Dat swaybar.
Who needs ac? Or I guess I should say, who needs broken ac? In the midst of a marathon oil change session with a bunch of my friends I decided to yank the rest of the components out. The condenser was already gone, so I removed the compressor, dryer and all the lines.
Other than that I've just been gathering random parts, replacing sensors and keeping up on preventative maintenance. A month or so ago I swapped for a new TPS and a newer, cleaner throttle body. Old vs. new:
Seemed to smooth out the idle a bit. Also swapped to another triple core radiator (third times the charm). Original radiator and the second one I tried both had a leak in the same location, but this one is holding up good so far. Shortly after that I installed a catch can to hopefully catch some of the oil vapor from getting back into the intake.
After just a few days of driving and it's definitely working:
That was with it just empty, so I stuffed a piece of steel wool in there as well to help it baffle better.
A few weeks ago I was leaving my shop after a not so good day at work and I stayed in first and roasted the tires til about 40. Pulled up to a red light and noticed my rear window was quite misty. When I looked back forward there was steam billowing out of the hood. Pulled off into a parking lot and discovered I had blown one of the nipples off of the (original) heater valve. Grabbed a replacement from AutoZone and replaced it on the spot. Exactly week after that I drove out to Lakeland to sell my hydras, then to Orlando to visit some friends, then all the way back home, and less than a mile from home I noticed the same mist on the rear window. Pulled into my driveway and the entire engine bay was showered with coolant, and I discovered that it was the heater core hose that connects to the head under the intake.
Developed a nice little split, of course right in the super convenient location under the intake manifold. Strange how it held for about 4 hours of driving that day, mostly highway and a 50-100 mph pull and it decided to let go right as I was getting back into town. Definitely not complaining though. So I ordered both hoses from IPD, along with a new breather box & o-ring, coolant temp sensor, poly endlink bushings and new intake manifold gaskets for my Yoshifab phenolic spacers. While I was waiting for all that to arrive I cleaned up and painted a spare intake manifold I had laying around.
Parts arrived and I swapped it all on. Would have gone much smoother, however I accidentally dropped a tiny washer/spacer that goes in the grommet for the fuel rail mount. And it fell into my lower timing belt cover (super convenient again, I know). I don't have a 24mm or 1.5" socket head for the harmonic balancer, so I bought an extendable magnet to try to retrieve it. The tip ended up breaking off of the magnet, so I ended up just using my dremel and cut a small square off of the lower cover and fished the washer out with a paper clip.
I win. Everything else went back together smoothly.
Since then I decided to sell the holset. It would be fun, but for the amount of money it would take to get working and the parts I'd need to make it fun and enjoyable on a DD basis, I decided to not go that route. I figured it would just be more of a headache to manage and it might really only be fun from a roll whereas I enjoy a good pull from a dig. So I sold it to my buddy Mike who's going to use it for his 16v +T swap. I grabbed an uncracked 90+ from the junkyard last time I was there, so my plans are to port it out and swap on something slightly bigger but still a more or less bolt on.