Furballs and Swedish Crust

[slammed240wagon]

Hello everybody!

I've been a lurker here for over a year, and it comes with great excitement to start my own garage thread. I found a great deal on my first house, and work began as soon as I moved in. The progress is slow, but I'll try to update every time I have something new for you guys.

Basic move-in pic

It was UUUUGLY, but full of potential. I love the tall ceiling and man door in the back.

Initial move-in

This was not how I wanted to start out, but there was only 10 days between the closing on my house and the end of my lease at the apartment. It's crazy how small a room becomes when it's disorganized.

After lots of imperative repairs in order to undo the previous owners' DIYs and negligence, I finally made it to the garage. This weekend's project is what inspired me to start a thread.

Rustoleum 2.5 car garage floor Epoxy kit. This was mine and my buddy's first time trying this, so it was an adventure. I think it turned out pretty well considering. There are things I wish I did differently, but I like it better than bare concrete! I will post more progress as I make it. Other parts of the house are atrocious, but I don't want to post that up until I can give you all an "after" pic.

By the way, my title refers to the tons of dog hair and dead rabbits left behind and the stuff I'll be dropping on the floor when I'm settled.

 

[slammed240wagon]

There are many plans for the place, but I will have to take it one step at a time. I want to build a closet for the air handler and water heater. It bothers me that it was placed in the garage when the house has a full basement, but oh well. The dry wall will have to be removed, so that insulation can be put in. The work bench top my great grandpa built out of an old bowling alley floor will be utilized too. I need more money and more time first! Stay tuned.

 

[Strouty]

Looks good, more info on the 240!

 

[slammed240wagon]

Looks good, more info on the 240!

Thanks! 240 is getting the 4.8/4L60e from the truck. I drove and tinkered with it for two years while I was in school and then it became a little too far beyond repair. Since I loved the car so much I figured I would rescue it and do what I wanted to it. There's an 8.8 LSD 3:73 rear end back there and matching hubs up front which is how I was able to fit the old wheels from my Buick on there.

Here are some old pics from back when the goal was simply keeping it alive. Keep in mind that the car was already severely bastardized when I bought it!

Shortly before I ripped it all apart

A couple years ago

You don't need 4WD to get around in the snow. I passed several trucks stuck in their parking spots on this day.

The day I bought it.

The car has been through a ton of transformations.

 

[slammed240wagon]

I finally got the main frame of my bench completed! The top came from my great grandfather's workshop. He built it out of a lane from the bowling alley that closed Inear their house in the 50s. It feels awesome to have it in my own shop now. I will be putting wood paneling on the sides as well as doors to cover the shelves. Now I need a stool and a vise. It was a small victory to hear the compressor kick on in the mini fridge. It's been moved 8 times since I bought it, and has been unplugged for over a year. It's seen some abuse, and I know I'll never get some of those stickers back!

I also finally replaced the horrible brass petcock drain valve on my air compressor with a 90 degree elbow, some pipe, and a ball valve. It's another small victory that made life so much better.

I still have a lot of garage work to do before I can really get any good work on the car done in here, but it's coming along quicker now that I'm pretty much done inside the house. However, Car Project #1 has already happened anyway. My donor truck bit the dust, so it was time to harvest the goods. The floor went to good use!

So dirty . I'm hoping to get some lighting next!

 

[pwschuh]

Any info about how you got the 8.8 in there? How did you do the parking brakes?

 

[slammed240wagon]

I bought the rear end from another Volvo guy, so the work was already done for me. However there a is a lot of information on Turbobricks. To get the rear end in the car, you need to cut and weld the brackets from the old Dana to the 8.8 in their same positions. It's best to make a jig so that you don't screw it up. Then it also has to be narrowed. The most common way is to chop the driver side so that both sides are equal length. Then you can put 2 passenger side axles in. It's better to have the pumpkin centered anyway. I personally don't think it's narrow enough though. I'll have that done by a pro some day though. I'm not comfortable with doing that kind of work myself.

As for the park brake, you will need to get creative or spend good money on custom cables. I think mine are going to be left out, because I never use it anyway. It's redundant in an automatic.

 

[pwschuh]

OK, thanks. Parking brake is not redundant on an automatic if you park on hills. The parking pawl on your transmission will not be happy. If you're mostly on the flat, you should be fine.

 

[cowboy73]

Welcome the Garage Journal! I don't live to far south of ya. The garage is looking a lot better.

 

[slammed240wagon]

Welcome the Garage Journal! I don't live to far south of ya. The garage is looking a lot better.

Thanks! I'll have a buddy from work come by this fall to upgrade my lighting and electrical. 15A isn't even enough to run my tiny compressor. That should make working with the door closed a lot easier.

 

[Kevkx125]

Looks good, think about moving air handler and water heater to the basement would clean up the garage a bit.

 

[slammed240wagon]

Looks good, think about moving air handler and water heater to the basement would clean up the garage a bit.

Well yeah that would be nice, but that's also a big project! Sadly, I don't have the expertise to do either one. :/

 

[slammed240wagon]

I wish that I had been updating this as I went... Lots has happened over the past year and a half! I'll try to find some old pictures later.

 

[v6buick]

lol... I got bored and decided to look for this thread. Slammed240wagon would be so disappointed to learn that he continues living in this house and working out of that garage for the at least the next 10 years.

I'm the man formerly known as slammed240wagon. I couldn't figure out the login credentials, so I made a new account a few years ago that better reflects my current hobbies. Frankly, I have no idea what I meant by "Furballs" in the title of this thread. I'm guessing it had to do with the intense amount of pet hair that was in this house when I moved in? That was along time ago.

The garage hasn't been expanded unless you count the car part storage and workshop I built in the basement. I have made the space a bit more useful since then though. Let's see if I can summarize ten years of garage details in one night of online boredom.

I was 23 and very naive when I first started this thread. I didn't know the first thing about home repair. It would turn out that I knew very little about automotive repair either. The slammed 240 wagon I was trying to LS swap and make nice again was too much for my tools, resourses, and lack of experience. After selling everything that was worth anything I was able to buy an El Camino to haul the rest of it to scrap or whoever needed parts.

This picture of the Volvo still wrenches my gut. I have had MUCH cooler and MUCH faster cars since I drove this one. Yet it's still the most fun car ever had and likely always will. R.I.P.

I kept the iconic roof skin though. I have yet to figure out a cool way to repurpose it, but I'm cool with it staying on the basement cieling for now.

Here's a picture of my work bench from around that time. I haven't said it in this thread, so I'm saying it now. It's way too tall, and I regret building it this way. It remains in place though. It's wild how much darness I dealt with back then!

All along, I knew the El Camino was jut something fun to tool around with and actually enjoy driving while I searched for my dream car. It was rust free and a steal at $3800. It ran like trash, but I knew I could fix it and flip it if I wanted to.

This too tuned into a bigger project than anticipated and I learned my lesson on "good deals". I got it running pretty decent but still not quite perfect. Why that was the case would become apparent after blowing a head gasket 50 miles from home. The 305 (actually a Jasper reman bored to 310) had a stock cylinder head on one side and some sort of big chamber 350 head on the other side. No wonder this thing ran so rough and blew a gasket! The compression ratios of each bank were way off. I ended up turning both heads in for cores on some fresh reman heads for $80, slammed it all together, and successfully completed the most involved automotive repair that I had ever done myself.

I was proud of how much better I made the engine run, but also beyond over the car and it's hackery by that time. I promptly sold the car for a much smaller profit than I wanted, but a profit nonetheless. After that experience I was even more over the garage situation than the cars. Upgrades would need to happen to the garage before proceeding with any more big projects. I hired a friend to add a subpanel and lights to the garage, an outlet to the basement, and give me the cabinetry he was throwing away.

By this time you can see that I had at least fundamentally switched from being slammed240wagon to v6buicks.

I had seen sombody do this before and thought it was cool, so I tried it too. It's an underbench mounted tool holder.

 

[v6buick]

I filled the bolt holes with wood filler to keep it flat. Here's a picture I just took to also give you an idea of how much has happened in/to the garage since then.

This tool holder never gets used anymore though. I made mounts for the bench grinder and polisher but that's it. The polisher got used once and the bench grinder stays in the basement so that I'm not flinging metal on the cars. It's kind of a hassle to move the grinder anyway. Oh well! Maybe I'll find a need for this again someday. Until then it's not in the way of anything.

One change that I have not regretted at all is moving my little Craftsman compressor to the basement. I love not needing to hear my comressor running all the time as I'm using it. it's also real estate I can't afford to lose in the garage. As I've developed a family it hasn't been bothering them in the house either. I bought a 1/2" pex kit and hose reel off Northern tool and started getting creative.


Attached this hose roller from Amazon to the cieling, and viola. Did putting the hose real in the attic accomplish anything? Well my air hose feels nice and warm on sunny days. This Klutch hose reel isn't loud by any means, but it's even quieter now. Keeping the reel out of view makes the garage look less cluttered which is definitley the most appreciated.

As much as I would love to have my air handler and water heater in the basement rather than the garage, I have a few issues with it. 1.) That's mega expensive for something that will yield no return if/when I ever leave this place. 2.) I'm a cheapskate and don't want to disturb utilities that are in good working order! The entire HVAC system was replaced when I moved into the house, but I may move the water heater to the basement whenever it's days on earth are over. Until then, I've got them walled off with peg board.

It took a while to get this right, but I'm happy I did it. This wall is not permanent. Theres a latch on the top to keep the wall from moving around, but it's on small casters so that whenever I need major service done, it's not terribly difficult to access. I quickly began to despise doing this though, so I cut and framed an access hole for easy filter changes. Since then I've only needed to pull the wall out once for a blower motor replacement. Hopefully the next time involves removing a dead water heater and putting it downstairs. That space would be perfect for my tool box!

 

[v6buick]

I cleaned the garage up really nice before hosting a GS Club of America meeting at my house. Unfortunatley the Indiana chapter has unofficially folded. This is probably not surprising given the amount of chairs arounfd the table!

More remnants of my 240 converted into a desk chair. It was cool, but it was also a bit sketchy. I alsways felt like I was going to tip over if I leaned back too fast. I sold it at our garage sale last year for $20.

I built this shelf out of scrap to hold this cheap heater I got off marketplace. This was all stupid and regrettable. It made more sense to buy a real heater that's meant for the job than cobble this mess together. When this heater bit the dust, I did the right thing and went to Rural King.

This was a fun day.


The belt broke and slung debris all over my Buick. The replacement belt was cheap and easy to get though. Also take note of my stereo placement. I'm sure this is no secret to the site, but I love having it above the bulkhead. I also added a bluetooth reciever, so I don't have to deal with the crappy radio reception made worse by the florescent lights. Keeping the whole thing above the bulkhad utilizes useless space and allows me to jam without bothering the neighbors. It's loud in the garage, but stays shockingly quiet in the driveway. Now i just need to stop misplacing the remote.

Some people love having big tool boxes. Others like shelves and cabinets. I'm a sucker for mounting things to the wall. These gas bottle holders are awesome becasue there is no shelf or drawer in my garage with enough space to stand them up!


On the wall seems to be the cleanest way to store grease guns too. Maybe I've gone too far with the wrenches ont he wall, but this has been may favorite way to maintain easy access, easily see which ones are missing, and easily find the next size up when I have a metric to standard brain fart. lol It's just been a bunch of nails in the draywall for years which has been mostly unproblematic, but I may need to make somthing a bit more robust soon.

With all this wall hanging going on, I decided to hang my leftover peg board in the basement.

For a somewhat short period of time, I was using this insanely overkill on/off switch I found in the trash at work to turn the lights on and off in the garage. It's a cool pice that I still have, but it's not very practical. I will find a better use for it someday. I prefer to keep my garage lights motion activated. It's nice being able to see as soon as I pull a car in or walk into the garage with my hands full.

 

[v6buick]

You can just barely see my air tool holder on the back wall. I love that thing too. I think it was a Summit piece. I just hope my wall is anchors can hold all that weight! A friend gave me that ugly flesh colored stronghold. I should have waited to do anything with it until I painted it, but it is what it is. At this point, it's so covered in magnets and RockAuto magnets that you can't tell what color it is!

I love when work throws stuff away. I scored a small maple bench top that I decided was perfect for my basement work shop. I whipped up stand, and quickly ditched the folding table I was working on. I added another outlet too since I knew I'd hate having it under the table.

There still aren't enough space saving techniques in the world to make this garage great with two cars in it, but I'll take what I can get!

What's this? Another toy?

You have already been informally introduced to my Buick, but let's just take a minute to break the ice. My dream car was always a factory intercooled Grand National. I finally got one int he summer of 2016. It was a two owner 1986 with 43k miles on the clock. When people ask me about it they think I'm nuts when I say "Don't meet your heros!" For such a nicely kept rust-free car, it has been a massive pain in my a**! I've even listed it for sale twice. We will get more into that when we get further into the garage story.

The GN humbled me very early into my ownership. I was used to working on jalopies and doing farm fixes, but I was not used to having a car that I was scared of "ruining". I had never owned a car worth as much as this one and everything I did that strayed away from originality seemed like a mistake. Keeping this car alive and healthy was not the same hobby I had when I was playing with any of my previous toys. This was a lot more expensive, more nerve-wracking, and my standards were much higher. It seemed like a worse and worse of an idea to modify this really nice Buick with my hillbilly methods, so I started planning a jalopy build that would satisfy my need for speed with Buick power.

In came a 2002 Camaro. It kinda fell into my lab when my buddy's dad said he needed to let it go. I didn't really want a V6 Camaro, but I did want a stick shift RWD 3800, so I would have been dumb to say no. Besides, I remember when he bought the car brand new and used it to drive us to baskeball games when we were about 10 years old. I can brush up on this car some more by request, but I don't want to take too much away from the garage itself. To make a long story short, the Camaro build was a huge success. I REALLY learned how to wrench with this car. It taught me how and why cheap parts don't usually pay off. It taught me how to and how not to modify cars. The end goal was to turbocharge it all on my own, and refine it as necessary. I pretty much did that, and it gave me the confidence and knowledge I needed to eventually give the GN a dignified refresh.

Then there's the 2010 Volvo C30 T5. That was my daily driver before I bought the house unitil 2023. I'm proud to say I put 200k miles on that car doing my own maintenance before letting her go. It was a fantasic car and I almost feel bad for trading it in to get a new Chevy truck. That one obviosly comes along a lot later.




I also ended up getting my girlfriend (now wife) into another 1989 mid-blue 245 DL. Unfortunatley it casued us a lot of grief. I would have loved to keep it if I didn't have so many other projects. 30 year old cars don't tend to make great daily drivers... especially in the rust states!


Then there was this guy... I loved it, put way too much money into it, sold it for too little, and I wish I had it back. '88 C1500 Silverado with the 350 TBI. Paint was bad but here was no rust! Cab corners, cab mounts, and bed were in excellent shape which is crazy since it was so mechanically neglected.

Those are all the cars worth mentioning. Now you know the entire fleet!

 

[v6buick]

Here's that heater upgrade. I think it was $200 at Rural King back in the day. It looks and functions a lot better than the goofy redbox it replaces. My garage is toasty all winter now.

Looks like the Camaro got a bath. I miss seeing her in one piece!

I found that I was almot always using my MIG welder in the same spot and blowing breakers. Since there was already a hole in the drywall under the panel where a telephone jack used to live, I figured why not add the easiest dedicated outlet ever?


No more breaker popping!

I have a strange sense of humor. We modernized the inside of the house and the garage lights ended up not reusing the same light circuit and switch as the existing. I thought it would be funny to put the old chandelier in where the old single bulb fixure was. Afterall, this is Buick garage now.

For real though. I need to get rid of this and add a cieling fan here. I'd have to move the box and leave a hole in the cieling, but I think it would be a great use of the switch and wiring. It gets insanely hot in here during the summer.

Garage glam shot after installing new exterior lights. In the foreground is the unfortunate (wife and I disagree on this ) replacement for the the second 240.

Sure enough, I can't summarize 10 years in one night. I'll revisit this thread another time. I promise it will be sooner than another 10 years fom now.

 

[v6buick]

My son is taking a nap so I'll try to squeeze in some more excuses as to why my garage is .

I've never really taken the time or money to make the garage what I'd like it to be. The main issue is that I've been working on ongoing projects or issues almost perpetually since I moved in. I've usually prioritized the those over the garage itself, and the scope of my work is almost limitless.

Rust remediation

 

[v6buick]

Paint


Interior

 

[v6buick]

board level electrical




AC

 

[v6buick]

LOTS of brake work




Rebuilds

 

[v6buick]

Exhaust

 

[v6buick]

.... everything really. Jack of a lot of trades and master of none. I've learned my limits. There are a lot of things I don't ever want to do again, but if push came to shove I'd do better next time around.

 

[v6buick]

Back on topic.

The point was that I just got used to my terrible garage and dealt with it's SHORTcomings. Have I mentioned that it's 19x22? I have room for benches on both sides but I can't park either of my toys in the garage with the door shut AND work under the hood unless I park them diagonally. This seems to be less of an issue now though. My son was born about a year and half ago, so my Camaro has stayed in it's sad state of torn apart since then. The GN is actually in better shape now than it likely has been in decades, but it's winter storage space is unheated and far from ideal. I hope I don't pull it out in the spring covered in mouse droppings and corrosion. Regardless, I've lost a lot of my motivation to work on anything. When I only have a few hours a week to get things done, I really want to make it count. That's tough to do when you spend the whole time tripping over tools and squeezing between the walls and whatever mess you've gotten into.

With that in mind, I've taken a hiatus from working on the Camaro. The non-rolling chassis is a sad sight for me to behold, but I'm confident that I'll get back to it. It's just too big of project for me to stay focused on with how little of time I have to play.

Instead I'm working on cleaning up my messes and taking on smaller projects that I never got around to. It was here on GJ many moons ago that I saw sombody build overhead shelving units for the first time, and I always thought they were an awesome use of otherwise wasted space. I never built any becasue my framing skills were **** and I didn't want it to look crappy. I finally got over it and realized that my whole garage looked crappy. I've always wanted that almost asylum-like cleanliness and brightness in my garage, but it's time to face facts. That's never going to happen for me. I'm a messy worker. I will eventually clean that mess up, but only right before diving into another messy project! It's time to build a shelf and get some junk off the basement floor.


Before the shelf I had an extra shop light suspended by chains from the cieling. Now it will be mounted directly to the underside of the shelf. The outlet is tied in with the rest of the lights so that it will come on with everything else. No more plugging lights into the wall.

Hooray! It's solid enough that I feel safe laying up there, and it's not in the way of anything. I just gained about 24 cubic feet of storage space, and feel dumb for not doing it sooner.

I didn't like the look of it though.

Let there be white! I had some leftover paint from rebuilding my screened porch, so this was cheap!

Another motivator for building this shelf was a specific item I wanted to keep on it. I was given this big old bell when my grandparents moved out of their home of 50 years. My great grandpa worked for Electromotive Diesel decommissioning locomotives, and sometimes came home with cool pieces like these. It's solid brass and paired with an ID plate. I have one of the windshields as a coffee table top as well.


It's one thing to have the bell, but I think it's way cooler to actually hear the bell and scare children with it. Continuing on the legacy, I "acquired" some bits from work, and rigged the old bell up to my air compressor. I love how it all turned out.

 

[v6buick]

ID plate mounted.

With that shelf done and whole bunch of stuff stored out of the way I moved on to a project I'd been itching to do. I bought a TIG welder over the summer for a deal that seemed too good to pass up. It's an AHP Alpha TIG200x with a gas bottle, upgraded torch, and bunch of consumables for $400. The previous owner even did a demo to prove that it worked. The trouble was that I didn't have a 220V outlet or a place to make good welds.

I thought the outlet debacle was a good excuse to finally do something about this hideous drywall. For the record, I didn't do the drywall in this garage. It was definitly a DIY job though and I would have done a much better job with zero experience. Oh well. It's a work space not an art gallery.

Done!


I found this foldable wall mounted stainless table online. It has a load rating of 200lbs and mounts with 8 long screws. I'm a fan! I'm not losing any usable wall space, and it tucks away nicely when I'm wanting to park a car on this side.


I threatened to throw that desk chair away many times. I'm so glad that never happened because it's perfect for this! Now I'm on the long road to figuring out how to make decent weld from this machine. I took a class a few years ago, so I'm not going in completely blind. However, I feel like I'm learning all over again. I will say I agree with the reviews about the pedal. I needs to go straight to the trash. It's merely an on/off switch and you get no current control at all.

 

[v6buick]

I almost forgot to tell you about this little side project I got into. I was working ont he Grand National refresh a couple years ago when I hit a wall. I was tired of wire wheeling stuff and still not getting all the corrosion off stuff, but I also needed a good basement project. The garage was getting to me. I did a lot of research and decided to get one of these.

My first impressions were that it's even worse than everyone says.

You're really only buying a sheetmetal box, and even that is ****.


What you're seeing above is a massive gap between the door and the cabinet with the door latched.

I kinda fixed most of it.

The light is very dim so I replaced it with these LED strips. I would recommnd super gluing them in place or something though. It evenually started to fall down.


I wanted a different suction and air feed system than whatwas supplied. After some research, I came up with this.



An extra hose was added for a blow gun as well.

 

[v6buick]

I quickly learned that clear hose is much better for the suction side. It's much easier to dial it in when you can see the media flow.

The factory 1/4" QC and regulator on my compressor would never be up to the task, so I did some hot rodding.

Granted, my entire compressor is wrong for the task, but a compressor isn't exactly in the budget either. I figured I'd be able to get by with what I had as a hobbyist.

The blast cabinet worked great.... for a little while. The media ate away at the original gun very fast and ruined it. I replaced it with a Northern Tool gun which wasn't cheap but wasn't expensive either. Either way, I was pretty disappointed that I needed to fix it right out of the packaging. The roll pin holding the trigger on was sized improperly and fell right out.

I tapped on side, drilled the other side a little bigger, and put a bolt in with red loctite. Trigger probably feels better than any of the others and definitly isn't falling off!

I keep the whole cabinet on this platform with casters. I never roll it around anywhere, but the platform brings the gloves up to a comfortable working height. This is good becasue my lack of compressor CFM means I stand here for a long time making parts ready to paint.

I sure am happy to have this in my arsenal though. Even with it's shortcomings I've made some absolute junk look like new again. I don't think I'd be happy with the GN today if I never bought the blast cabinet.

 

[v6buick]

That's about all I have to say about the garage right now. Now that you're mostly aware of the state of the union, I'm hoping to get a little better at my story telling and documentation from now on.

I'm in a pickle. On one hand, I am locked into a great mortgage that I won't have the opportunity to get again. On the other hand, I hate this garage. There's not a lot of room to expand either. I could probably expand it back 25-30' if I really wanted to spend my money on that, but at that point I would NEED to move the air handler and water heater to the basement, the condenser would probably have to sit on my patio, I would no longer have a great spot for my pool, and I really don't think an extra two stalls in my current garage would be enough to keep me happy long term. Hard to say.

Ideally, I'd have an attached garage that houses the daily drivers, a walk out basement with a garage door that would house my GN on a turntable all winter, and a shop for actually doing the work. The housing market just went wild and nothing I've seen for sale in my area seems worth leaving my current situation. Until I figure it out, my goals have been cheap experiments and equiment that I can move to a new garage downt he road. I REALLY want a lift, but it's not ver feasable in my garage as it is. I consider a scissor lift since that wouldn't require concrete work, there's no posts in the way, and I can move it relatively easily. My garage door is falling apart and needs replaced anyway, so I have no problem going ahead with that high lift kit when I get around to it. Getting a new door will be tough for as long as the Camaro is in pieces though! It's always something.

 

[Xti04]

I did a scissor lift for a couple of years prior to building my shop. Worked well especially for brakes or suspension work. Swapped to a high rise top rail on the garage door opener to get to where I could lift trucks and suvs inside. Tough to do transmission or other work that involves getting to middle of car but much better than doing work on the ground.

 

[v6buick]

I did a scissor lift for a couple of years prior to building my shop. Worked well especially for brakes or suspension work. Swapped to a high rise top rail on the garage door opener to get to where I could lift trucks and suvs inside. Tough to do transmission or other work that involves getting to middle of car but much better than doing work on the ground.

I guess that may be what I need to get over. Unless I hit the big time and can afford more space with multiple lifts there's going to be compromise. I'm certainly not pulling engines and transmissions regularly, but lifting a car off the ground with a floor jack and jack stands to do simple oil changes and tire rotations is becoming my least favorite chore.

We'll see. I'd still like to be sure that I'm in this house for the long haul before I make that plunge. My wife and I figure that we have until the kid is in school before we start feeling tied down.

 

[v6buick]

I don't have much to update right now in terms of the actual garage, but I'm excited that I finally broke down and got a new garage door which comes tomorrow. What lovely weather the intallers will have to do all that! I decided to go ahead and just get everything I want. New insulated door that won't scream every time I open or close it, obviously a new spring so I don't have to press AND hold the remote button, a jackshaft style opener so that I can fit a cieling fan, and a high-rise track so that I can get to my cabinets and shelf easier. I think a lift of some sort will follow in the next year or two. I'll be sure to post pictures of that once it's installed tomorrow.

Until I decided to do that the garage status has been very inactive compared to recent years. Both my wife and I work full time and have very little help from our families to raise our son, so garage time was stopped for a while. Learning that the AHP Welder I bought is an early version that doesn't really have aluminum capability wasn't motivating either. I had a couple hiccups with the GN that had me start thinking the rusty Camaro shell just had to go. I didn't have enough space to work on both, and GN certainly wasn't going anywhere. The idea of giving up on cars I love never sits well, and acting on it always results in regret. I decided to take a few days off, remidiate the rust issues, and make it roller. I'll spare you the details, but you'll see that it's come a long way.






Almost everything forward of the struts was cut off and rebuilt my way. For ease of major services, I made the radiator support a bolt-in piece. Now I should have no issues rolling an engine hoist in from the front to pull an engine if I so choose. I hate dropping them out the bottom. The new K-member and control arms are tubular. Viking coilovers were put in, and many other new parts will go in soon. It kinda stinks that I thrashed to get all this dirty nasty metal work done. Now that I'm at the fun part of this build again, I need to put the car away.

Rolled it out on it's own wheels for the first time in over two years.

loaded up

and in her new resting spot for the forseeable future. I have no idea when I'll get it back, but I really hope it will be sometime this coming year.

The only reason it's sad is because no car i've put in this barn has come out the same way I've left it. Either mice or moisture will find a way to undo my work, but it's better than any other option I have. On to better things!

Those hiccups I was having with the Buick? I figured those out long before all this, and the results were.... glorious? You'll see.
After that winter of doing nothing in the garage and being bummed about the welder, I decided that the GN needed to run right by any means necessary, and it need to to do so reliably. First step, was fix whown leaks.

Turbo drain was loose for some reason. Check!

 

[v6buick]

AC leaked out.... uh okay. I don't know how that makes the car run better, but I'm tired of looking at this new AC compressor.


Nice! It seems that that the modern condenser upgrade wasn't for nothing either. It feels cooler than it it ever did.


Oof. I'll try not to freak out over the fact I spent weeks cleaning and repainting the frame only a year or two ago.

Although I believe the real issue here was a broken hose clamp, I could not resist this beautiful aluminum replacement reservior. I'm going to call this the fix instead. Check!

And the real deuzy... exhaust leaks. I had them all sorted for a little while, but I'm not really sure how. This turbo never had a chance.

The downpipe elbow clearly needs help again as well.

Uhhh. What's that?

We're done. This explains the low boost for sure. As for why it's not running great? I measured this wheel and it turned out that I had a very different turbo than I was told when I bought it. This thing is big, and my chip tune was not made for this. It was fast when the fins were still good, but lean.

I was lucky enough to have a friend lend me his stock turbo for the summer.

 

[v6buick]

It's not pretty. Nor is it fast, but it gets the job done.
It makes the full 25psi of boost now, but still seems pretty unhappy. I was unable to make a full clean 1/4 mile pass at the GS Nationals this year becasue of detonation. With no leaks, it's time to dive into that.

New map sensor plug with an added wire for logging.

Painstakingly installed a gauge pod in a way that would actully look nice for my wideband.


and began logging that data as well. It turns out that the car is actually pretty rich on the top end. I had a hard time recreating the KR condition on the street, but I had a hunch of what might have been the problem.

Nobody runs the huge restriction of an airbox on their turbo Regals unless serious trickery is involved. I don't see any KR anymore and the car is noticablly and expectedly quicker.

So now that I realize how difficult and unfun it is to go faster with stock 80s parts and look stock too, I decided to give up on that.

Once the new garage door is installed and I have everything cleaned, I'll get to giving this car a makeover.

In my efforts to clean up, I finally found a use for this old spice rack my dad refinished. I don't know why I didn't think of this before pushing it around the garage for almost five years.

I knew I was going to have to get a new outlet over to where the new door opener would be installed so I knocked some other electrical chores out along with it.

The original garage light was switched on and off inside the house which has always been annoying. When I had the new lights installed by a friend years ago (big mistake) he put the switch where the old telephone jack was and put them on a new circuit. I think it's time to put them right next to each other. Don't mind the beautiful drywall work.

Oh yeah! You probably never saw the regulator I recently installed. I found it in the dumpster. Now I can regulate from the garage instead of going all the way down to the basement. I was pretty proud of the hard plumbing and custom mount I made. I wish I was ambitious and rich enough to hard plumb the whole system!

 

[zanyad]

Love the plates!

 

[v6buick]

Love the plates!

Thanks! I really hope I can get that one back on the road in reasonable time. It doesn't turn as many heads as the GN, but man is it fun to drive!

New garage door today! While I'm very excited about all the new features and full function, I am a little disappointed in the sizing. It kinda looks like the door is too tall for my opening. The guys are supposed to come back and redo the outside trim, so maybe it will look better when it's done. The weather strip is very close to eclipsing the top of the stamp.

See what I mean?


But that might just be the nature of the beast. My old door was about the same, but it appears to have had smaller stampings that made the issue less obvious.

But I opted for the teflon rollers with bearings, high-lift track, and a jackshaft opener. It's so quiet and out of the way! No more closing the door to access my shelf. No more pressing and holding the button. I've avoided opening and closing the door whenever possible becasue it was such a hassle for so long. It's going to take me a while to get used to having one that actually works and accepts more than one remote!

The auto locking and battery back up features are pretty cool too.

Embarassingly, I hung those cabinets reversed of how I should have. The two widest doors would hit the old track. Not anymore!

I still need to clean up a bit more in the garage and basement before I begin anything with the car, but there are no more reasons why the Buick will have to move under it's own power for a while. I need to find a new spot for my ladders and and jack stands so I would expect a couple more garage org updates in the near future as well. Until then, I'll be dreaming of mid-rise lifts!

 

[NUTTSGT]

Hmmmmmmm, Id love to have me a GN or especially a GNX, but I would settle for a T-Type.

 

[v6buick]

Hmmmmmmm, Id love to have me a GN or especially a GNX, but I would settle for a T-Type.

I'm super biased because I've wanted no other car for as long as I can remember. Still, I have no problem admitting that these things are a labor of love. No car has tested my patience more than the GN (and my friends GN that also never runs right ). I hope that updating some parts especially electronics helps with a lot of the goofy inconsistencies and tuning issues.

 

[v6buick]

I'm having the door guys come back. I can't live with that mis-sized door. If I knew it was going to look like this, I would have chosen a flat design.

 

[v6buick]

I really liked what I did with the hose and cord reels in post #15 until the door opener went away and made them look kinda silly and in the way. The only complaint I had prior was that being in the center of the garage meant that cords and hoses were always rubbing against cars. That's not okay and needed to be addressed.

It may take some getting used to having the air hose reel over here. It's certainly louder outside of the attic! The bigger issue I foresee is the having trouble filling tires on the house side of the driveway. Then again, I gained a few feet of hose by bringing the reel downward and another few feet by bringing it closer to the door. It may be wash after putting it on the far side of the garage. Hopefully I like it becasue I did not enjoy the process of remounting it one bit! I do think this will turn out to be a much more ideal location as there is much less wasted hose.

My chandelier looks so much more oppulent up there without cords, hoses and door openers muddying up the view. In all seriousness. I'm probably going to replace it with a cieling fan, because the lack of airflow in the summer time makes this space pretty awful even with both doors wide open.

The other thing I'm noticing a lot more is that horrible attic access!

It's not that I DIDN'T notice it before. It just didn't bother me much becasue of how much of a mess it was everywhere else. Since I'm cleaning up the cieling, I guess I'll keep going.

It's still bad, but it somewhat covers up the sins of the drywaller. I bolted in a new eyelet too since the old hook was just screwed in and felt like it was going to leave on the next pull.

Staying at ceiling level, I was ready to upgrade the flourescent lights to LED. The 8's were very blue which didn't match anything else, some were getting dim, and one ballast kicked the bucket. Pictures would never do it justice, but the 5000k bulbs I got from 1000bulbs.com were fantastic. I only needed 6 which is good because they're sold in a package of 10 and I only recieved 7 good ones. The packaging was honestly impressive, yet no match for FedEx.

Sticking with lighting now, I moved the itty bitty work bench light that I found in the basement when I moved into the house over to my itty bitty welding bench. It did the job just okay at the big bench, but it works great here.

Plus, I was cleaning out the basement and listing random junk on marketplace when I had the idea to repurpose the old kitchen light fixture.

Now that's some light! It's a little overkill, but I like it!

Now for the garage door update. The fitment issue has been burning me up a bit inside, so I had to do some investigative work. I don't like to doubt the pros on things I've never done before. It's poor practice, but I'm also a pretty mechanically capable guy. Garage doors are far from being complex machines, so I'm sure I can figure out what happened. This door company is a pretty small business with great reviews, so I doubt they're doing me dirty.

This is bad on a couple fronts. 1.) I should not see daylight. 2.) OMG that drywall.

Doesn't look closed, does it?