Obsession With Perfection Racing
My Tips and Tricks
Now, I've only been into these cars for a little while compared to some...
but I've learned a few things along the way. If it's on this page, it's
something I learned. Others may well have contributed!
Door Handles won't open the door, or need a lot of force to work
This applies to all models of SD.
The problem described, doors hard to open because door handles have
to be pulled out and yank on door, is usually due to metal fatigue of parts
inside the door. There is an odd shaped channel that backs up the handle
assembly from inside the door; you must remove the interior panel from
the door to fix the problem. Once that's out of the way, carefully remove
the plastic moisture shield from the door. Directly behind the handle assembly
are some small acess holes. Through one of these you can see a nut, centered
on the odd shaped piece of metal (It's kind of Z shaped). This one nut
holds the handle assembly in place, and often you can simply loosen it,
shove the handle assembly down so it sits lower on the door, and tighten
it back up. Sometimes the metal piece has bent a little, and pulling it
out and reshaping it to be a little more rectangular, then reassembling
does the trick. But either way, it's a fairly short process to go from
extreme frustration with the way your doors open (or don't) to properly
operating door handles.
(It's also possible that the hinges have gone south, but less usual,
and I'll let someone else tell us how best to fix that...)
Oil pressure gauge acts 'wonky'
Sometimes my oil pressure gauge would act a bit funny. Actually, at the
time, it wasn't funny at all, because when I got into the boost, the gauge
would indicate that my oil pressure was falling rapidly, and I was scared
to death I was about to lose oil pressure and ruin my engine.
The symptoms that you might see are as follows:
Oil pressure gauge reads normally at idle
Oil pressure gauge reads normally at cruise
Oil pressure gauge indicates a rapid fall in pressure under any hard acceleration
and under boost
Oil pressure recovers as soon as you get off the throttle
To me, it looked like some weird form of oil starvation that only happened
when I hit the gas hard. I went through a bunch of strange guesses before
I discovered that the problem was in the sender. I thought the sender was
bad, and replaced it. The new sender did exactly the same thing! A little
more experimentation gave me the answer, and a solution.
To see the solution, click here.
New Exhaust Donut Bolts
I replace the exhaust donut bolts anytime they have to come off, for example
when replacing the turbo or the head gasket. Every Shelby-Dodge car I've
worked on had enough rust and scale on them to make them a real pain to
remove, and I usually broke one getting them out. Replacement is probably
going to be a necessity in any case, so I now just go buy them before I
start taking things apart.
Here's the trick, and the tip.
Use a 13 mm socket and an extension about 18 to 24 inches long from behind
the K-frame to remove and install the bolts
Replace the exhaust bolts anytime you have to take them off, at least the
first time on a given car
Get two of the nuts with "wings" on them. This makes installation a whole
lot easier, as you won't need a helper up top, and also makes removal the
next time a lot easier too.
Coat the new nuts and bolts with antisieze compound. Baste them really
well. It won't completely prevent rust, because these things are exposed
to a lot of road debris and a whole lot of heat, but it sure does help!
You can replace the headliner easily, and for only about 30 bucks. Click
above to see how.
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