I played in the less sexy side of hot-rodding last weekend... pulling old dirty components out of old high mileage cars in order to clean them up.
This is why we do those things, though; Factory epoxy coating had failed in a couple of spots, hidden by foam insulation:
These are the '85-'86 heater tubes that I installed in my '87 car because they work better with the Northstar than the '87-'88 heater tubes.
For '87 & '88, GM T'd the heater return back into the right side coolant pipe from the radiator back to the waterpump. This works fine in older systems which have a restrictive thermostat and the heater circuit acts as a bypass of the thermostat, ensuring coolant circulation as the engine warms up. HOWEVER, in more modern engines with recirculating thermostats, it means there's no circulation through the heater core until the thermostat opens. As implemented in the Caddy, the heater circuit has constant circulation, but the radiator circuit does NOT. Merging the heater circuit and the radiator circuit means that the heater circuit is restricted when the radiator circuit is restricted. I switched back to the earlier style heater and right-side coolant tubes to plumb my car more like the Caddy was plumbed. When driving in the cold, the heater starts to give heat in about 1/3 the time with the '85-'86 plumbing as it did with the '87-'88 style plumbing.
All four heater & A/C tubes:
I've been using a rattle can epoxy paint on the A/C tubes. While it's very resistant chemically, it chips easily. That's not really good for something that's going under a car, so I'm going to strip/blast the epoxy off and do clear POR-15 on all four.
I'd *LOVE* to anodize them, but I don't think it's practical.
Here are the '87-'88 fuel tank expansion volume vent tubes... I pulled them out to sand and paint as well. The bottom one is from the fuel tank to the expansion tank. The top one is from the expansion tank back across the engine bay to the charcoal canister. Ackshully... Once I remove the battery tray and switch to a compact battery, I can move the charcoal canister over to the right side of the engine bay and save the weight of these lines reaching from the right side of the car to the left just to deliver VOCs for combustion. Weight reduction is a game of ounces, not pounds.
The Fiero fuel tank is under the center console, between the seats. That's basically the perfect position to keep weight distribution constant at changing fuel level.
The '84-'86 Fiero tank holds 10.something gallons. The '87-'88 holds 11.something gallons. Although the tanks are different, the 1 gallon increase didn't come from making a new tank that filled the space more completely. It came from moving the thermal expansion volume required for any liquid tank up into a separate enclosure stuffed in between the body metal and the plastic rear clip just above and forward of the right rear wheel. This volume is then vented to the charcoal canister for evaporative emissions control.
How do I go about having bent tubes digitized? It would be fun to have these reproduced in stainless for a little deep engine bay bling.
And here's the expansion tank... Looking up in front of the right rear wheel house, with the plastic wheel well liner on the right
I also spent a couple of minutes with the last ICM baseplate in GM's inventory:
Coil mounting plate, right position (unlikely):
Coil mounting plate, left position (likely):
Now I need to get the correct LS coils and figure out how to mount them. If feasible, I want to reuse the Northstar coil harnesses... I *think* the car versions of the LS coils use the same connectors, but I need to spend time with photos to make sure.
There are six pairs of holes at the top/bottom edges of the plate visible. The middle pair in each trio is a simple pierced hole that's flat on the back. the other four pairs are pushed through--not sure what the correct terminology is for this process--to thicken the material around the hole, making it suitable to tapping or threading a screw into. These are the mounting holes for the original waste spark coils. I'll probably use them for LS coils once I figure out what kind of additional bracketry I'll need to package things elegantly.