Festiva #5 (OrneryGarbagebox) gets a major overhaul!

[Damkid]

Thanks for the catch bro. Wish I could edit the post!
PLEASE NOTE: SEAT SWAP WAS WITH ASPIRE SEAT BOTTOM not Escort. My mistake.

I edited your post to now say aspire seat

[Basement_Modder]

The rio passenger axle is great news for many. You can find XR2 axles no problem, but the intermediate shaft is a pita. An XR2 driver's and rio passenger axle combo corrects this, at a cost of some torque steer. I will gladly live with the torque steer if it means a cheaper swap, especially if it means more money for structural reinforcements.

[Afro]

Busy day today so I only got a few hours to work on the car.
Tore the old festiva rear beam out and swapped in the Aspire rear beam using the festiva mounts. Routed and reconnected the Aspire emergency cable. Bolted on the KYB aspire struts (but couldn't find a part to my spring compressor so I didn't install them in the car with the Festiva front springs)... and yeah they're two different colours
No hangups, easy job.

I then got to work on cutting up some mounts to fabricate the mounts for the BP. Here is the lower half of the Festiva rear transmission mount and the top half of the BP rear transmission mount, as well as the bits I cut off both. I'll drop the engine in tomorrow, and weld them together as needed.

[crazyrog17]

Haha, try not to catch fire to the rubber. Lookin good!

[Movin]

The higher you go, the shorter axles you need, the longer lower control arms
you need and eventually you have to drop and rotate the trans to get livable
cv angles..lift front of engine..Boy is it easy to enter and exit about 6 more
inches of height!!!!

[KJ4YXY]

YES

. We're going for a little bit of a high clearance dirt/gravel road daemon on this one because it's not our prettiest festive( most panels have dents and it has a few mismatched panels)

YES YES YES YES!!!!!!!( that there does not show how excited I am to see the outcome!)

I can't wait to see.
That was hat I wanted to do but it would cost me alot of money.

Good luck and post millions of pics!!

[Bert]

One last post for the day!
I took the festiva rear beam complete with struts, brakes, etc. out without too many problems, but there was a huge problem awaiting in the Aspire beam we pulled from the wreckers a while back. When we pulled the axle, we couldn't get the passenger side shock off, so we just left it on. Today I fought it for over 3 hours. I tried the 14mm with an impact wrench: nothing. Tried with a huge snipe: rounded the bolt (surprised it didn't snap it). Soaked it in Wurth release compound, hammered on it, used an airhammer on it, all to try and loosen the rust, filed down the bolt and hammered on a 13 mm, rounded the bolt once more. By this point I decided I had to go crazy on it. I flipped it over, cut the bottom of the shock eyelet so I could tear the shock off, air hammered the rubber off and was now down to the small sleeve left over from the shock, covering the bolt. It was seized on good. Nothing could make it spin, no air hammer, sniped pipe wrenches, nothing, and I was afraid of hurting the beam. So I grabbed my sawsall and cut the sleeve and bolt in two places. I air hammered the sleeve off the head-side of the bolt, and then air hammered the sleeve couter clockwise on the treaded side of the bolt to extract it from the threads on the beam. SUCCESS! Beer time.

In every repair book or manual re and re of a rear shock appears to be a dead simple procedure. Until you get to tangle with the real thing! This particular recounting of events should be posted somewhere for noobs that think an Aspire swap is merely a few hours work.

[Christ]

In every repair book or manual re and re of a rear shock appears to be a dead simple procedure. Until you get to tangle with the real thing! This particular recounting of events should be posted somewhere for noobs that think an Aspire swap is merely a few hours work.

Mine was, on the rear. I even reused the Festiva's brake lines and hoses.

[Jfro]

Afro has been manically tearing through Pick n Pull for the past few days, thinking of better ways to build this Festy back up. Promise more posts very soon!

[Afro]

So we went to Edmonton to visit our friend who operates Mermaid Welding Co. He's an awesome welder and promised to help us out with our fuel dilemma.
The problem? We're swapping a BP into an old carbureted Festiva body and so we can't easily swap in a Festiva EFI fuel pump because the fuel tanks between carbureted and EFI Festivas are different. And the wreckers always puncture fuel tanks so we can't buy one of their Festiva EFI ones either.
Solution? Hack and weld a fuel pump to the carbureted pick-up "pump".
If we're doing this though, there's no reason we should stick with a Festiva fuel pump, why not use an EGT pump? Turns out it was a better idea too because the area it occupies on the pump lid is smaller than the Festiva's.

**WARNING**
To anyone doing this, the metal is stainless on all pump covers, so weld accordingly!!

This is a comparison of the Festiva EFI pump (left) and carbureted Festiva pick-up tube and float on right (not really a pump). You can tell the bolt pattern is quite different and this is why we can't easily use any EFI pump.


And an Escrot GT pump doesn't even have a bolt pattern, it is held down by a large circular ring, like many modern pumps. So we estimated what we had to cut out of the Festiva Carbureted "pump" lid and fit it to the escort one to see how we might weld it.


We got an idea of what we would do and so Mitch got to cutting and welding.



And tada! A brand new EGT EFI fuel pump for our carbureted Festiva fuel tank.

[Afro]

Next step was checking the fitment in the actual tank. I mean I checked before hand but of course things would change as we cut and welded it together.

First thing to do: drill out all the holes in the lid that the weld may have obscured.

Next, check the depth of the pickup tube in the tank. It was a little too far from the bottom, so I just grabbed the end of the pipe and bent it down (easy) until it was as close as I could get it without it touching the bottom of the tank (not much of an adjustment).

This is what it looked like at that point.


The next problem is the float. The Festiva float has a resistance of 6 to 120 ohms (I think... I didn't write it down) and the Escort float has a resistance of 10 to 120 ohms (again, I think, but regardless the EGT and Festiva resistance range was almost exactly the same through the potiometer's action), so no problems there, but they are inverted! So when the tank would be full it would read empty, and empty when full. Not a major inconvenience if remember to read your guage backwards, but I figured I'd try to fix it anyways. The good thing is that the EGT float is bolted to the pump and the swing action is perfectly symmetrical so you can just unbolt it and flip it around! The only problem is that it has a plastic tab, and a rod sticking out that you have to drill out the metal to make room for (see pictures).



Here you can see the newly drilled holes and what the obstructions were and how they would not get in the way of the metal support if the float wasn't rotated 180 degrees.


And here it is installed!


And I can just cap off the return on the pump (the more bent tube) and use the stock return in the tank with the stock hose.
Now for a little wiring...

[hodginsa]

Whoa so much work, and very nicely done, but why not just use a Walbro?!

[Afro]

It would have run me around $100 for a new pump, and this cost me nothing. And I'd still have to build a bracket and buy hoses and fab a small amount of wiring for a Walbro or Denso pump. I also like to use stock parts when I can.

[Afro]

I got back to work on this headache of a car and found what I hope to be the ideal solution to a BP G5M-R clutch cable fix. I made a post in Custom Engine & Drivetrain so I won't post it here, but here's the link to the post:

http://www.fordfestiva.com/forums/showthread.php?p=543614#post543614

[Afro]

Just a tip to anyone doing a G5M-R swap with a rio passenger side axle: the auto has 24 inner splines instead of 26. I knew this and even wrote it down in my chart I posted a while ago, but somehow picked up an auto shaft a long time ago and today went to install, and well, I was pretty upset. Yet another trip to the wreckers... Ugh.