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1991 Cadillac Fleetwood Project Thread


MikeKnight

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Still got to sort a solution for the door speakers. They're a custom size inside a plastic enclosure, stupid-ass BOSE macguffins. Normal speakers don't fit. Hmm.

It's supposed to have rear shelf speakers too but I dont remember hearing anything from the back when I tried.

I do have the original head unit but the modern unit installed is a good quality SONY one so I think I'll leave that in for now.

I do like my tunes so sorted speakers are the new priority. Current ones do work after a fashion but mostly sound like they're underwater.

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Additive tablets?  Sounds like a recipe for future issues and possibly the source of much of your silted up radiator.

Forte system conditioner & stop leak is the only thing I'd consider putting in these days.  A lot of the older compounds caused more issues than they caused.

Did you know that Jag specified TWO cans of Barr's Stop Leak with each coolant change on the V12 XJ-S?  Madness!

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7 hours ago, Zelandeth said:

Additive tablets?  Sounds like a recipe for future issues and possibly the source of much of your silted up radiator.

Forte system conditioner & stop leak is the only thing I'd consider putting in these days.  A lot of the older compounds caused more issues than they caused.

Did you know that Jag specified TWO cans of Barr's Stop Leak with each coolant change on the V12 XJ-S?  Madness!

I did a bit of reading up on the tablets you add (I used the "proper" AC Delco ones that Cadillac recommended) and apparently it was more to secure the block than the radiator.

The workshop manual goes into more detail and I don't have that here at home, something about the specific wet liners needing to be sealed.

I've never heard that before on any wet liner cars I've had but it's American and Americans are weird.

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Tried to get the A/C re-gassed today but the compressor isn't engaging its clutch for some reason. Might be seized. Thankfully the workshop book tells you certain pins to short in order to bypass its control system and engage anyway, so I can determine if the sensor or the compressor itself is at fault. Also the high pressure side valve is leaking and it might have a fail-safe that stops it engaging in this case, so I'll change the valve out first.

I cleaned inside the car today, it was a long day, it was so bad.. so so bad.. I don't even want to think about it.. I've probably picked up consumption from it..

Anyway, I cleaned the carpets and found all this yummy coffee! Anyone for espresso? A really good crema head on this one! ?

20200714_155635.thumb.jpg.14ae28c4600432d116edbde9b6f1ef49.jpg

SERIOUSLY

THE CAR WAS FILTHY

FUCKING FILTHY

It's at home now at least, fully insured and taxed. Was only £180 for the whole year fully comprehensive.

I'm going to need a new battery though, even though still displaying its green "I'm okay!" light this one doesn't seem to hold as charge very long.

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Oh I almost forgot to mention, I fixed the speakers! I mean they're still shit, but at least they work now.

When someone re-wired them they simply twisted the wires on the ends.. and they'd fallen off.. ?

I'll swap them out for some decent speakers when I can be bothered. One oddity is the head unit forgets all its settings every time the car is turned off, meaning I have to re-enter them. Bet he's wired it to a constant live and not the ignition live. It's a typical amateur mistake.

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23 hours ago, MikeKnight said:

One oddity is the head unit forgets all its settings every time the car is turned off, meaning I have to re-enter them. Bet he's wired it to a constant live and not the ignition live. It's a typical amateur mistake.

It should have both - a constant for the memory and an ign feed to fire it up when you turn the key. Usually red and yellow wires on a modern head unit, swap them around.

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53 minutes ago, bunglebus said:

It should have both - a constant for the memory and an ign feed to fire it up when you turn the key. Usually red and yellow wires on a modern head unit, swap them around.

I found the problem when I removed the head unit today. I'm swapping it for the one in my Supra, along with the subwoofer, because I like my tunes and the Supra will be going up for sale.

Both red and yellow lines are spliced into the same feed. Although this should mean it always has power... unless that single splice is from a purely ignition system. It probably is.

Honestly don't know if I want to rip the dash apart fixing this. It's difficult and fragile. I'll dig a little bit more tomorrow with my multimeter. I want to d some soldering anyway because the guy who did the conversion originally used a million scotch locks. Ugh.

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Probably whoever wired up the stereo in the Jag (years ago judging from the look of it), where the permanent vehicle live was hooked up to the illumination line on the stereo, the switched live to the permanent live on the stereo, and permanent to switched.

Yes, this meant the panel lights on the stereo were always on.  I do wonder how many years the car had issues with a parasitic battery drain...

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10 hours ago, Zelandeth said:

Probably whoever wired up the stereo in the Jag (years ago judging from the look of it), where the permanent vehicle live was hooked up to the illumination line on the stereo, the switched live to the permanent live on the stereo, and permanent to switched.

Yes, this meant the panel lights on the stereo were always on.  I do wonder how many years the car had issues with a parasitic battery drain...

I had nearly a decade of battery drain on my Scirocco.  Turns out that a Bluetooth radio will always look to pair with a phone whenever it has power.

On an old VW, the stereo just had a permanent live.  Once I added an ignition switched live in addition, all my troubles were over!

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I still have to replace the battery, it only holds just over 10V when idle, that's no good.

But today at least I swapped the radio for my much nicer aftermarket Sony DAB one and cleaned up the wiring behind the dash. I had a spare standard ISO harness so I soldered that in so in future any modern radio should fit. I can't go back to the original radio unfortunately as the wiring had been chopped so much.

Here's a before picture.

20200716_150445.thumb.jpg.3c0b4f61445581c83e629192df5e7435.jpg

The plastic connectors on the left are from the original radio and are unused. They're for things like dimming the screen when the headlights are on. Also for the two tiny speakers in the dashboard, which are sadly unused but I may rewire them in at a later date to ride off the door speakers.

Previous owner had tied the yellow and pink wires together, yellow is ignition power and pink is the powered aerial. No wonder it was always coming up regardless of radio condition. Pet peev of mine. The orange wire roughly in the middle of the pic is constant power which I had to uncover, he had not used it. Explains the memory loss on the radio. It only had power when the ignition was on.

Here's an after picture with the new soldered ISO harness.

20200716_155621.thumb.jpg.266cb662ce946ab6f8f7378bb4a079fc.jpg

Much cleaner. The Sony connector simply attaches to this then to the radio.

I soldered the constant power and ignition power to the correct wires on the ISO harness so the radio retains a memory but powers on and off with the ignition as it should do. The powered aerial wire was also soldered to its own connector so the radio controls when that comes up and down. Radio off, it goes back down. Good.

I enjoy doing stuff like this. It takes a while to tag all the wires to find out what they are and where they go, but the end result is immensely satisfying.

The speakers are still shit but swapping them over is a job for tomorrow.

I decided not to install the under-seat subwoofer I removed from the Supra, one because it was too wide to fit under there but also because the boot is enormous so I want a boot sub instead.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, don't be horrified at the enormous hole the radio sits in. There's quite a nice surround that clips in around it to give it a factory fitted look. I just didn't take a picture of the radio installed.

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12 hours ago, bunglebus said:

Much better. I had a stock of spare ISO connectors from my Halfords days for just this reason, plug and play head unit swaps. Does your new unit not have a connection to dim when the lights are on? Many do.

It does, but I'll have to cut the connection and find where it is on the loom as the ISO connector lacks it.

I have to remove the radio again to install the subwoofer cables so I don't mind doing this.

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The ISO connectors I used are just basic ones. No illumination wire. Just speaker wires on one side and the other having +12, +12 switched, Ground and Antenna. I'm honestly not that bothered though as I've set the head unit to a nice cool blue colour scheme to match the interior and it's no brighter than the interior illumination.

I fought with the speakers today and I'm exhausted. After a lot of swapping and testing I discovered there's nothing wrong with the speakers at all.. it's the wiring. The factory wiring is very complicated as each speaker used to have its own mini amplifier, a previous owner has gutted these and wired the speakers directly, but for some reason some of the speakers lack clarity because of it or sound like they're in a huge echoed room or underwater. The wiring I soldered to clean up his mess isn't the problem, as I used the same speaker wires he did.

The problem is that these speaker wires likely go elsewhere and do other things, for example if I disconnect just one of the rear speakers they both go off. Quite confusing as they are indeed on their own lines (fader and balance tests proved this) so they must be using the same power line or ground line. This is extremely bad practice and you should not ever do this.

I can fix this but it means using new speaker wires to wire all four in properly directly into the head unit ISO connector, dumping the use of the factory wires completely.

I mean the speakers WORK, they're not awful, they're just not "clean". Dirty audio always pisses me off.

I'll run new speaker wires when I can be bothered as if I'm doing that I may as well install all new speakers and just run the wires to an amplifier and subwoofer rather than the head unit. Fewer wires running all over the place and better sound quality.

That can wait. After today I'm in no mood to start pulling carpets. The interior is quite fragile, especially the head lining where it meets the parcel shelf, every time you move the shelf you remove a little more headlining. I'll do it when I have all the parts together and am in the mood for it.

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The issue with these is probably that one of the ways that Bose get such impressive performance out of a lot of their drivers for the size is to have amplifiers which are set up to precisely match the characteristics of the speaker itself.  Normal audio goes in, modified goes to the speaker.  Bypassing the local amplifiers will result in the audio sounding strange.  We've got a little Bluetooth speaker here from them and the sound it pushes out for something the size of a couple of cigarette boxes seems utterly impossible.

Sadly not likely to be much you can do about that without actually replacing the driver's unless the amps are fixable...and I imagine they were bypassed originally due to a fault.

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Correct, I have a Bose 901 here and it uses the same principle. If you put flat audio in, it sounds muddy, like a cheap transistor radio.

It needs the mids reduced, the bass and treble boosted a crazy amount and then it sounds excellent. That's the way it was designed. You'll probably find those speakers are the same.

Phil

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I played with the equaliser on the radio and got it sounding pretty good but yeah, I'm eventually going to go the route of wiring all four speakers into a four way amp in the boot along with a boot sub.

The radio already has two pre-amp outputs and a dedicated sub output so is perfect for this.

I just can't be bothered doing it quite yet. Maybe next Spring before it goes back on the road again because there's no way in hell I'm driving this through Winter, it wheel spins like a nutcase even on dry roads.

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I'm having lots of fun embarrassing barry boys.

It's large so these wankers keep thinking its slow and try to overtake in their chavved out corsas.

4.9L V8 says no. Emasculation achieved. Back behind me, pleb.

The Cadillac is ridiculously quick, but having a lead foot makes the MPG plummet to single figures. Also can't go around corners quickly.

But straight line? It's a god damn rocket.

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Bit miffed today as coolant level in the bottle, which has been fine, has gone down by half and appears brown and cloudy. It had stayed lovely and blue until now after I'd flushed and refilled.

I have however been pushing the engine to test it and clear through the faults one by one, if this happened at high RPM I'm assuming it's just a bit of crap/air pocket that was left in the engine and I have nothing to worry about.

Gonna keep an eye on it. Also going to perform a pressure test when I'm at the workshop on Monday.

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Yeah, the water pump in these is designed to have fairly high flow at low RPM. At high RPM it's like a damn waterfall so if you've got it nice and hot you probably cleared some old scheiße out from the radiator, block or heater matrix. If it cleared suddenly it might have just burped the coolant out.

Drain, refill with fresh. Whatever made it go brown will be trying to get lodged in the radiator now.

 

Phil

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I drained, flushed with a flushing solution (just in case) and refilled today.

Although I think I may have been mistaken. Allow me to explain.

I added another tablet for the sealing stuff they tell you to add.. and noticed the tablets are brown with glitter inside.. and the drained liquid from the radiator was brown with glitter inside.

So I'm lead to believe it's the tablets making the coolant that colour and nothing was actually wrong with it! The air pocket release at the same time just made me panic I think.

-----------------------------

I cannot find side bolt batteries of any decent quality or a name I trust, so I had to buy a normal battery today. I have some terminal adaptors but realised the normal terminal layout in the UK (positive on the right) is incorrect for this car as it has the positive on the left. So I've ordered some heavy gauge wire and I'll just extend the wires by a few inches. Bit of a faff but means I can use normal UK batteries.

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