A Productive Sunday

I managed to sneak in some time and worked on my '88 today! The weather was nice and almost 50* degrees.

I finished up with the dashboard and decided to test fit it today. In an effort to lose every ounce that I can, I trimmed down the cabin wiring harness by removing the wiring that I no longer need. I think it's coming out nice so far.


















The cabin wiring still needs a lot of work. It's a great start though. A little more snipping and I will be satisfied.

As far as the rest of the interior is concerned, I am going to remove the rest of sound deadening material. In some areas there is a lot of some sort of glue or adhesive that sealing holes. I am going to remove as much as of that stuff possible then paint the interior a classic gray.

The doors are going to get gutted. I'm not going to use lexan though. I want to use the oem glass and fab up some fasteners that will attach the oem window brackets to the door itself. The window won't roll down and that doesn't matter as this is a track only vehicle.

The rest of the cabin has some little brackets and things that I will remove before I paint all of the cabin classic gray. I have always wanted to have a nice clean and bare interior. It's getting there and I have a long way to go.

Being that this is a track car, I have my daily driver that will be transporting my Civic to the track. It's a 1990 Jeep Cherokee Pioneer. I picked this bad boy up for only $500 dollars.



It has a 4.0 liter inline 6. Thankfully it is multi port fuel injected. I already looked into tuning options for the oem ecu but it doesn't have an eeprom. I would like to be able to at least dial in the air/fuel ratios to get the optimum mileage and power out of it. I read about some guys using an SAFC but those devices are so finicky.

I have done minor upgrades. It has an Accel ignition kit which includes plugs, wires, cap and rotor. Other than that it has just enough power to tow my car around.


This week the weather forecast is looking decent so I hope to get some work in!

New Parts Arrived

Today the UPS guy was kind enough to drop this off for me:





I had hopes of installing the new mounts today but ended up working on my tow vehicle. For a tow rig I have a 1991 Jeep Cherokee with a 242 4.0 inline six. The power really seemed down on my Jeep. After a lot of research I ended up getting some new parts to help increase the power output.

My Jeep's engine seemed to have a slight miss when in park and would misfire occasionally in drive. A few months ago I found a spark plug wire that had a small pin hole that was arcing against the block. I taped the wire off temporarily. I always knew that this could be causing my lack of power. Last week I bought I an Accel tune up kit for my Jeep. The kit came with new wires, new cap, rotor and Accel spark plugs. I installed the kit today. It went very easy and straight forward. I also changed the oil and oil filter.

With these upgrades, my Jeep's motor feels like a new engine! I am surprised at the increase in performance.

When I finished up with the tune up it began to snow. I hope the weather will be nice enough this weekend to do work to my Civic.

Quick Header Update

Last week Matt sent me some pictures of the progress with my Bisimoto header. It's looking AWESOME!





I hope that in a few weeks Matt can find time to finish this project up. He's super busy and many projects to divide his time with. My local track is scheduled to open in April and I want to be there the first day.

Project Dashboard Continued

I finally got a chance to get away from customer cars and was able to work on my dashboard.

I started by going to Harbor Freight to get a cheap hole saw set. I found a decent set for $14.99. After I made it home I started in on the work. Here's what the back of the dashboard looks like:





This is what is now looks like swish cheesed up:







The battery died in my cordless drill so I had to stop for the evening. I made good progress. Here's a small pile from my efforts:



Was it worth it? My dashboard definitely feels lighter but I need to weigh it to confirm. Just by the feel from picking it up I am satisfied with the weight loss.

In the past week some new parts arrived:




I also wired up something that I think is rather cool. Joe, the NG ROM writer developed a ROM that has check engine light as a shift light capabilities. Due to the small size of the steering wheel, most of the tach is not visible. I had an Autometer 5" tach with a broken needle that had a good shift light on it. I removed the shift light and attached it to the gauge cluster bezel. I wired one side of the shift light to the cel wire located on the back of the gauge cluster. I grounded the other wire. In theory this should work and will allow me to watch for the light instead of staring at the tach. I think it came out nice:



Later this week more parts should show up. I am excited for them to arrive!