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GTX fix up, on a budget with some unique twists

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    GTX fix up, on a budget with some unique twists

    Hey guys, Welcome. I decided to write this little thread as a blog/record to help me keep track of what I've done and discovered fixing up my latest 323 addition to my ever growing list.

    While you go threw this, keep in mind I had 1 objective for this car. A cheep, comfortable daily driver. This means I am spending as little as possible for parts, I am not looking to lower it or really add any kind of bling.

    Let me introduce you to the little beast. I have yet to decided a name for her. She's an 88 GTX with a unbelievably low miles. 79,000km to be exact. She's bone stock, but lived quite a ruff life all ready. She's was once a TSD rally car with the undercarriage damage to prove she's been off the road a few times. The front ends been his and back yard repaired. She was stolen and recovered twice in the mid/late 90's. Despite all this she runs and drives great, with no real rust issues to deal with.

    Not long after I got her home.




    I thought about posting the whole story, since it has been quite the ride so far with this car, but I'll keep things more simple. All the pictures and info I am going to post next is work that was completed in 6 days, working after hours and during this last 3 day long weekend.

    Car up on the hoist getting torn down.


    Stock suspension out, can you spot the problems with it? both rear springs are broken and rear shocks blown out/leaking


    stock exhaust system with the cat deleted. This needed to be fixed to pass emissions.


    Front spindles/brakes came apart very easy. I pressure washed them as they were covered in road grime.


    New front rotors were easy to come by. With it all apart I decided to take a gamble. I replaced the inner grease seals, repacked/reused the wheel bearings.


    Great tool for reinstalling the hubs.


    Last edited by crazycanadian; 12-01-2014, 04:01 PM.

    #2
    Rear rotors were an issue. Originally when I bought the car I looked up all the parts and they were available. A few months later I can no longer find a listing for them. After calling around there was only 1 rotor to be found in canada and it was back east in Quebec. I could have ordered rotors from Rock Auto, but it'd take to long for me to have them here. Plus the cost of shipping anything across the bordered gets stupid expensive. So I measured up the rotors and they were well with in spec. They didn't have any bad grooves, or pulsation so I figured I would reuse them. At first I was trying to set them up in the brake lathe to machine them properly but quickly discovered I had no adapters that would work properly. I still set the rotor up as best as I could, using a sanding disc I knocked down the rust ridge and cleaned up the glaze on the rotors. If I have problems down the road I'll have to buck up and replace them.


    Pulling the rear suspension apart to do the rotors ended up being a challenge. The Lateral link bolt at the spindle was seized. The Trailing arm sleeve was seized as well to the spindle. The right side trailing arm bushing was worn out and fell apart the moment I started to fight with it. Eventually I had to lower down the diff so that I could remove the bolts holding the lateral links to the sub frame. Thankfully these bolts weren't seized.

    The left rear spindle with everything seized to it.


    Not many pictures, but I did manage to get the bolts for the lateral links out of the spindles. I accomplished this by using my heavy duty air hammer, rattling away on the center of the bolt while my co-worker used my 1/2 impact gun attempting to twist the bolt. Eventually we got it to turn and free up saving the bolt and the lateral links. The trailing arm, wasn't so lucky I couldn't get the inner sleeve to free up so I had to torch the bushing off the sleeve then use the torch to get the sleeve off the spindle. That ment I needed to replace both trailing arms. With no new replacement parts available, and no BF's in any junk yards around I had to get creative.

    I had a set of mx3 trailing arms sitting under my bench that came out of my autocross 323. comparing them to the GTX trailing arms I discovered they were very close to the same. Spindle side of the mx3 arms is wider but over all it looked like they would bolt up. The wider bushing ment I needed a longer bolt which I didn't have. The local wrecker was having a half price weekend and happened to have a couple clean BG 323's in the yard. A quick trip I came back with a set of stock 323 trailing arms. Here is a comparison of the arms. The Mx3/323 arms are boxed, where as the GTX is flimsy C channel.




    The one issue I saw was with the side that bolted to the body. The BG's use a larger bolt. I was worried if I just slapped in the trailing arms with out finding away to make sleeve in the trailing arm fit the stock GTX bolt better, I would get a clicking sound while braking/accelerating. Rob was lending me a hand with other stuff on the car and had a great suggestion. Using a pop can with the tops cut off I wrapped the bolt in the pop can until it was thick enough to take up the slop. I used the bolt to help hammer the pop can sleeve in place, then cut it to length after it was installed. With the new sleeve installed the BG trailing arms bolted right in.

    The excess slop, kinda hard to see.




    using the bolt to drive the pop can sleeve in.


    The extra before cutting it off.


    Slop all gone.

    Comment


      #3
      The suspension was up next to tackle. I had taken some time prior to compare a set of stock BG 2wd shocks, with Mx3 springs to the GTX suspension. This led me to believe with some modifications I could make it work. Since stock rear springs were non existent. new stock shocks couldn't be found in north america. inserts and coil overs to expensive, I figured I would give it a shot. I tryed to take pictures but I don't think I took enough, so hopefully you can follow all this.

      I'll start with the fronts. They took the most to figure out, but were the easiest to modify to make them fit. The spindle side was straight forward, the lower bolt holes needed to be relocated since the bolt spacing was different between the BG and BF's.

      The body side was a little more difficult. BG's use an upper spring perch that is machined out to accept a little plastic bearing/bushing that allows the spring/struts to turn, when turning the wheel. This plastic bushing sits against the upper strut mount that is then bolted to the strut and to the car. The BG upper mount also uses 4 bolts to attach it to the body. The BF uses an upper mount with the bearing built into the strut mount. The spring perch then has a washer kind of piece that contacts only the inner race of the pivot bearing.

      The point between the threads and the shoulder on strut shaft is longer on the BF shocks, then it is on the BG shocks. Also the BG shocks have a smaller diameter strut shaft. This ment the BF, strut mounts would not bolt the BG shocks.

      I ended up knocking all the studs out of the BG upper mount and test fitting them on the body. When turned so that 2 of the 4 holes lined up with the holes on the body they were very close to lining up. 1 problem though, the large hole in the body where the strut mount pokes up threw is oval, and not wide enough for the BG strut mount. I ended up putting the BG mount in the vise and squeezing it, to narrow it. It didn't take much to make it work. From there I had to ream out the holes a little bit to make them line up with the body. I then welded the studs from the Stock BF strut mounts to the BG mounts.

      With the modifications complete, the front struts would now bolt into the GTX using BG shocks, Mx3 front springs, BG strut mounts.

      The only pictures I have are of the completed mounts.




      Just to note. BG springs have coils that get wider in diameter as they go from the top to the bottom. BF coils are the same diameter at the top as they are at the bottom. The top coils between a BF and BG spring are the same diameter.
      Last edited by crazycanadian; 09-04-2014, 05:12 AM.

      Comment


        #4
        Rear suspension was easier to figure out, but took a little more work.

        Both the BG rear springs and BF springs were the same diameter, so they could be interchanged back and forth.

        Mx3 rear springs mocked up for fun on my old BF GTX rear shock, and rear spring mounts.


        A comparison in the shocks reveal a couple of problems though. Lets start at the spindle. The BG spindles are wider then the BF spindles by a 1/4. So a plate needed to be made in order to make up the gap. Also the bolt hole locations are different spaces and needed to be relocated. With access to a milling machine this wasn't to hard to modify and make work.




        With the spindle part solved lets move on to the upper mount. The BG uses a very thick upper mount where as the BF, is pretty thin. You couldn't use the BG upper mount since the orientation of the bolts is off set and will not fit in the body of the GTX. The BF upper mount will work, but you need to build a spacer to fit between the shock and the mount. With Robs, help and access to his dad's lathe it didn't take long to make up a couple spacers.




        We drilled out the upper mount and put a small shoulder on the spacer in order to make sure the upper mount would stay properly centered.


        completed and rust proofed.


        Great, we have all the issues solved right? We can now bolt it all together and have it all bolt into the car. Kinda sorta. There is one more issue to over come. The distance between the spring perch and the spindle is different by about 1" This ment using the BG rear shocks would give the ass end of the car a bit of a lift. The Mx3 rear springs are a little different then 323 springs as they have a bunch of coils tightly compressed together. Cutting one or 2 of these coils out shouldn't affect spring rate to much and allow me to level out the ride height of the car. I haven't put the car on the ground yet, so I don't know how much to cut out yet. As of right now the shocks are assembled with full length Mx3 rear springs.










        I am very aware of any possible engineering flaws I might have created with relocating the lower spindle bolts and how I have done this. Along with various other things I have had to modify, so there is no need to remind me of it. The whole point to all this was to see if it could be done, because at this point its only cost me $12 in materials to do the suspension work.

        Comment


          #5
          The exhaust system was pretty straight forward for me to fix. Since the flange that would have been before the cat was in ruff shape, and the flange after cat was horribly done. I decided to cut it all out and build from scratch with new flanges and flex pipe. While I was at it, upgraded the pipe to 2 1/4 just in case I was to have a little more fun down the road. Since the stock cat back was in good shape, I decided to save my penny's and leave it alone for now.

          The welding was all done with a flux core welder. It looks like ass, but the welder works really well.





          Comment


            #6
            Since this car has such low miles, with very little rust on it I felt the need to preserve the body as much as possible. So while everything has been apart, I enlisted in Robs, help to give the car a good coating.

            Stripped the front end down, you can now see some of the damage from the front end hit. Looks like the RF took the brunt of it.




            All prepped








            Rear trunk area done. We wanted to pull the diff to really get all over, but couldn't get the brake lines apart so I decided not to pull the diff.








            Rear suspension all together and installed.

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              #7
              After 6 days. This is where she sits. I still have a long list of little things to complete, but hopefully by the end of next week she will be insured and on the road.

              Comment


                #8
                Looks like it's coming along. Nice work
                i know its a piece of crap... but im still faster...

                Comment


                  #9
                  Subn
                  sigpic

                  Comment


                    #10
                    ---Has ClubProtege helped you in someway? show your support by Contributing--- Click Here---

                    1992- project FE3..... 313 WHP @ 9.3psi




                    I pet my dash when I get into the car..."good car"
                    he actually has a mazda tree, parts grow on it

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Subn' . Looks nice adam.
                      Ian Boyd- Bellingham, WA (click vehicle to view)

                      1988 BF GTX

                      1990 x2 BG AWD Protege

                      1991 Escort GT- SOLD

                      1975 911 S Widebody 3.6 conversion

                      2005 Corolla

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Subn, looks great! Did you use por 15 for the rust coat?
                        Before you criticize someone, first try walking a mile in their shoes. Because then you'll be a mile away, and you'll have their shoes...

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Good job.

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Originally posted by KaleoXtreme View Post
                            Subn, looks great! Did you use por 15 for the rust coat?
                            I didn't use por 15, but it was a product similar to it. I'll have to go look at the cans to figure out what it was. Rob (permin323) knows more about it then I do. He's used it on 3 of his cars. After the product has cured, we also went over it with a rock gaurd like product to give it some extra durability.

                            Its amazing how poor the seam sealer is on these cars. All in the major rust areas the seam sealer was flaking right off the car as though it wasn't even there. Had I not taken the time to do all this rust prevention this car would be trashed in a few short years.

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Thanks for the support guys. Glad you're enjoying what I have posted.

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