What have you done to your wagon lately? (Let's keep the thread going!)

The one we did was an early V6 model 1st Gen German model. The cam gear was a fiber gear with a steel crank gear. The 2nd Gen 2.8 had not yet been introduced.

 

That's the price of marketing a quiet engine. I'd rather have a bronze gear ring shrunk onto a steel camshaft-driving wheel, instead. But then, it would have been more expensive to put into production

 

Is that why they do the fiber gears??? To eliminate engine noise? That’s crazy...That’s like the plastic cooling hoses they have on the pontiacs. I forget what engine but the two little elbows that you have to remove all that stuff to get to. The replacements are all aluminum, which I bet was the original design until someone said “nah, it’ll be cheaper to do plastic, then when they fail after 80,000 miles we’ll get paid again to put the aluminum’s on there”

 

No, it's not crazy. If you have ever heard a gear drive in a performance engine, they have that telltale whine of steel on steel. The fiber gears were used on engines that had direct gear drive.....no timing chain. Early GM inline 6's had them and I only ever saw one of them fail and those engines got a lot of hard use. The problem with them was that they were pressed on to the camshaft and to change one, you had to pull the cam to press the new one on. Fiber gears are not plastic gears.

 

And they are different from gears that are aluminum with a plastic overlay, made of nylon, and crumble after a long while. My '74 Ranchero's Cleveland had it, nylon was gone, and the chain whipped right around the totally worn gear, causing the engine to no longer want to start.

 

http://midstateantiquestockcarclub.com/stovebolts.html

 

I feel like I’ve seen nylon (or maybe plastic??) gears with a belt? And i remember the teeth being worn down to a nub? Or it could have been one of my vivid dreams...

 

The 2.3L fours were belt-driven, but I've only seen metal gears with those no matter how old they are.

 

On subject of my 90 Grand Marquis, what could cause the temperature needle to not rise if the heater gets warm enough to heat the cabin? Can it be just the instrument cluster? If so, I do have to fix the odometer anyway since it's no longer turning. The speedometer's been reading 59 when I'm going 55 too but maybe the tires are a little small even though they're 215/70R15s (the stock size.)

 

Check the wiring and most importantly the connector right on the temperature sending unit for the gauge cluster. You can also test the resistance of the sending unit and compare cold to warm to see if it is changing.

Odometer gears are a pretty common failure on these. I think there are two styles depending on where the trip odometer and odometer are (stacked on top of each other or left and right). These instructions are for the latter style. The instructions are written using a newer car as a model, but are pretty spot on for the 90-91 vehicles.
http://www.odometergears.com/docume..._Fascia_Panel_Removal_and_Odometer_Repair.pdf

You can get the gears pretty cheap on ebay.

 

I always thought they used fiber gears in case of a catastrophic failure it wouldn't do more damage, the gear shatters (cheaper, easier to replace) than the whole motor seizing up or blowing chunks all over.
If you used a metal gear in place of a sacrificial gear it could cause problems if something happened that would normally cause the sacrificial fiber gear to give where the metal non-sacrificial gear wouldn't.

 

I've never heard of a valvetrain seizing up, at where parts rotate. When something happens further up in the cylinderhead, a pushrod will bend, without affecting the fiber gear. Fiber was solely used for noise reduction and not for any programmed obsolescence or intended failure

A certain margin of error isn't uncommon

 

Especially if the tires are near the end of their life, as the diameter is changed from new. Do this: take a penny, turn it upside-down, and put it in the deepest tread area. If you can see the top of Lincoln's head, the tires are at the end of their life.

 

Low and behold, the relay block is right behind the switch. It resembles nothing I've ever seen before. This guy's not repairing it. But, getting it to work just enough to get home with:

 

Not necessary. If you can see Lincoln's head, then you can see the wear indicators which are molded into every tire. They indicate that there is only 2/32nds of tread left, at which point the tires become illegal in most states. To a police officer following behind, they will appear as a straight line across the tire. Should you get into an accident, they are prima facie evidence that you are at fault because you were driving on unsafe tires.