Captain Obvious

I'd leave the wheels on and grab the tires and rock them around up/down and side/side. You need the mechanical amplification of the tire diameter to feel for looseness. If you are measuring right at the hub, the amount of movement is reduced because your fulcrum is shorter. Mine were pretty loose and even as loose as they were, I couldn't really tell by grabbing just the hub. And yeah... It's a PITA.

Beautiful. I'm going to have to redo mine in the (hopefully) near future as well. Hope mine turns out that well!

That's what I figured as well. And I don't think you can put them on and end up with partial covering, can you? I think if you get them on wrong, you completely occlude the oil feed hole. I haven't been in there in many moons however, so memory is quite fuzzy. Well good luck with the investigation and keep us posted! It's just so odd to be on the other side of the fence. You so often hear people complain about low oil pressure. How often do you hear the opposite!

Appreciate the input, and as a matter of fact, cable adjustment was something else I tried before resorting to the return spring. When I first got the car, I had four or five clicks up to set the parking brake. Handle would rattle around and sometimes flash the brake bulb as Jim mentioned above. So, after convincing myself that I wasn't missing some return spring somewhere in the system, I did exactly what you suggested... I adjusted the brake cable to take out some of the slack. After the adjustment, the handle stayed down much better than before, but still rattled a little sometimes. I also only got two clicks out of it before the brake was fully set, and it just didn't feel right to me. Maybe I was just used to those four or five clicks, but I liked it that way. Now I can have my cake and eat it too. Four or five clicks up to set the brake, and positive stop down when not in use. PS - Love the rock that came with the car as a wheel chock! That's classic!

Ok, then war it is! I put an LED in my dome light a couple months ago and I love it!! Story goes like this... About a year ago I bought a cheap "cool white" festoon bulb off Amazon and I hated it. I found it very harsh compared to the original incandescent. Even though it was supposed to be brighter than the incandescent it replaced, I found it harder to see with that typical harsh "cool white LED light". What I really wanted was a warm white bulb, but the problem is that the warm whites are always dimmer than their cool white counterparts and I was worried that it wouldn't be bright enough. So... I went one size larger and got one of these from superbright in warm white: I had to grind a little off the brass clip fingers in order to stuff it into the dome lamp housing, but now that it's in there, I absolutely love it! The whiter white from the LED style perfectly offsets the yellowing old lens plastic giving me a perfect incandescent "looking" light style. And going one size too large gives me an increase in light output that it's a good upgrade from the original incandescent without melting the lens with a larger wattage bulb. I'm not going for the dash bulbs, but for the done lamp? War it is!! I bet you would open my door and when the lamp would come on, you would think "Hmm... Seems brighter than mine", but you would NOT think "Oh... He's got one of those stupid LED lamps in there".

My keen troubleshooting skills are now telling me that it's not the ballast resistor or the connections to it. You can disregard my previous input. I'd take a look at the switch on the back of the ignition key assy.

Could also be a problem with the ballast resistor or connections to it maybe?

I've never studied the intricacies of the oiling system routing in the block, but that rear galley plug is post filter, isn't it? Also, someone mentioned the possibility of having the crank bearings in backwards thereby blocking off the oil holes. I'm assuming that crank bearing(s) with no lube would have spun long ago, right? There's no chance that this is the issue is it? Hey... I have to ask.

Well it really sucks to tear down the motor not knowing what it is your looking for, or even if there's anything at all. Could you feel comfortable with one assumption... The assumption that if there IS some obstruction somewhere, it is upstream of the pump. Between the pump and the filter? If you operate under that assumption, then maybe you could just drop the pump and remove the filter and blackflow from the filter holes back towards the pump and see if anything pops out? Make some sort of block off plate that you could bolt onto the filter location to facilitate an air or solvent supply?

How about pulling the valve cover off and seeing what kind of oil flow you've got up at the cam while you're spinning the pump? Might give you some insight into whether the pressure is high throughout the system as opposed to something restricting the flow closer to the pump? I'm thinking that if you get great flow out of the cam, then you've got an overactive oil pump. But if you've got 75psi at the pump and just a dribble at the cam, then you might have a problem somewhere in between? Just tossing out ideas...

I don't know what oil pressure would be expected at what RPM and temperature, but I guess I wouldn't be surprised to get 75 psi at 2500 RPM on a stone cold engine in un-worn good condition with thick oil. You're clearly bumping against the pressure relief valve built into the pump, but that's not necessarily a problem. As for the leaking rear main seal, I don't think there should be any link between the oil pressure and the leak at the rear main. There's no way that seal should ever be seeing pressurized oil. The back side of that seal has gotta be open to the pan somehow. Been so long since I've been in there personally that I don't remember how, but it's just gotta be. The cocked rear main could certainly be an issue... Not sure how much misalignment your typical garter spring seal can tolerate. You said that you turned the crank while applying oil pressure and you could see it trying to seep. Does it do the same seeping when you turn the crank and there is NOT oil pressure?

Haha!! That's exactly the same straw that made me go through this effort! The rattling was annoying enough, but sometimes I would get the same brake warning flash you have. Here I thought I was the only one! I found it very disconcerting. The spring, unfortunately wasn't a right off the shelf option. I looked around a bunch for something that off the shelf that would work, and the best I could find was just "OK". What I did was made a "semi-custom" spring... I found a spring that was a suitable diameter and gauge and applied an appropriate amount of pull, but it was way longer than I needed. It was probably about a foot long. So I cut off portions of that long spring and reformed the hooks on the ends. The good part about that is that I could make the hooks in any configuration I wanted to best fit the parts they connected to. If you take a close look at the pics, you can see that the hook on the two ends are not symmetric and go off at weird angles to best fit the application. So anyone want one of these? In the beginning, I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out drilling holes in the brake assy, so I bought a spare to mess around with instead of taking the chance that I was going to mess something up. As it turns out, the first one turned out so well that I swapped it out for the one on my car and then did my original. What that means is that I've got a spare available for someone who doesn't have the means to do this themselves... $30? Send me PM?

Why yes... Yes it is. Haha!! Glad to help! Of course, if you have an Ohmmeter that is capable of truly working down in the low ohm area, you should be able to tell what went where just by checking resistances. My meters aren't that good... I have one that might work for that, but it eats batteries and seems like every time I grab it, the battery is dead. Honestly, I almost always find myself reaching for my cheap (disposable) HF meters. I've got one in every room of the house. Cheap and good for reality checks, but I wouldn't trust it to tell me the difference between a half an Ohm and one Ohm.

One of the things that's always bugged me was the lack of a return spring on the parking brake handle. The first couple clicks on my car were completely loose and floppy and the handle would rattle a little over bumps when driving because there was really nothing to hold the handle down. So I fixed it... I added a return spring. I messed around with a couple different options and here is the method I thought was the best option. Here's the parking brake assy from the top side. Looks completely normal from the top: But on the bottom side, I drilled a couple holes and made a spring to pull the handle down into the off position, Not a lot of force, but just enough to overcome stiction and the little spring in the warning lamp switch: Here's a close-up of the spring: I gotta say that I really really like the modification. The handle stays down, doesn't rattle, and has much more of a positive feel to it when it reaches the OFF end of travel. It's unobtrusive and doesn't require any other changes to the car. It's all located on the dry clean side and I don't have to worry about the spring rusting or sticking... It's the little things that really increase the sense of driving pleasure!!

These Z-Cars don't go off unless you hit them juuuuusst right.

You don't backfeed through the transistor. You backfeed through the other injector(s). Maybe these sketches will help with the weirdness. Here's why you would see +12 on both sides of the injector connector if you pull just one: And here's why you should be able to determine which side is which if you pull all of them (or at least the ones that share a transistor):

Good eye!!

I just did the internally regulated alternator modification and as a side benefit of doing that work, I now know the charging systems inside and out. Armed with that dubious knowledge, I discovered a mistake on the 77 color wiring diagram. Inside the voltage reglulator, some of the components are misplaced: Not sure it's enough to warrant revision "L" or save it until there's more, but if I didn't write it down, I was going to forget! This wiring diagram is better than sliced bread. Way better!

Well the symptoms say "lean miss", but the SM needles say "richer than necessary" at almost all points. Only place they are leaner is way way up by the shank. I would expect that you're above that area at pretty much any spot except maybe idle? In your original post, you said that you "seated the needles against the seats". What do you mean by that?

There's no pull ups on the injector outputs inside the ECU. However, unless you pull all the injector connectors off at the same time (at least all the ones that share the same transistor) you'll read 12 back feeding through the other injectors and their dropping resistors. In other words, for example... If you pull the connector off injector #2 and probe the contacts for voltage WRT ground: One side will read 12V because it's pulled up to Vbatt through it's dropping resistor. The other side will ALSO read 12 volts because it's pulled up through the solenoid coils of injectors #1 and #3 through THIER dropping resistors to Vbatt. If you pull all the injector connectors at the same time, you should be able to determine which side is hot and which side is pulled to ground by the ECU. Does that make sense? Did I say that right? :bulb:

In addition to pulling off the cover over the ECU, I think you'll want to remove the small trim strip that runs horizontal above the driver's knees. I don't think there's enough room to swing the big ECU connector off it's bottom hook if you don't take out that trim panel as well. Before you start poking around at the ECU connector... Have you checked the big fusible link(s) that feeds the whole fuel injection system? Goes right from the battery to the FI harness? Spade connectors on both ends to facilitate replacement if necessary. You should have 12V on both sides of that link at all times.

The SM needles should run richer than stock and there's no reason you should be running lean with them. They should be capable of delivering more than enough fuel for your motor. Can you get your hands on a wideband to help nail down if it's a fuel problem or not?

The garage is calling. The mice want company too. :laugh:

You got sparks at the plugs?

I'm bidding them to please take that memory away from me and let me forget I ever saw that ad. Unfortunately, I'll never get those thirty seconds of my life back. :sick: