It’s been a while since any updates, but I’ve haven’t been totally slacking off!
I bought some new tires for street driving from Tire Rack. Great experience — ordered them and they were on my driveway the next day! I got some Sumitomo HTR A/S P01 in 195/60R14 to go with a slightly wider tire that would perform pretty well and not cost a fortune. So far, they seem pretty good, but they need to be balanced in a bad way. The car actually looks pretty good with them since I had them mounted up on the ARE rims that I had in the garage.
Also, I finally got around to flocking the dash. It was a super easy process of cleaning up the dash real well, then painting on the adhesive and blowing the fibers on. It looks great and also gave me an opportunity to firmly attach the gauge pod and put a new lighted switch on the dash for the cooling fans.
I have the spare transmission apart and have the Phantom Grip installed in its differential. I did notice that the gears in the diff have a ring on them that would definitely reduce the contact that the PG bars would have. Based on PG’s install instructions I used my bench grinder to grind the gears down to a smooth, flat surface where the PG will make contact. All I need to do now is install the new snap rings on the PG diff pin, clean everything up, and put it back in the transmission.
Here’s what the gears look like fresh out of the differential:
Differential spider gear before grinding
Before and after, it looks like this:
Center gear is stock spider gear from Neon differential. Left and right gears have been ground flat to accommodate the Phantom Grip
Neon differential with gears ground and Phantom Grip installed.