, you’ll probably want to replace all the fluids with fresh ones, replace all the rubber parts (drive belts, brake hoses, radiator/heater hoses) and possibly the water pump, since coolant can become acidic over time and corrode the pump. If memory serves, replacing all that stuff one a car that old should be easy, at least from an “access to the parts to be replaced” stand point. You might have a bunch of rust to deal with though, which can make things tricky.
There’s a company called Electric Life that sells retrofit kits to put power windows into classic cars (think ’60s muscles cars and the like) which are controlled by the crank handle. You might want to see if they’ve got something. electric-life.com
I’ve never personally used them for anything, but I did read about them in a magazine once. A quick look at their website and I think they have what you’re looking for. It’s worth a shot.