1985 Euro Resto Blog

[1988shark]

Well i am Baaaccccckkkkk! its been about 4 years believe it or not. This car sat while I was paying rent. With the money spent on housing I could have been driving already but out of sight is out of mind.
So, let me update you on what has been going on. More unfortunate bullshit! i am rolling with the punches again but not giving up the fight. After moving to the new address the car sat in the garage for 4 years. I would only visit the garage if I needed something I did not keep in the house, so I had to travel about 15 mins to my old address where the car is located. I needed to grab my spare wheel for the Audi since it was losing air on a daily basis. The black beauty sat for 2 year before getting her on the road so i bought a Mustang while she was being nursed back to health.

I got to the garage and noticed that something looked a bit odd. I have more space that I remembered, my wheels are missing. *&^%$^ bastards!!! they were crawling up in the ceiling like a bunch or roaches under the cover of darkness. Stole the full set of wheels for the 6er, full set of wheels for the Audi including a brand new spare and tire, never used. That wheel alone with tire set me back about $700. Aaaarghhh! when will this end! I staked out for a couple of days waiting for the bastards to show up but I got sleepy and went home. I don't know the extent of what was taken but discovering as the need arises. Needless to say management did not want to take the responsibility of extending the wall to the roof line as in the other units being rented.

Forward to 2016 May my lease is up and I have to move a month later management at the garage decides that since I don't live there I need to take my shit out of there within 30 days. 4 weeks with junk and anything else I don't want to look at in 2 garages over 10 years is not a lot of time to figure things out. Time to inventory and throw away some stuff. I have garages available at the new place so it was great to have the car at the residence. While taking inventory I found that my wheels imported from Germany was spared the heist. That would have hurted! I had them in boxes so I guess the crooks were in a rush to get in and out. My radiators from the 88 and the 85 are gone. I need to replace those and who knows what else. Thankfully, all the new parts I bought years ago including headliner and 2 full leather hides were still in the boxes. Yeahhhh. I was so discouraged that I even contacted a member for an offer to take it off my hands. Now its time to get busy and continued where I left off.

I will be posting improvements weekly as time permits until I reach the engine and then paint bodywork. With the prices of these cars going up in value, the Euro will be much desired but costly to bring up to snuff. So lets begin......

Headlight refurb
these are before and after pics

I used VHT engine enamel. I was not necessary to prime, since this is self priming and there was little to no rust on the brackets. I had to wait several days for the paint to cure before proceeding to assembly.
I had H4 Euro low beams on the purchase of the car as you can see in the delivery pics and I won a set of H1 Euro highbeams on the Canadian eBay. They arrive today and I gave them a little polish with Mothers and Plastic lens polish.The results are terrific.

[dwcains]

Welcome back. I wasn't here when you started on your shark, but I also bought an '85 Euro, about 2 years ago. I'm enjoying this thread, so keep up the good work.

[1988shark]

9/18/2016
Well another week has passed by and do a little cleaning on the engine bay. I am tempted to leave it all out and wait until I repaint the car but I will not see any progress there. So, I opted to leave the car in its original color. By doing this I won't have to worry about painting the engine bay and a full disassembly. I'm not even sure where everything goes at this point 4 years later, then to add more to my memory is well....a future PITA I'm going to avoid.

While taking the wiper transmission and all components behind the engine bay, there was 31 years of accumulated dirt and debris. Seeds, dried and disintegrated leaves, dirt and anything else that can creep its way in there. The removal was pretty simple although I have to shop for rubber bushings for the wiper holes. When removing the retaining screws they just crumbled from age.

The cloth tape was rotted, so I cleaned it all up. I have about two reels of tape I cannot find but will get back in there later to finish the job. Dirt was so thick on the blower fan cage I thought it was insulation. It was about a quarter inch thick! and just coated the thing entirely. I would give it a level 2 on the scale of difficulty. If you haven't been in there for a while take so time to do some cleaning. You will be surprised at what you find. Since I had everything out, I decided to do some refurb of the parts. Here are some shots of the bay.

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Here are the results after cleaning and painting of the old parts:

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Its looking good! Its the details that matter. I sent the valve cover, intake manifold, wiper arms, air box, and blower cover to get powder coated. This should be back in about a week or two. This shop does great work but are very slow with their turnover rate. If not back in a week, I will put some pressure on him. So in the mean time I will work on the interior bits and other small removables i can paint myself. I have firewall sheets on the way for soundproofing and tidy up the engine bay. The current firewall heat shield is falling apart and looks quite ugly. When this gets in I will do the interior first and clean up the old grease on the window regulators and channels. They go up and down fairly quickly but a bit noisy from all the dirt crunching and scraping in there. I found I had a bad window switch after checking if they work. I have not activated them since the purchase of the car. I would be nice if the window actually went down a bit further than a quarter of the way.

[1988shark]

sept 20
A had some time to play today. Since my heat shield came in I decided to install it.
I removed the old padding, being over 30yrs the rubber padding is crumbling into pieces and not very effective at dissipating the heat.

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As you can see in the photos, the rear is incomplete and will have to order a bit more padding to complete the rear and the engine bay.
The wire harness is a mess and the cloth tape is dry rotted. Hopefully, this weekend I will be able to get it all labeled and sorted out.
I have the cloth tape to get it completed and while Im at it will see if I will need to replace the speaker cabling since the interior is gutted out.

Be safe all, if the creator is merciful to let this cup pass from us with the incoming asteroid I'm sure man will continue in his blasphemous ways.
I'll have some more pics of my progress in the next couple of days, including my powder coated parts and my M6 diff getting a fresh coat of paint.