Pitchblack Rally Recce Raider Build

[irish44j]

last couple days, more of the same. Pulled the passenger side front suspension as well....very exciting. If anything, this truck is pretty easy to take stuff apart. some of the balljoints were a bit of a ********** on the steering but not too bad.

Then poured myself a stout and pulled the front axle/diff assembly. Mostly so I can get better access to the inside frame to clean and paint it, but also so I could clean up the diff good, and paint it as well..

Put the upper control arm and pitman arm on the driver's side, mostly just to get them off the workbench

Then started cleaning up, refreshing, and painting the calipers. Once a new seal kit gets here I'll blow out the pistons and make sure everything looks good in there. And hey, got some decent brake pads off RockAuto for $8 (I know they're decent because I once used them on my Sequoia). Those will do for the time being, though I like to put Hawk HPS on all my street cars, including the SUVs. But $8 is better than $80 at the moment, since it's not driving anywhere

Put a new axle seal on the driver's side....

Oh, and the headlight washer reservoir is.....uh.....a bit brittle. Doens't really matter, I plan to eliminate it anyhow, or at least put a much smaller reservoir there. This seems like serious overkill for the *almost never* I'll actually want to wash my headlights.

 

[irish44j]

finished cleaning up and painting the diff and pulled the cover. Inside looked pretty decent, though there was a bit of water in with the gear oil, and a few little surface rust areas. Nothing that I'm worried about, but cleaned it out good.

all painted up and pretty....

Then finished up painting in the driver's wheel well, as well as some new bedliner coating on the upper wheel wells.

And pulled the entire passenger side suspension, cleaned the frame up (no pics) and painted everything over there

Spent some time sitting in the engine bay cleaning things up, and now i have the whole frame foreward of the firewall completely cleaned up and painted. It was cold and dirty in there.

Then started taking everything apart on the inner driver's side fender to clean it up and paint. All three plastic reservoirs on that side (washer fluid, headlight sprayer reservoir, and coolant reservoir) were brittle and cracked. Looks like the P/O had already "repaired" the sprayer reservoir once. In any case, replacements are cheap so will get those eventually...though I may not get a new headlight sprayer reservoir, mostly because I don't see the point of headlight sprayers lol...

sanded, wire brushed, and painted all the brackets and the cruise control assembly, and did a couple coats of paint on the inner fenderwell, though it was in pretty good shape.

working in a clean vehicle is much nicer...

Headed out in the other truck to get some parts for a different project, and saw a nice sunset

And came back to my 80s-tastic driveway (that's an 85 BMW and an 88 Porsche under cover)

Still waiting on some parts I ordered a while ago. Apparently 80% of my RockAuto stuff came immediately via USPS. The two being delivered by FedEx are taking forever (FedEx sucks, don't know why any company still uses them....). So once that stuff gets here I should be able to put the whole front suspension and axles back together and move on to another section of the cleanup/paint job.

 

['round n' back again]

whew big job. i recall all of that work, i too have done on a gen 1....and keep doing.
ferget the paint /clean thing. that buggy is so fun off road that its a waste of time to try fer pretty. this summer while on fire crew (we had no fires) i got this weird anal thing about cleaning the underside of my gen 1 of 30 years of road grime. carefully i simple greened it with a weed sprayer again and again and let it set till i drove down to the car wash (where they actually have hot water!), and sprayed her clean. did this nightly i was so bored and 600 miles from my shop. Now back in the rainy north woods...cant tell a thing was ever done under there. but i get it , i hear your pain at filth.
note: while dicking around with the front suspension u cant fall in love too deeply with mitsu stuff.
cast a leery eye toward the steering (junk) and the uca. also less than good. look at how simple it would be to install rack and pinion.
im working on custom UCA's that will house coil overs or ORI struts.
look at the improvement there available for you.

good press in ball joints are hard to find.

steering upgrade is a good idea, as are the brakes. the gen 1 is pedal to the floor stopping at times. and they get hot.
the mitsu bushing is really good stuff. dont replace unless absolutely have to . i ve been so happy with my replacement poly bushing that i plan to get rid of them at earliest possible...
there is nothing fundamentally poorly designed about the gen 1. its nearly perfect in execution; carry a spare fuel pump. keep a ignition igniter in the glove box, and clean your stepper motor with care ( carry an extra). I've taken my gen one into remote places that would be called foolish and she mostly got me back. but the old electronics may have bugs.
she likes copper plugs.
and put a gasket under your dist cap.

the 3.0 is a very good power plant, except it has no power.
think about 2.6 turbo or a 2.4 turbo. the 2.6 makes it torque down where it should be, but lotsa mitsu guys hate that 4. I like it with the replacement heads; what ever you do, use a trubo.
the transmission is good to 300k at very least but likes clean cool fluid with lube gard. there lotsa crying about fluid . use Eneos sp from napa. readily available and reasonably cheap (especially if your are accustomed to german cars).
mitsu engines like eneos oil
consider an electric fan unless you like swimming your rigs. i did and shed all the metal on the front of the engine. timing belt changes for me are now a 45 minute affair.
A dodge caravan shares the same 3.0 but has more power. i used one with good result.

the mopar intake manifold, i am sure will yield greater torque. i just have to re-jigger the layout to make it work and likely will go with a 4 before i ever spend any time working the 6.
your TV cable on your transmission needs TLC when adjusting to fine tune. but yields great result.
yes the hardness number on the fasteners. it kinda means where they go, in that some areas need stronger bolts than others. you will get the hang of it as you go. there are only 4 sizes i believe on a mitsu. a blessed relief from german cars and thier wrong headed fastening systems. i have found that the same size bolt but in a different location than mitsu designed it, does not work as well. try to reuse the original bolts in original locations. a 6mm is different depending on its designed need,
im rambling but these are some of my experiences with this remarkable little buggy.

Oh, and these mitsu boxes are hella chick magnets. i get more compliments for different women than i can remember. as one said "anyone can drive a jeep" as she got into her wrangler admitting if she had the choice she would have bought a mitsu. yaaaa buddy .

Oh I use the fluid reservoir for a hillbilly water injection holding tank. same contents winter windshield washer fluid rerouted through a vaccume hose into the manifold at the throttle plate. ran it all summer at 5000 foot altitude. cant say it did much but i have a very clean intake manifold now....

 

[PacS14]

Great job! Keep the pictures coming!

 

[Toasty]

there lotsa crying about fluid . use Eneos sp from napa. readily available and reasonably cheap (especially if your are accustomed to german cars).
mitsu engines like eneos oil

Probably because Eneos is Nippon Mitsubishi Oil company. ?



Love seeing a good Gen 1 build, these machines don't get enough love.

 

[irish44j]

Dave, thanks for all the knowledge! It's tough finding organized information on these things sometimes, half the old links are dead, photos disappeared, etc. I figure I'll just take on a few of your points below, since it lets me expound on things as well

whew big job. i recall all of that work, i too have done on a gen 1....and keep doing.
ferget the paint /clean thing. that buggy is so fun off road that its a waste of time to try fer pretty. this summer while on fire crew (we had no fires) i got this weird anal thing about cleaning the underside of my gen 1 of 30 years of road grime. carefully i simple greened it with a weed sprayer again and again and let it set till i drove down to the car wash (where they actually have hot water!), and sprayed her clean. did this nightly i was so bored and 600 miles from my shop. Now back in the rainy north woods...cant tell a thing was ever done under there. but i get it , i hear your pain at filth.

I hear you there, and I'm definitely not one of these guys who cleans his cars a lot. But when I'm doing a new build I basically like to clean and paint everything really well - first so I can see what needs to be fixed/replaced, second to stop future rust, etc. and third because I want to be the one who gets my vehicles all dirty haha..

Don't worry, I have no problem getting things dirty - my BMW gets dirtier than 99% of the 4x4s out there, I'd bet

note: while dicking around with the front suspension u cant fall in love too deeply with mitsu stuff.
cast a leery eye toward the steering (junk) and the uca. also less than good. look at how simple it would be to install rack and pinion.
im working on custom UCA's that will house coil overs or ORI struts.
look at the improvement there available for you.

good press in ball joints are hard to find.

steering upgrade is a good idea, as are the brakes. the gen 1 is pedal to the floor stopping at times. and they get hot.
the mitsu bushing is really good stuff. dont replace unless absolutely have to . i ve been so happy with my replacement poly bushing that i plan to get rid of them at earliest possible...
there is nothing fundamentally poorly designed about the gen 1. its nearly perfect in execution; carry a spare fuel pump. keep a ignition igniter in the glove box, and clean your stepper motor with care ( carry an extra). I've taken my gen one into remote places that would be called foolish and she mostly got me back. but the old electronics may have bugs.
she likes copper plugs.
and put a gasket under your dist cap.

Yeah, I have some ideas on the steering, but they are not on the top of my list. Though if I find a Gen 2 at the junkyard I'll pull the box from it, which will suit for the time being. At least by putting in all new fresh balljoints and busings up front I should tighten it up as much as possible for the time being. I'm only replacing bushings that are torn or otherwise don't look great, not all of them (though i "have" all of them, I think). I'm pretty good about carrying spares (comes from racing a rally car, where we carry about 20# of spare stuff while going 100mph through the woods!).

the 3.0 is a very good power plant, except it has no power.
think about 2.6 turbo or a 2.4 turbo. the 2.6 makes it torque down where it should be, but lotsa mitsu guys hate that 4. I like it with the replacement heads; what ever you do, use a trubo.
the transmission is good to 300k at very least but likes clean cool fluid with lube gard. there lotsa crying about fluid . use Eneos sp from napa. readily available and reasonably cheap (especially if your are accustomed to german cars).
mitsu engines like eneos oil
consider an electric fan unless you like swimming your rigs. i did and shed all the metal on the front of the engine. timing belt changes for me are now a 45 minute affair.

Luckily (or not), I'm down on the coast so don't have the high-altitude thin air, so turbo isn't as imperative. Since this truck had a 6G72 in it, and I have the transmission, I'll likely put another Mitsu six in there - that is TBD probably next summer and may just be a matter of what turns up that is inexpensive and not too much fabbing - this area is FULL of dirt-cheap Montero Sports for sale with both the 3.0 and 3.5. I know there are some differences that I'd have to address, but will cross that bridge when I come to it. Pretty much any Monty that I can grab close-by for really cheap, running, may be my swap candidate.

I'll definitly go electric fan (I have about 10 of them here that we've used for racing and stuff) eventually.

A dodge caravan shares the same 3.0 but has more power. i used one with good result.

That's another engine option, but I've had a hard time finding a clear answer or information of what "needs to be done" for them - things like moving the oil pump, dipstick, etc....

yes the hardness number on the fasteners. it kinda means where they go, in that some areas need stronger bolts than others. you will get the hang of it as you go. there are only 4 sizes i believe on a mitsu. a blessed relief from german cars and thier wrong headed fastening systems. i have found that the same size bolt but in a different location than mitsu designed it, does not work as well. try to reuse the original bolts in original locations. a 6mm is different depending on its designed need,

yeah, figured that all out. It's mildly annoying - I have literally giant cases full of nuts and bolts from 80s German cars from various builds and cars I've parted. And zero of them fit the Raider, haha. The Japanese had a thing with fine threads! It's fine though.

Oh, and these mitsu boxes are hella chick magnets. i get more compliments for different women than i can remember. as one said "anyone can drive a jeep" as she got into her wrangler admitting if she had the choice she would have bought a mitsu. yaaaa buddy .

Haha....well this is the Washington DC area. I probably see a couple Defender 90s every day to go with a million mall-crawler Jeeps and every luxury SUV you can think of....., so trying to pull chicks with an 80s Dodge may not work here (luckily, I do have a Red 80s Porsche as well....). But since I've been married for 17 years and have 2 kids, it's not a huge worry of mine

Anyhow, feel free to comment on anything I do - I'm sure I'll do some wrong stuff. But I try to document everything (my build for my BMW rally car and my Porsche is over 1,000 pages and 10 years long!!), both for my own reference and for peopel trying to do these cars in the future. I'll start with the basics, get the truck running, and then work up upgrading it and doing fun things with it.

We DO plan to use it for reconnaissance runs before rallies. Right now we use my Sequoia, which is usually loaded up with 1000lbs of spare parts and gear for the car, so isn't ideal...then again, it tows better than a Montero, which is its real job.

[/QUOTE]

 

[irish44j]

Continued with some things today. Got my caliper rebuild kit in, so rebuilt the driver's front caliper. Piston and bore looked excellent and movement was smooth. So, put new seals in, greased the pins, put in new hardware and pads, reassembled, and good to go there.

blowing the piston out with some air..

Then I put most of the front left back together, and installed the caliper with new soft lines.

Looks a bit better under there than it used to.

Also put the front axle back in

I hate that it just looks like I'm painting stuff - but it's hard to take photos of taking apart and refurbishing/rebuilding greasy axles, bearings, bushigns, and stuff like that, which I'm also doing, just not documenting. But, thanks for bearing with me while I do the boring stuff. My rally car build thread started like this too, but eventually got pretty good

 

[sedole]

Wow, I love your thoroughness and attention to detail. This is gonna be a sweet rig! Makes me wish I had a gen 1 again. She was a blast to throw around on the dirt/mud esp. with the LSD.

 

[irish44j]

So taking a quick break, figured I'd answer two questions. Not that you guys asked them, but just as some background.

1. Hey, didn't you do a XJ Cherokee build about 10 years ago, and then sell it pretty quick? Why another vehicle that's "kinda" in a similar category.?

2. You live in the 'burbs of Washington DC - is this going to be a mall-crawler? What do you plan to do with it?



So yeah, first off...when I was in high school in the 90s I drove (alternately) a Chrysler minivan and a 1970 Triumph. One of my good friends had an XJ (which was pretty new at the time) and it was definitely the coolest vehicle in the school parking lot, that I recall, and I was always jealous. Flip forward 15 years or so and my good friend's new girlfriend was selling an XJ for cheap. I decided to do an impulse buy (I knew she needed money, so it was a bit of a charity buy as well) and went and checked it out in a rainstorm, not really checking it out very much, honestly.

It had big stupid wheels with 32s on it, a terrible lift with blocks and spacers, handled badly, brakes were even worse, and had the pre-HO AMC 4.0 engine with Renix engine management (but it was a manual transmission). I spent a year or two trying to undo issues with it and make it better, with no real goal for it. After putting a decent (OME) suspension on it, fixing a bunch of rust, getting some decent wheels and tires, adding a swing-out tire carrier and rack....and then kinda determined I really didn't like driving it. Soon after, my wife got a new 4Runner (2008), and I disliked the XJ even more lol. And a few months later I had to get a new daily driver, so I sold the XJ to get some down-payment cash (for a 2009 WRX). Only took it wheeling once, and never really liked it how I thought I would, based on high school memories.

So why the Raider?

Well, because I like projects and already have a race car and a vintage sportscar, so needed something different. The Raider is unusual (especially in this area) and I like cars that aren't too common (e.g. Jeeps). And I wanted something with better street manners than the XJ (i.e. not a stick axle up front). So, not that the Raider is a Miata, but once I'm done with it I expect it'll be a decent street vehicle - I'm not going crazy off-road setup with it.

What will I do with it? Well, plans always change, but the main plan is kind of three-fold.

1) Have the ability to do some wheeling and exploring when the urge hits me. My Sequioa is too big for that, and it's mostly stock and used for towing, so I don't really want to do any real off-roading with it. My other cars won't do well on much more than logging roads, lol. There are some good trails in GW forest a couple hours from here, other places to explore depending on how far I want to go. We'll see how it goes once I finish it up.

2) It's not a Jeep. There are a million "built" Jeeps around here, mostly mall-crawlers. It would be the easy button to just find on and build it, with huge aftermarket and resources. That's boring. I want something unusual.

3) Rally. Rally is what we do. The Raider will be great as a recce (reconnaissance) vehicle before rallies, so I'll want it set up more for "fast gravel roads" than "slow rock-crawling" primarily. We'll see if those things can exist together, though. IFS helps.

4) Be creative. It's easy enough to just do what everyone else does, buy $$ parts, huge tires, etc. I like to build things, so if it gets a roof rack, I'll build it. If it needs a rollbar, I'll build it, etc etc.

5) Something to do. Living in the 'burbs is boring. When I don't have a car project, I'm a brat and my wife is unhappy. Car projects keep me busy and active. Previous projects since the XJ included my WRX (which was heavily modded), my trailer (for hauling the race car), a Triumph GT6, an e21 BMW, my e30 rally BMW, an '87 Porsche 924S, and various projects on other vehicles I own.

Three cars i don't own any more....all of which I really liked.

ok now, getting back to work on this thing....

 

[irish44j]

So today's projects mostly more of the same, but UPS did deliver some RockAuto goodness for me in the form of a set of KYB shocks, which were on some kind of clearance sale and withe current coupon were like $80 for the whole set. Seems like some people in the Montero world like them, we'll see. Nothing that can't be upgraded later if I want to.

Put some of the passenger side suspension back together. I mean, as far as you know, since all these black parts don't make for very good photos...

Then disassembled, painted, and rebuilt the other front caliper, which was in just as good functional shape as the other one. I'll still be keeping my eye out for a junkyard Gen 2 brake setup, but that's for later.

 

[irish44j]

So need a quick clarification. For the front LCA main bolts, the FSM says they should be tightened when the vehicle is "unladen." Generally with this kind of setup on other cars, it's usually required that they be tightened with the car on its tires (i.e. "laden"), so as not to tear the bushings when at normal ride position.

So, is the FSM just using the wrong word (Japanese translation?), or is this just a different procedure from usual?

 

[irish44j]

Swung by Home Depot today and got myself something to make it more pleasant to be in the garage this winter..

It's not that I can't deal with the cold, but when painting a lot of stuff, sub-40 temps make drying time endless. So now that we're warmed up, time for some more painting and cleaning. Today I did basically the entire outer/bottom of the driver's side frame (I'll do all the inner frame faces at once at some point this winter).

Pulled the trailing arm on that side and the rear swaybar for better access back there as well

The bushings on the trailing arms look pretty decent so may not replace them at this time. It's pretty easy to remove if I want to do it in the future.

Put most of the front passenger side stuff back together as well, as well as the front sway bar with all new bushings

And since it was fairly warm (and it won't be like this all winter), decided to paint the gas tank skid, since it was just sitting there...

 

[irish44j]

The afternoon started with my wife telling me the TPMS light on her CX-9 was on, so after an inspection of the right rear tire (which looked a bit flat), found a broken piece of a razor blade in the tread. That's annoying. So had to do a plug job before I got to my own projects.

back to the Raider. While cleaning up the radius/trailing arm, I noticed that the front bushings appear to have been replaced at some point with urethane bushings (I assume these aren't stock!). So, they're in great shape, one less thing to replace

With the temperature closing on 60 degrees today, it was a good a time as any to pull the gas tank, since I'd have to have the garages wide open to keep things aired out. So first did a drain.....9 gallons :/ Seems like every project car I get has a fullish tank of fuel. Put a few gallons into the Sequioa (which already had 15 gallons of fresh fuel in it) and the rest into a couple big jugs in the shed. My lawn mower will be well-fed for the next 5 years.......

Then pulled the tank, which was pretty simple.

Unfortunately, managed to twist off the meal feed pipe from the tank since the fuel line was stuck on the hose.

This does bring up another issue - all of the flex hoses in the fuel system, while not appearing to leak, really don't look very good. I'm not a big fan of fuel leaks so would like to replace these, or at least some of them (especially the ones in the rear). Looked them up and really only available in Japan for around $100 each (there are a total of 8), so may have to look into having some made, or seeing if there are some from more recent Monteros or another vehicle that would work. Guess we'll see, but fuel is an area that I don't take chances with, so will do something.

This system has surprisingly large number of vacuum hoses and "modules" of some sort - none of this stuff appears to be present in my OEM '89 parts catalog, so not really sure exactly what it is - I assume emissions - so may see how much of this junk I can delete once I figure out what it all is.

more of it behind the protection panel in the wheel well...looks like some kind of overflow drain for the filler, but the routing is pretty ususual.

WIth the tank out, better access to the rear body and frame so I can clean that all up.

So, did a bit of that until I got tired of being on my back....

What else....so fulled the non-functional tailgate outer handle. For as little rust as this vehicle has overall, not sure what happened here lol......practically the whole thing is made of thin rust at this point

I had ordered a new one from "Gen 1 Montero Man" on the internet, who sells a variety of hard-to-find parts, and it arrived today, but it's not correct so will have to see what I can do. The original design is so simple I may just be able to fabricate a new handle on my own without too much difficulty. I don't see any easy way to modify/improvise with the new one based on the direction of the mechanism's pull.

 

[irish44j]

With all my shopping done, the wife busy inside cooking stuff, and the kids playing with their friends - and it in the mid-50s again, got a few more things done.

Cleaned off the fuel tank and took a better look at things. Aside from the ridiculously-complex emissions/overflow system this thing has, it's in decent shape

Pump has clearly been replaced, will test it myself and clean all this stuff up

Inside looks pretty good. Tank was about half full sitting for a couple years, and the bottom half is very clean. The upper half has a very light coating of some rusty-type stuff, but it basically rubs off at the touch. So figure I'll rinse it all out, but happy to see I don't need to do any real inside work on the tank.

Took a few moments to use some JB Plastic Weld on the broken headlight bezels, just because I was tired of being under the car at that point.

The did the inner driver's side rear frame rails, which meant taking the fuel/brake line brackets etc etc. And also put the radius arm/trailing arm back on.

And spent some time cleaning up stuff and putting tools away, since I was getting to a point where I couldn't find stuff.

That's it for now, went and took the rally car for a drive (almost got hit head-on by some idiot who ran a red light, so that was fun locking up all four brakes on race pads......)

Hope you all have a very merry Christmas, and thanks for following along!

 

[hardwaregrrl]

I'm really enjoying watching this one! Were you racing NASA in 12-13? Your BMW looks very familiar....I was on an old airhead with a big black and blue tank. Sandblast, Rally W. Virginia, Black River. Looking forward to the finish!