I just wanted to share with people who might be interested. My goal over the winter was to do a full tune-up and engine clean up with minor mods to make it "pretty". I wanted to be able to open the hood and be proud of the little 2.8 stuffed in there. After taking it for a drive on Sunday upon completion I'm pretty proud of how it turned out, especially for it being my first time going anywhere near this far into an engine (even though it was only the top intake stuff).
Here's the before:
This was a couple of weeks after I bought the car and tried cleaning up the engine as much as I could. I had already tried polishing the dog bone to see what it would end up looking like. The intake was installed by the previous owner.
Here's the after:
What I did:
- New NGK copper plugs
- New DIY Taylor wires
- New MSD cap & rotor
- New fuel filter
- New Street Fire (MSD) coil
- New battery bolts
- New crossover pipe heat shield (came with the car when I bought it)
- OEM intake blasted and DIY refinished & re-installed
- '88 upper plenum & valve covers blasted and DIY refinished
- '88 EGR tube
- Delete coolant hard lines to throttle body
- Delete cold start injector
- Removed the OEM insulation on the sides of the engine bay
- Remove and clean rear blower ducts and heat shield.
- DIY aluminum vac lines with some custom routing to clean up the appearance
- Re-located PCV valve to rear cover and installed a breather filter for the valve cover intake
- Remove injectors, soak in cleaner and re-assemble fuel rail with new o-rings
- Throttle body cleaned and painted some parts black
- Remove EGR valve, clean and paint
- Remove, clean and paint all brackets that came off to do the valve covers
- Remove some rust under the battery tray, prime and paint affected area.
Stuff you can't see:
- Removed a couple of rusty braces from under the front end, blast and DIY refinish
It doesn't sound like much, but when doing something for the first time with all the cleaning and painting the time really adds up. All the time was worth it when I was able to drive it and it drove way better than last fall, and when someone took a look at the engine and said "holy crap"
I still have a few things to do and some more cleaning, but at least now I can drive it when I want to.
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