Tail Light Lenses

 One of the issues is that the SE harness doesn't support separate brake lights and turn signals. This means that when the left signal is on the whole left side of the tail-light blinks, not just in the indicator portion, so I would have to modify the tail lenses too since the the blinkers would come on under braking (illegal) and the brake lights would blink for the turn signal (not illegal).

I figured the easiest solution to this problem was to turn the amber portion of my tail light lens red. I looked all over the web for suggestions and stumbled upon someone who came up with the fantastic idea of using the transparent red paint for model cars used to... paint tail lights. Simplicity.

 

So I went out and bought some transparent red spray enamel at the craft store, masked off the reflectors, and re-painted the amber sections of the tail light.

I'm very pleased with how they came out. Now that the reflectors are the right color I figured I'd try a fix for delaminated tail light lenses I found on the Pennock Fiero forums, simply masking off the letters and painting the outside of the lens.

Look how delaminated this is

So I masked off the letters with some vinyl painting tape, and masked off the clear portion of the lens.

Sprayed the lens down with black automotive grade paint, the forum recommends some water-based paint through a spray gun since it's not as thick and gives a smoother finish. After 2 coats of black had plenty of time to dry I sprayed on 4-5 coats of automotive clear coat.

Unfortunately when I went to put the right lens back together I wasn't being careful and the reflector seated weird and as I applied pressure cracked the outer lens, so I have to repair that crack and repaint that lens.

Tail Light Troubles

The first thing on the agenda for the Franken-Fiero is to get it to pass a state inspection so I can drive the damned thing. To do so I need to fix:

• Tail Lights: I need blinkers, brake lights, reversing lights, and running lights. Of which about 1/5 work the way they're supposed to
• Head Lights: One of the headlamps doesn't come on, but it's high-beam does. Either a burnt out lens or a wiring/relay issue
• Emergency Brake: install the front cable to connect the brakes to the handle, repair or replace the switch in there that controls the light on the dash.

So first I decided to tackle the biggest issue: tail lights that simply don't work. So I had to remove the lenses, which is fairly simple.

There are 6 abs plastic caps above the lenses under the deck lid. Pop these covers off with a flat-head screwdriver or knife. Underneath these caps are 6 matching Philips screws that are pretty distinct, remove them and the lenses will pull out from the body. 

Then squeeze the handles on each of the sockets and rotate them counterclockwise-wise to remove them from the lens. Once this is done the lenses can be completely removed from the car to be dealt with as appropriate.

I found at this point that some sockets were missing, as well as the fact several wires were poorly spliced together and the simplest solution would be to remove the whole harness from the car to solder and trouble-shoot.

To remove the harness you need to remove the rear bumper, both rear interior and exterior sail panels (at least in my case), the engine vents on both sides of the engine bay, and at least half of each rear inner wheel-well. Once all these panels are removed there is a long dimpled piece of steel that serves as a shelf for the tail lights, a point for the bumper to be attached to, as well as providing the pathways through which the harness travels, so it will have to removed to remove the harness from the body. This shelf however can be removed at any time in this process.

The tail-light harness is all connected to the chassis harness through the C203 connector found right behind the battery on the passenger side of the car. This connector is attached with a small bolt that will have to be loosened to remove the connector.

The C203 and C500 connector are attached via that same small bolt, so to remove the C203 simply pull that side of the connector forward off the bolt and slip the wires through the slot in the C500.

Now if you follow the harness you see if goes underneath this piece of weather-stripping, which can simply be peeled up carefully with a scraper or flat head screwdriver. We'll glue it back down when we re-install the harness later.

After the weather strip is pull up I removed the two bolts that hold the body panel to the chassis, this gave me enough slack to push the connector between the chassis and body into the wheel-well.

Continue following the harness down the passenger side and you'll see that a bundle splits off through a small grommet into the trunk space. This grommet simply pulls out, but first pull back the carpet at this corner of the trunk and disconnect the wires to the fan motor and corresponding relay. Once the wires are disconnected and the grommet remove the whole bundle (including the grommet) can be pull back out.

Keep following the harness across the chassis toward the drivers side, if you've got a grounding wire screwed to the chassis go ahead and unscrew it. Leave the harness in the body clips along the back of the chassis so it is held up and doesn't hit the ground and break any bulbs or sockets. On the drivers side of the car you can follow the harness back up into the engine compartment where it will travel behind the canister there in the engine bay, as such it will have to removed. 

in my case the previous owner had obviously messed with this so I didn't need to move it...

The harness is connected to the trunk-opened switch and in the cruise control unit. Simply remove the connectors carefully.

Trunk open switch

One of the two connectors on the cruise control unit

The harness then travels through another grommet into the trunk compartment into the bulb there. The whole assembly for the trunk light simply pops forward out of it's hole, use a screwdriver or knife to pry it forward.

remove the connector into the lamp and pull it back through it's channel toward the engine bay. If it gets caught you can pull back the carpet to help guide it through.

Then there is another matching strip of weather-strip on the drivers side, pry it up and guide the harness back between the body chassis. Then you can remove the harness from the clips, and if you haven't already the steel tray, now the harness is free of the body.

I took the harness inside to trouble-shoot, and upon peeling off all the tape and shielding I found that the reason my lights were so messed up was two-fold.

 First the harness wasn't for a GT car. There were no sockets in the harness to illuminate the PONTIAC logo running lights, no high sockets for the turn signals, only sockets for the brake lamps, leading me to realize that the harness was for an SE car. 

Also there was some very questionable wiring and splicing in the harness, in places there were as many as 8 wires spliced together and in all these cases long wires running around it's ass to get to it's elbow.

 Both of these problems I set out to repair. First I cleaned all the wires of the adhesive and dirt with some brake cleaner and a rag. Then I used a combination of research and a multi-meter to figure out what each wire and corresponding pin was supposed to light or send.

Once I knew what each wire/pin was supposed to do I could start cutting out the horrible splices and repairing the harness, as well as adding in sockets for the turn signal slots and PONTIAC logo. So I drew up a wiring diagram for the sockets to work off of .

Then it was simply a matter of soldering in the sockets and fixing the splices in the wires.

The Franken Fiero is Bough-Born!

Before I get to my Fiero some backstory:

3 Years ago I wrecked my first car, a 2003 Hyundai Tiburon 4-cyl with a 5-speed. It was a good first car, fun to drive, only had 130k miles when I bought it. It had some bad rust in the undercarriage and me and my dad had gone through and replaced all the brake lines and both lower control arms over the car's time with me. The best thing about the car was that it was a manual. I drove that car all through high-school and into my first year of college.

After I wrecked it I figured (because I was young and dumb) I didn't need a daily driver really. I mean I lived on campus, my friends had cars, I had a meal plan, why did I need a car? Well I love cars. If those two previous sentences seem like trouble to you then you're right on the money. I browsed Craigslist kind of haphazardly in between classes for months until I came across a 1971 SAAB Sonett III. It was a basket case, but the more research I did the more I had to have the car. So I went out and bought it and embarked on a (still on-going) restoration project (which you can check out on my other blog for it at SAABSonett3.blogspot.com). 

After about a year and half into the SAAB project I decided "I probably need a daily driver to actually drive myself to work". But being a broke college student I had a really tiny budget, so I did the only logical thing someone in my position would do: I bought a 92 Chevy Camaro for $800. It was purple, rusty, had a slow-as-snot automatic, 225,000+ miles on the clock and tiny little tires... but it drove, and it had a V8 (admittedly only a 305 but still). I drove that thing for close to 10 months before the engine blew up, the previous owner hadn't been huge on maintenance... or oil changes. The poor 305 was very dead. 

So I sold the Camaro to a guy who wanted the transmission out of it and with that money, as well as a single paycheck, bought my "1985 Pontiac Fiero".

Obviously the car is the "Fastback" body style... which wasn't available until the 1986 model year, spotted a problem yet? When questioned the previous owner explained they had re-bodied an 85 chassis with an 86 GT fastback body. The VIN number said the car was indeed an 85 with a V6 so I shrugged, I like the fastback body way better anyway. I test drove the car and everything mechanically checked out, manual steering was snappy, no rear flotation from collapsed or failing suspension, transmission shifted smoothly, and the engine sounded great, no exhaust leaks. I crawled all around underneath the car looking for rust or leaks and couldn't find any or other large issues.

The car was listed fairly cheap, so I was willing to overlook a few of little flaws: the headlamp motors didn't work, but all my research on Fiero's showed that was a pretty common problem with a pretty simple fix. The paint work was done by the owner and not the best, but it was a hell of a lot better than the paint had been on the Camaro. The emergency/parking brake was missing the front cable to connect the handle to the actual brake cables, so I'd have to get one of those. The headliner was coming off the headliner board, and the tail light lenses were pretty badly delaminated. All of these things were well inside my skill-set, and the car only had an alleged 70,000 miles, which I now suspect is simply the reading on the odometer he tossed in the car. The tachometer didn't read correctly (idling around allegedly 3k on the dial instead of 1k) but that's not a pressing issue, I can shift on engine noise. So I bought the car and drove it an hour home, during which I realized the car would also need an alignment. 

On the way home with the car my girlfriend called me from behind on the highway to inform me that my blinkers didn't work. When I got home I inspected to determine she was half right, one blinker worked, but not the other. Puzzling, I figured it was either a blown bulb or a wiring issue, no big deal.

After a few days working on this carI came to realize that I was truly dealing with the "Franken-Fiero". The guy I had bought it from had stitched this car together from the parts he had lying around. He had 5+ Fieros around his property, so I suspect if any component was bad he went out to the yard and pulled a part off one of his other cars to fix it, which is all fine and dandy if all the cars are the same, but they weren't.

I have an intake manifold off an 87-88 car, but the engine as far as I can tell is the original V6 from 85. The 5-speed Muncie Getrag unit he told me the car had wasn't quite true, my 5-speed is a Isuzu unit offered only for the 85 model year. My speedometer and tachometer come from a later model GT car, likely causing the issue with the tachometer reading incorrectly since it's pickup is likely for the Muncie transmission. I also found that the harness for the rear lamps of the car was from an SE car, instead of a GT, which caused some problems. 

IT'S ALIVVEEE!