Captain Obvious

Excellent. Sounds like you an I had the same issue... We needed to turn our squeal shims into anti-squeal shims.

Gotcha. Good luck with the project!

Glad to help. I just took a look at the FSM years I have (downloaded from xenons30) and according to the service manuals, those switches were all over the map! Earliest I have is 72 (and I don't have 75), but pretty much everything else was different every year! 77 and 78 looked the same, but that doesn't do you any good. 71 might be the same as 72, but after seeing all the other changes over the years, I'm not really confident. Here's the earliest I have. Its from a 72. Note that the diagram is turned 90 degrees from the way they depicted later years and I find it harder to read. But once you figure that out, it's not too bad. I made a couple notes to try to help: But you'll notice that there is NO connection that is hot in both ON and START. There are a couple choices for ON and there area couple for START, but nothing that covers both. They are mutually exclusive other than the hot at all times source wire. So you either need a 71 manual or forget the manual completely and just measure the connections on the back of the switch. I'm not sure what you want is available that year. Is there a specific reason you want hot in START? Not intending to pass judgment, but it seems a little odd. :bulb:

Hold on. You don't have it right yet... The wire going to what you have identified as position #14 is the SOURCE for all the other functions and it's hot at all times. Of course "hot at ALL times" include both "ON" and "START", but that's not what you're looking for. The only choice you have for a wire that is hot in both ON and START (and only in ON and START) is the one going to position 16. According to the wiring diagrams, you're after the black/white wire, and it was used on earlier years for ballast defeat when starting and on later years for that as well as powering the ignition module, etc. All that said though, according to the wiring diagrams, there was a change in the ignition switches between 72 and 73... The 72 version I have shows NO such connection available at the switch like they do in all the later years. In 72 (and presumably earlier?) The black/white wire is only hot in START, and not in ON. So... This might depend on what year you're working on? If you're working on what's in your sig, then you might not have any option.

The arrows should be pointing in the direction of forward wheel rotation, and I've also found from experience that they do matter. I had an intermittend brake squeal and when I pulled my pads, I found my PO had installed those shims backwards. I flipped them around and my squeal hasn't come back since. I was thrilled it was that simple.

There were a couple small issues with rev. "L", so Revision "M" has just been uploaded. It's awesome.

Here's the latest. It's Revision "M". It includes the two changes mentioned above (voltage regulator and illumination light in the Temp/Oil gauge): 1977 Color Wiring Diagram Version M.pdf Wayne had asked for me to take a look at it and upload it if I got the chance. Never tried to attach a pdf before, so let's hope this works right!! Thanks again Wayne!!

Agreed... It's simply astounding that you didn't jump a tooth or run a chunky bit through the chain. Murphy must have been off doing something else. You might want to watch your back.

I'm pullin' for ya!! Let's hope that's the end of it!

Yes, it's basically another injector that dumps fuel in, and it's located just behind the throttle body. You should be able to find it by following the fuel lines. The fuel line that shoots over towards the throttle body goes to the cold start injector. The cold start injector is not under the control of the fuel injection ECU in any way other than it's connected to the same fuel source. If there's fuel pressure, the cold start injector should spray even if the fuel injection ECU has been completely removed from the car. Assuming it's cold enough to warrant needing the cold start injector, the cold start injector should spray when the engine is CRANKING, and it won't do that forever. There's a temperature controlled switch (known as the thermotime switch) that will cut off the cold start injector after a few seconds of spraying regardless if the engine has started or not. Take a look in the FI literature about the thermotime switch. That's what controls the cold start injector. The ECU has nothing to do with it.

Excellent. Glad you got it back together and that the tensioner didn't take out any other parts when it snapped. Your tensioner clicked into position all right. Into position at the bottom of the front cover that is!! Impossible to go back at this time, but I wonder what happened. You think you didn't get the tensioner plunger into position correctly at the very beginning? My guess is that it slipped out and was wedged on an angle from the very beginning and that's why you had such a hard time getting the cam chain on. And it went from there. I liked your shot holding the distributor drive shaft from the top. I did the same thing when I was changing my oil pump and didn't want to mess with the timing. Looked like this:

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!!