A Sorry Excuse for an 02 (Now with M42!)

[Barrosco]

This mess began back in March, but I've been far to lazy to start a Project Blog. I haven't really felt like anything of that much interest has been going on; that is, until some of my plans were pushed forward, but we'll get to that later.

I started of with an abused, wrecked, and a bit rusty 75' 2002 (great start, right!?). My main draw to the car was a previously completed 5 Speed swap done by a reputable 02' shop down here in Atlanta. The battery was dead the first time I went to look at it and silly me didn't bring another when I came to pick it up, but the engine did spin freely. So it was brought home that night without a hitch:


That night I began to disassemble the front end and assess the damage.


Sometime that week I began to clean it up. The car had been sitting in the P.O.'s driveway for about a year after rear ending somebody and puncturing the radiator, and it has most certainly not been washed during that entire time. I doubt it was even washed all that often before it sat. It took quite a bit of scrubbing to get the moldy residue out of the paint, it really thin anyways. But it did come out a little bit better.
Before:




After:


It didn't come out nearly as good as the photos show, but it was definitely an improvement.

Well that's enough of boring you with cleaning pictures. I'll continue to update the thread whenever I get a chance and try to catch up to where I am currently with the car.

Edited May 15, 2013 by Barrosco

[LS1CMR]

where are you located in GA?

[Barrosco]

@LS1CMR

I'm currently up in Sugar Hill, right around the Suwanee area.

So back to the car. Over the next few days I continued to dig deeper into the front end and tried to figure out what I was going to do.

So I didn't pay all that much attention to the damage and progress slowed over March as I began the process of moving from closer into Atlanta back up to Suwanee. The 2002 was one of the first things to get to the new house:

So now it was about May and I began take the fenders off and I realized that it had been hit before the P.O.'s accident. At some point it must have been smacked pretty hard on the driver's side corner and most of it had been badly bondoed. Earlier on the damage had been covered by a flimsy air dam, but after I had taken it off most of it was in plain sight. Don't ask me how I missed that...

Couldn't do anything about it at that point so I just continued to take the nose off:

Aaaaaaaaaand the end of the frame was bent. At that point I let it sit for awhile and pondered what my next move would be.

[Koblenz]

Next move, a beer and a shot?

[Barrosco]

That would have been my next move... If I was of age. Instead I had to rely on some Root Beer Floats to keep me from falling into a spiraling depression, but I digress.

While it was sitting I took on a few little projects that would need to be done sooner or later. So this box from Pelican showed up with new ignition parts and some brake parts.

Moving the 02' around was a fairly scary task. There was barely any pedal pressure at all. So as I suspected the rear wheel cylinders had leaked almost all the fluid out and left quite a bit of air in the lines. So new shoes and cylinders were installed as well as new front pads. I bled everything and once again had some pedal.

The next little things that was bugging me was the job that somebody had done to the gauge cluster face. It was a strange grey, blackish, salt and pepper looking job. It also had quite a few imperfections:

So I disassembled the cluster, popped the face off and sanded it down:

This was my finished product, which I felt looked much better than the old salt and pepper job. I didn't put a clearcoat on it so it stains quite easily and it's still not perfect, but it's definitely better:

As you might be able to tell, I've now got a pretty nice Momo on it now. That was after I had taken this awkward Formuling wheel out.

So this was the end of any type of productiveness on the 2002. May ended and the 02' wasn't touched all throughout June, but things begin to pick up in July.

Let me know if anybody feels like I need to resize my pictures or perhaps make my text larger. It seems like some may have a hard time reading the text in between pictures.

[Barrosco]

So as I said before, things began happening during July. I had decided that with the bent frame, lack of a quality welder and sub-par welding skills that this job was best suited to somebody a bit more experienced. So I ended up passing my problems onto Jason at Heritage Motorsports, he was also kind enough to help me with some floor pan rust repair while it was down there. So here was some of the floor pan rust at the rear of the passenger side (the front pans on both sides were totally solid.):

As you can see, the rust separated the rear seat structure from the floor and the floor began to sag. The strange part was that the rust on the passenger side was concentrated behind the rear seat structure. While in contrast the driver side floor rust was mostly concentrated in front of the rear seat support:

Unfortunately I was really bad about taking pictures while I was down there but as I began to scrape more and more sound deadening up the more soft spots I began to find (It seems like that's how it always goes). It seems like this was the only picture I took of the rust when uncovered (drivers side, like I said, concentrated in front of the rear seat):

On the drivers side a flat panel ended up replacing the drain since the mount for the drain was just gone. The passenger side's drain was completely solid.. quite strange.

Back to the biggest reason the 2002 was down at Heritage, the nose. Jason had a very, very rough late model nose sitting at the shop so that's what we used. It had the usual lower valence rust through both layers so all of that was cut out and replaced after I sand blasted most of it. The late model bumper holes were also patched and the nose was straightened out as much as possible. After the frame was straightened we test fitted the nose:

Due to my laziness no more pictures were taken while I was down there. Honestly, I really wish I would have found a better nose as I'm still doing bondo work on it. But hopefully I can get it pretty smooth, it is what it is.

But while it was down at Jason's shop, a few interesting developments arose...

More on these tomorrow.

[Barrosco]

As you saw yesterday, a lift was installed in the new house and an M42 somehow found its way home with me at some point. So at this point it was now late August and the nose had been fitted and the floor pan rust had been taken care of, so it came home:

As you may recall the drivers side fender was awfully rough, so a replacement was needed. I ended up finding a guy in GA with a few parts cars laying around and was able to source a good fender from there.

I just realized that I forgot to mention the running status of the motor. A few days after I brought the 02' home, I started it with the punctured radiator and ran it for a very short period of time as I didn't want to overheat it, but I did know that it ran. So after the nose was tacked back on at Heritage, we threw a used 2002 radiator in it, started it up and she ran just fine.

So once again I didn't take any pictures of the finished product, but I buttoned everything back up and took it for a successful first drive. It performed well for a few days until this happened:

This is the remainder of an E30 battery cable that was run underneath the car after I did the battery relocation. As you can see, the centerlink ended up pinching it and shorting it all out. Luckily there was a built in fuse so nothing was harmed, except for the cable that is. So I then ran it through the car as I should have in the first place and everything was hunky-dory for awhile.

So I continued to take the 02' for short drives every once and awhile and decided that the leaky old 2002 radiator that I had gotten from Jason needed to go. The plan was to use an E21 plastic tank radiator which I had bought in a part-out back in May or so. I had also bought a couple of other items in the part out which were in great condition, so I just did a quick scan over the radiator without completely taking it out of the packaging and all seemed okay. Well, while down at Heritage I discovered the upper hose connecter on the tank was busted, rendering that radiator useless. Even though it seemed like the radiator wasn't damaged during transit and that it may have been damaged before packing, it had been so long since I bought the radiator that I really didn't want to bother the guy. So another solution was needed.

Since an M42 was due sometime down the road, I decided that I needed to go bigger. For some unknown reason I decided against an M42 radiator and went with a Summit Racing aluminum radiator. Well, the first one I picked was too thick so I went with a thin, wide radiator. This required a bit of notching of the late model bumper supports (which I should have just removed all together). After that was done I found a few R/C car brackets laying around that served their purpose pretty well. This is what I ended up with:

Passenger side:

Drivers side:

After installing an I.E. electric fan kit the M10 ran without a hitch and the radiator provided more than enough cooling. I continued to drive it and put about 300 miles on it, that is, until a gearbox whine led to a much bigger problem.

[carrosene]

I actually looked at buying this car like 5+ years ago but I obviously passed. It had less rust and the nose wasn't bashed in at that time. Good luck with the resto. Glad to see someone is fixing it up.

[Barrosco]

I actually looked at buying this car like 5+ years ago but I obviously passed. It had less rust and the nose wasn't bashed in at that time. Good luck with the resto. Glad to see someone is fixing it up.

That's interesting, I believe the fellow's name was Jeff or Jeffrey and it was out in Loganville. The car is quite rough and at the time I though $900 was a decent deal as I had almost paid more for an 02' in similar condition, but not wrecked. Oh well, you live and you learn; I still love my big pile.

Alright, so back to said pile, which literally became an immobile pile. As I said before, the gearbox had a bit of a whine but I didn't think all that much of it as the gearbox shifted quite smooth without any grinds. Not only that but I didn't have a 17mm Hex Socket and was waiting to find one. Unfortunately my abuse led to a bit of a problem. As I was moving the 02' over to the other side of the garage the car locked up, almost as if the parking brake was on. I could try to disengage the clutch and the car would lurch forward a bit and then grab, once again like the parking brake was engaged. It would stay locked in gear and require quite a bit of force to get out, after a bit of a struggle I was finally able to get the car into the garage until I found a hex socket.

So once I found a suitable socket I drained the transmission and this is what I got:

Yep, that's it, that's all I got. All of the fluid was burnt too, but I found no excess metal shavings or chunks of metal. I assume some bearings must have just been burnt up due to lack of oil, so I may open this G245 at some point and see if I can rebuild it and sell the complete 5 speed swap.

As you may have anticipated this drastically accelerated my plans for an M42 swap. When I bought my E30 the guy threw in an late model E30 drive shaft and everything else except for a transmission. Luckily a local 02'er was kind enough to donate an M42 Getrag 240 to my cause in exchange for some manual labor.

That happened back in September so I'm almost caught up to where I am now. Since then I've just been assembling parts and preparing for the M10 to come out and the M42 to go in. I'll have another update tomorrow.

[canadapierre]

I think you will find more than 1 burnt bearing in that dry tranny!

What does the diff fluid level look like?

[Barrosco]

I'm sure it's not pretty in there, but I don't think it'll be too bad. I refilled it with fluid and drove a few miles, shifted find while moving but would lock up when I stopped until I could break it free. I did check the diff and the oil level and oil itself look good, it does seem to be leaking quite a bit though, much like the transmission was. I wanted to save up for an IE poly suspension bushing kit which came with the diff mounts (which are bad) and then reseal the diff, but I should probably just find some rubber bushings and reseal it.

[Barrosco]

This really deserves an update, the swap is pretty far along at this point but we'll get to that later.

The first step was to get the M42 up on the stand and start stripping it of unnecessary accessories and such:

Since I'm cheap and would rather not take up room in the shop, I decided to use the lift to take motors out and put them in, which required the transmission to be removed and installed separately. I started with the M10's G245:

While the M10 was coming out, some beautiful mounts arrived on my front porch from none other than Jakeb:

The last step in removal of the M10 was.. Well, the removal of the M10 itself. I'm happy to say that the M10 found a home in another local 02'er in need. I think I might miss the old brick a little bit....

So that left me with a gaping hole in my engine bay:

I tried to give the engine bay a good scrub, but nothing seemed to budge so the engine bay will stay "dirty" for awhile.

I'll definitely be updating the thread more often now, perhaps another update tomorrow.

[jakeb]

Looking good man, keep the updates coming!!

[cajaka7]

Sweet ill be checking in on this frequently. I just finished my 1976 o2 m42 swap and man is it fun. I've had an e36 m3 with exhaust ob1 conv and m50 intake mani with comforti intake and I can honestly say my o2 scares me a bit more :rofl. In the top end it accelerates like a jet and corners like a dream. I have billies all around with h&r springs and it is firmer than... Well we won't go into that lol

As soon as some of this snow melts off ill get one of my buddies to ride shotgun with me and get some footage of some aggressive driving!

Also I would recommend if its not too late to run the battery cable along the passenger side door wells, It doesn't interfere with anything and keeps it dry. I ran new fuel line in the same spot as well.

What are you doing for the fuel pump? E30 in tank sender?

Have you planned electronics? If the chassis side wiring harness is a mess I would recommend ripping it all out and starting over with some fresh new stuff. It helps significantly.

If you need help with the carrier assembly for the shifter linkage, check out my project thread I did it a lot differently than jake did and so far it's working well.

Glad to see I'm not floating in a small boat with this swap, it's nice to see m42s in place of the much more common m20 swap.

Looking forward to updates! Cheers from northern Idaho!

[Barrosco]

Sweet ill be checking in on this frequently. I just finished my 1976 o2 m42 swap and man is it fun. I've had an e36 m3 with exhaust ob1 conv and m50 intake mani with comforti intake and I can honestly say my o2 scares me a bit more :rofl. In the top end it accelerates like a jet and corners like a dream. I have billies all around with h&r springs and it is firmer than... Well we won't go into that lol

As soon as some of this snow melts off ill get one of my buddies to ride shotgun with me and get some footage of some aggressive driving!

Also I would recommend if its not too late to run the battery cable along the passenger side door wells, It doesn't interfere with anything and keeps it dry. I ran new fuel line in the same spot as well.

What are you doing for the fuel pump? E30 in tank sender?

Have you planned electronics? If the chassis side wiring harness is a mess I would recommend ripping it all out and starting over with some fresh new stuff. It helps significantly.

If you need help with the carrier assembly for the shifter linkage, check out my project thread I did it a lot differently than jake did and so far it's working well.

Glad to see I'm not floating in a small boat with this swap, it's nice to see m42s in place of the much more common m20 swap.

Looking forward to updates! Cheers from northern Idaho!

Been awhile since I've been in my thread. Sorry, I never saw you're reply, but unfortunately I'm stuck with the battery cable on the drivers side (don't really want to drill any more holes). I ended up running the return line tie strapped up against the old metal return line (which became the feed line). I'll post up a lot more details tomorrow.