Well after about a year and half of driving this thing around after the B230FT swap, all the little unfinished things are starting to bug me. There was a lot that I left hanging for the next phase of the project. My wife had to borrow the car a few days ago and ended up stopping on the freeway because she thought it was going thermonuclear - the temp gauge isn't matched to the sender in the head, so "normal hot" looks like "OMG overheating" on the old 1981 gauge. The e-fan comes on just as the needle gets up to the bottom of the red zone. Anyway I'm going to fix that finally, get the tach working, pull the dash to do HVAC, and a bunch of other stuff. Mostly listed back on the last page from February
Started with two small projects today. There were several embarrassing vacuum/boost leaks from caps disintegrating and blowing off the unused ports in the intake manifold. I was running some cheap rubber vacuum caps, which worked well at first but didn't survive the rigors of Redblock duty. Zipties didn't help much.
I had some little heat shrink caps left over from another project. Two of the small smooth ones worked fine on the smaller ports.
This bigger guy was needed for one of the open throttle body ports. It has a spiral of heat shrink bonded inside that shrinks lengthwise and contracts the diameter quite significantly. This type of cap also has some glue inside that melts as you heat it up and sticks the cap on pretty well.
Boring little job but I like fixing stuff like this and knowing that it's right now.
While I had the heat gun out, I decided to finally try the old bumper blackening trick for myself. These skinny bumpers were from the junkyard and are nowhere near perfect. Lots of gouges. They were also getting quite gray. Much better now after a quick clean and waving the heat gun around for about 30 minutes. I can live with these now.