Here's the car as I found her, loaded up on my tow dolly ready to come home. I made a six hour round trip from New York to Connecticut to go pick her up, plus the few hours it took to winch the car out of the bush she had been living in up onto my tow dolly. I had never even heard of these cars before this one popped up on Craigslist, and for $600 I just couldn't say no.
My wonderful view on the drive home. All in all, it was about a 10 hour adventure, with my wife and 12 month old son, to go get this car. Easily the furthest out of my way I've ever gone to pick up a car.
It was dark out by the time we got back, but here she is at her new forever home.
8 Hours of work later, and the engine was about ready to come out.
The rear-most engine mount is pretty much the only part that put up a fight this whole time. Well, and the exhaust....but that was a mess anyways so I gave up fairly quickly and cut it off.
The engine and car have about 151,000 miles on them. This thing was absolutely disgusting for so few miles. I did what I could to clean it up, but it will have to go to the machine shop to get hot tanked.
This is one of the main reasons I pulled the engine out and apart. You can see here how bad the head gasket was. All 4 fire rings were egged out, and you can see coolant puddled up on the wrong side of the gasket around cylinder #4.
Here, I'm measuring the endplay in the crankshaft. It was actually pretty good, right at 0.00055 inches. I haven't checked any specs yet (I plan to take all of my measurements first), but I'm pretty sure that it's well within the limit. I'm planning on measuring EVERYTHING. Anything that's out of spec is going to have to get corrected. I do plan on throwing more boost at this engine, so I want to make sure it'll be able to handle it. At the bare minimum, the engine will be getting new rod bearings, main bearings, piston rings, and seals/gaskets. And hot tanked.
And this is where I left off last night. I got the rods and pistons out in order to start measuring oil clearances. The bearings are actually in decent shape, but they are pretty worn through. No deep scratches or hot spots or anything like that. This car may have been neglected, but it doesn't seem to have been abused.
So that's where I'm at after about a week of ownership. I plan on building the Capri into a sort of daily driver/track car hybrid. I'll be getting rid of the air conditioning, power steering, audio system, soft top, etc etc. to save as much weight as possible. At the same time, I plan on increasing the boost, and possibly the compression ratio as well. I'm still debating with myself if I would rather do the rocketchip or if I'm going to go with microsquirt. If I go standalone, I can replace the silly VAF setup with a normal intake and a MAP sensor. I can also get rid of the car's factory ignition system, which seems rather weak to me, and replace it with a slightly newer setup from a Miata. I might even be able to go to a coil-on-plug setup. The only real downside is that it's expensive. It'd cost me about $550 for the microsquirt, plus however much more to essentially rebuild the wiring harness, intake system, and ignition system. Tough decision. In addition to all of that, the only real modification I have planned is to replace a bunch of the bushings in the car with poly bushings. I was planning on making my own, since I can't seem to find much in the way of aftermarket. I'd like to add some chasis bracing too, but again that'll probably all have to be custom. I can't even find front and rear strut tower bars. That's okay though, I do enjoy fabrication work.