With the car running well, I’ve been working on some incremental improvements lately.
First off, I went to the junkyard in search of the rear window guides so that I can easily roll the windows up and down. I wasn’t able to find those, but I did find a ’95 2dr with a rear swaybar. $20 and some nasty, rusty bolts later, and I walked out of there with a rear sway and all the mounting hardware. The frame bracket bolts came out a bit deformed, so I got new bolts from Ace. Previously, I had dropped $50 to someone on neons.org to get a set of mounting brackets, endlinks, frame brackets, and Prothane bushings, so my plan is to use that hardware to mount up the swaybar and then sell the leftover hardware.
I couldn’t bear to bolt that nasty, rusty swaybar to the car, however, so I hit it with a whizz-wheel and some sandpaper to take the surface rust off and then painted it with some leftover SEM gloss black rust-covering paint that a friend had given me a while back. I did the same to the mounting hardware I got from the .org and now all I need to do is bolt it up.
Some hunting around on eBay Motors paid off in a big way when I found an auction for a matched pair of Schroth Rallye 4 harness belts. I wound up getting them for $125.50 after shipping plus another 7 bucks or so for some bolts to mount them up to the OEM seatbelt attachment points. Interestingly enough, the bolts that used to be in those holes are long gone, and it took me some doing to find replacements since they’re SAE not metric! The seat-back bolts are 1/2″, fine thread and about 1 3/8″ while the rest are 7/16″ fine thread. I picked up 1 1/2″ long bolts for all the positions and those worked okay on the sides, but the seat-back bolts were just a hair too long — had I pushed them all the way through they would have started to dig in to the plastic gas tank which is probably not a good thing. I threw two washers in there to prevent the bolts from going too deep and it seems to be okay. I haven’t had a chance to drive the car with the harness belts yet, but just from sitting in the garage, I can tell that I’m going to be pretty well planted in there. Maybe some “Neon” shoulder pads to lessen the bruising are in order.
The eBay-special short shifter that I got in the box with the boost gauge, MSD coil, catch can, and other stuff is now installed. It was a bit easier than I expected, actually, and it seems a lot nicer. The throws could definitely be shorter, though, so I don’t know how long I’ll keep this before I move to something of a little higher quality.
I still haven’t hooked up the oil pressure sender. I really need to do that. I also need to do something about street tires — these have a ton of vibration in them at highway speeds and it’s downright tiring to drive.
I’m starting to think about my next steps, too:
- There’s still a little bit of an oil leak that I’d like to track down
- Replacing the oil lines with steel braided ones would be nice, as would adding a right angle to the oil pan inlet
- A mount for the laptop would be great for having TunerStudio provide a nice gauge console for me
- I’d like to hook up the other cooling fan to enhance the car’s chill-a-bility
- Fixing up the turbo piping would be nice. I’d like to take out the rubber couplers and replace them with silicon. Additionally, fixing that rear pipe would be nice, weather that means running to the front of the engine or re-engineering the pipe that runs around the back.
- Some sort of LSD would be very helpful, given the amount of power I’m putting down. I could get in to a phantom grip pretty cheap, but I think an OBX or Quaife would be a better choice. I just don’t know if I feel like tearing apart my transmission.
- I still want to get a couple seats to put in the car. I think a set of Corbeaus is what I want, but I’m probably in to that for about 700-800 bucks if I get them brand new with the appropriate brackets.
I may try to go out tonight and get that swaybar installed to see what that’s like. I’ve heard it will really tighten up the car and I’m anxious to see how much it will help me rotate the back end when I’m in the dirt.