pma1123 submitted a new DSM Profile :

PMA1123's Talon


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It seems completely silly; building one of these cars to go destroy in the winter.

But around 2010 our local "studless ice tire" winter rally class was becoming pretty popular and I was assembling this Talon as a street car/Ice racer.

This event is an autocross on a frozen lake. There were really only 2 winters where the weather/lake ice thickness behaved well enough to enter the car during this tenure of operation. And of course it was FUN; just infrequent having safe ice.

But when you have a 'winter DSM' that is fun to drive/registered/insured and the lakes aren't frozen; you take it out on the streets. (in the salt)

And when you have a 'summer DSM' at the same time and the snow melts, you really don't spend you summer working on the 'winter DSM' that has summer wheels, rusted dragging brakes and 15 other compounding problems.

In February 2015 I pulled the Talon into the garage and shut it off, parked it in the corner with intentions of fixing all these problems.

It got put on jack stands, taken apart, ignored, interior filled with parts, nearly sold.....and then 8 years later banished to the back yard in 22/23 when I tore down the old garage and built a new one.



It has been quietly sitting in the corner of the new garage for a couple years.

The passenger front tire leaks air so it requires continual refilling every few weeks.
I'm about sick and tired of doing that.



Welcome to the rebuild thread.

Despite popular belief, sitting in the garage is hard on things. These are not coffee tables.


Drained the fuel.

More on that to follow.










There was a time I decided to spray the underhood/underbody stuff with Fluid Film out of a bulk spray gun, and I have all this grease/grime coated rust flakes constantly raining down. With the engine out, I'm looking forward to putting the car up on jackstands and using my favorite degreaser (S-100) and the power washer to knock off all the grease, spider webs and rust flakes.

It'll make laying underneath so much better!!

I'll be back to talk about engine disassembly and fuel tank stuff next.

Less exciting update than the fuel and engine stuff I just mentioned, but a good place holder.

Last night I was laying under the car with the power washer till after dark.
Everything underhood and underneath is a lot cleaner and I was able to push the car back in the garage.
The driveway was absolutely full of crunchy crusty stuff this morning as I walked out to go to work.

Added a picture of cleaning the transmission with S100 degreaser mixed 50/50 with water.
Sprayed it on, let it sit 5 mins, hosed it off.
At some point I'll use this as the ultrasonic solution and show how amazing it works.

The pan of bad gasoline has been sitting outside evaporating off and there is 1/4" deep slurry at the bottom of the pan now.
So if you need to get rid of some, it seems to go away pretty quickly this way.

I now have several avenues to go down between cleaning/blasting rusty parts, fuel tank, motor mounts, engine teardown, restoring fasteners, brakes, suspension, tires, etc.

Till next time!

Managed to blast/prime/paint these items over the weekend.

Quick bath with mineral spirits and brakleen to get things ready for teardown.

Keep up the good work

Thanks brother!!! Same goes for you too!!!
Seeing the passion of others in these build threads is what makes me walk out the door after dinner and head for the garage.

Last night I spent an hour on disassembly; valve cover off, valvetrain removed, exhaust manifold studs soaking in PB blaster, bagging and tagging hardware for cleanup.
Overall happy with the ''re-usableness" of what I see so far; all rockers roll nicely, cam bearing journals look alright.
I am planning to send the head out for a once-over and new valve seals.

The lurking shortblock concern is knowing I ran this ~30Kmi on Rotella oil with an un-cooled NT filter housing.

Have things down to the shortblock and the bores look good. We're looking at .5mm over Wisecos and 1G big rods.
Struggled getting the pan off more than normal because I used Right Stuff. But also it wasn't showing signs of leaking.
The alternator bracket/WP bolt is broke off flush in the block so I will have to work that out.
Parts cleanup, parts ordering, and more disassembly to come.

Over the weekend, I got into the gas tank. This is a multi-step, multi-day deal.
There are several items to address here and we're going to talk about all of it.

So lets begin by saying this was parked with a half tank of fuel for 10 years as a datapoint of 'how bad'.

Some hack long ago cut the trunk floor (sub box?) and proceeded to lay down 2 tubes of silicone caulk to cover it up.

Step one was to cut all of the caulk when the tank wouldn't drop out with all fasteners/hoses/filler neck removed and all of my weight hanging from it underneath. (STRONG stuff!!)

This also leads to discovering the "exploration hole"; about a 3/4" step drill hole right in the top of the tank! This was covered by a US quarter JB welded over the top of it.

The sending unit studs, nothing broke.
The gas tank shroud, 1 bolt broke I'll have to deal with later.
The original return line, sheared right off.
The fuel filler assembly, I gotta look at that some more.

Some of you are saying "SWEET, he's going to use that Rust 911 stuff!!"
But you see, I ordered that a week ago...its still not here and this tank is really BAD!!

This is where my impatience and Step Zero of the cleaning process begins. All of these supplies come from the paint section at the home improvement store.

I dumped in a half gallon of Lacquer thinner in the tank and started scraping with a long stick. It was on sale for $15/gal. YUCK....not really doing much to this mess. Rotated it around a bunch, flipped it over and drained it off after a couple hours of that. Nasty stuff drained out.

NEXT.....I grabbed a box of roofing nails, dropped about 2.5lbs worth in there and dumped the other half gallon of lacquer thinner in. Proceeded to shake that all around for a while on and off for a couple hours. Dumped out the liquid, noticed more solids breaking away.

Next I decided to try Tolulene since the internet said that works good on old gas. The stuff is $27 a gallon. I sorted out my used roofing nails and re-installed them, dumped in a half gallon and shook the daylights out of this for a couple hours rotating it around during rest sessions.

Dumped the liquid off into an appropriate vessel. Noticed lots more solids and began lightly banging the sides of the tank on the lawn to dislodge crusty stuff. I dumped the solids and nails out on a piece of cardboard.

This is where we are after Tolulene + Nails.

With the tolulene fumes quickly evaporating off, I threw the tank in the truck and headed down to the gas station, put $5 worth of E85 in there!

I also added 5lbs of roofing nails and several handfuls of gravel from my driveway. Shook it all around, rotated it, shook it some more.

Its still sitting there soaking as I type this, but I retired for the evening feeling great that I got to see things looking like this:

Without trying to make this a multi-page thread about gas tank cleaning pictures; these pics were after Round 1 of nails, gravel, E85 and lots of shaking.

The bottom of the tank is pretty clean, the varnish residue is still along the sides and top of the tank.
I think with the level of abrasion inside the tank while shaking all of this around, you probably could wash this out really well and declare this halfway run-able as it stands.

Tonight I'm planning to dump off Round 2 E85 / gravel / nails and next move to a box of drywall screws (sharper!) and gravel.
The coming days are just Soak, Shake, Rotate, repeat. I have enough lacquer thinner and toluelene left to try each once more before a big wash-out job.

I'm supposed to see the Rust 911 solution show up today; I'll make another post after doing more solvent/mechanical cleaning and a wash-up. The Rust 911 should take the inside cleaning job over the finish line.

And we know once the inside is clean, the outside still needs various things attended to.