Cadillac Jim

The mystery connector looks like a weatherproof two-conductor connector. It may have been for an exhaust solenoid. Without information for the 1989 model year I can't say. The green single-spade connector by the pump doesn't look like a weatherproof connector; it may be for a ground spade on the relay mount, or on the bottom of the relay carrier.

That platform was sold for various cars in the 1976-1994 time frame as follows: Chevette (US, Latin America, Chevy or GMC) Pontiac Arcadian in Canada Pontiac T1000 or 1000 (USA, 1981-1987) K-180 in Argentina Vauxhall Chevette Opel Kadette Isuzu Gemini Holden Gemeni (Australia) Chevrolet 500 pickup in Latin America through 1994 Grummett (station wagon or pickup, Uruguay) See Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Chevette

It looks like Rock Auto sells the individual parts. If you know the approximate year and can identify the parts by sight you probably can get them there.

Back in the days of high-profile bias-ply 16" tires, one could mount a tire by yourself with a tire iron. With a tube and a steel rim, it worked fine without damaging anything. With modern radial tires with steel cable rims and 75% profile, I would want a floor-mounted tire machine to mount the rims. Of course, if you stay with well-traveled paved roads with your Duke, the odds of ever needing a spare are slim to none.

It's magnificent. This does seem to complete the wheels part of the project. I don't see how to improve on that. You say that the new tires are too big for the spare tire covers?

That one appears to have a European license plate, too.

If it drives and steers OK, the offset is good. The acid test is a steady steering wheel on hard braking on a less-than-perfect surface. I like the two-wing spinners. But, be careful that they live up to the wheels they are on, and don't look cheesy surrounded by all that high quality chrome spokes, hub and rim.

I just did an online check and WalMart carries dry ice.

I think that transforming the look of the car is a fair assessment of what you achieved here. I do like the look with the center covers better. When you get the covers and the spares, with or without the two-ear spinners, you are done with the look. The fold-down windshield is a tiny little thing, maybe nice in the day of 45 mph drives in the European countryside but not to be missed.

Spacers are an easy fix to adjust the offset. If you need to do that at all, find the steering axis spot where it will intersect the road at the riding height with the new wheels and adjust the offset to center the tire on it. You can get it by putting a little cat litter on the driveway, driving up on it, and turning the wheel a little both ways. Mark the car position and back off the spot, and the lime will have left you circular white arcs with the center where you want to center the tire. The angle from the lower ball joint to there gives you the axis to adjust for ride height.

That particular dealer was good to buy from and OK for routine maintenance, and excellent for parts, and the body shop was top-notch. But the service department was horrible. They knew it and worked on the problem but I don't know how it worked out, i.e. how long they took to solve the problem. I didn't complain to GM about the wheel; I was young and didn't understand my rights and options and I felt that I was at the mercy of the largess of the service manager. A few weeks later, when it threw the dedicated fan belt between the damper and the water pump, and they told me that it would take 90 days to repair, I called GM Customer Service; I got a call early the next morning that my car was ready.

The thing to watch about wire wheels is that if they get curb damage or some such, the only remedy is replacement. That's OK to use for a covered spare. I had my 1966 Corvette, with factory knock-off wheels, in the dealer for warranty work that involved adjusting the emergency brake. For some reason the techs did not read the owner's manual or find it in the FSM, and they didn't know to jack the wheel off the ground to knock off the hub. They couldn't get a rear wheel off because the left some weight on it to keep it from turning while they pounded on the spinner. They first destroyed the lead hammer in the tool kit that is provided to knock the hubs off and on, then destroyed the spinner, including prying out the center cover and looking through the hole (clear into the rear suspension!) looking for a key or lock or some such. Then they ruined the hub with a two-pound sledge, and put some major dings in the aluminum wheel and even a notch out of the rear fender with some misses. They called me and said that the wheel would *never* come off that car, and that I needed to make plans to get another car if it became necessary to get the wheel off to keep driving the car - say, for a flat tire. I picked up the remnants of the lead hammer, now about 25% of the mass of the soft lead hammerhead left, asked them to jack the wheel off the ground, and got the hub off with it in a few seconds. They fixed the fender and gave me a new hub. They told me to just put the dinged wheel in the spare. The spare in the 1997 ETC never came out of the trunk, except once the second day because I got a nail the first day I drove the car. I checked it before I sold the car, and it had essentially no air in it but it still had an original Goodyear RS-A on it. If you drive that car as carefully as I think you are, you will never be short of wheels if you get six, and two are covered spares. Just watch out for valet parking and such.

In most street cars, the front stabilizer bar reduces lean but its most important function is to eliminate oversteer. When there is a rear stabilizer bar, the stiffness of the front suspension and stabilizer bar introduce understeer or plowing and the rear stabilizer bar eliminates that and gives balanced handling in an emergency situation. There are some interesting cases that illustrate this point: In the 1955-1964 Chevrolet, the V8 cars have front stabilizer bars. Cars sold with the six cylinder, which weighs over 200 pounds more than the V8, does not. From the factory, the lower A frames don't have stabilizer bar mounts on the six cylinder cars. If you put a stabilizer bar on a six cylinder car, it will plow on hard cornering. The original Volkswagen bug has a major oversteering problem because of its short swing axles, particularly the vans. A common aftermarket solution for safety or as a handling upgrade is a reverse-stabilizer bar, that crosses over diagonally from side to side and has an action that is the reverse of a stabilizer bar, called, cryptically, a "camber compensator."

If you are buying sellout stock, I would still get them for the bargain but get an extra one or two to provide parts for the future, unless you want to use the fender-mounted spares for that. I find that it's almost impossible to match custom wheels after a couple of years even if the company is still going strong. That may not be true of these from other manufacturers but a spare wheel strikes me as a good idea with any custom wheel buy.

Actually this is a pretty good suspension for a 1.6 liter street car. The SOHC version of the Isuzu engine used in the Chevette went with the GM T platform which was used by a variety of manufacturers worldwide. I think that the main things that were unusual with it were the use of a long extension of the differential to the carrier bearing, which avoided a second section for an exposed drive shaft, and the whole drive shaft became simpler than a two-section three-u-joing layout, thus good for a small car. I don't know about torsion stresses due to one wheel moving when the other doesn't, but that is a problem with any car using trailing links. The simplest solution is to allow the rear mount of one link to rotate while keeping the other solidly mounted to the axle. Thus a rear stabilizer bar would be the main thing controlling side-to-side differences in vertical motion.

Lincoln stopped making wire wheels when they looked into it and found that it cost more to assemble one of those wire wheels than it did to assemble a Ford. But I looked at the web site for those beautiful wheels that are sold on eBay and found that they are made in India, and that they make them in my size. I tremble to think of what would happen if the tires hooked up really well in a time-trial launch.

As I understand it you could use your choice of donor chassis parts, Chevette or Pinto/Mustang II, and possibly others. I suppose that since these things were attached to the Duke frame rails you could put one type of chassis on the rear and another on the front. But since the steering, motor supports, and exhaust all are designed to fit together with decent operating clearances, it makes sense to me to use whatever comes with the engine in the front. You don't need an anti-sway bar if the roll axis passes close enough to the center of gravity. That's not easy on a sedan where everybody expects to ride high and quiet so that they can be comfortable and look around, ergo stabilizer bars on most sedans.

Actually that rear suspension configuration is pretty good for a live axle, with long trailing arms on both sides, and a matching extension on the differential with a center U-joint at the suspension flex point, and a pretty hefty anti-sway bar. I don't know how much of that is in the Duke, but it should be all of it, as you note. The noise might be something as simple as the U-joint, or the bearing that holds the front drive shaft in front of the center U-joint.

The "Fitment guide" link from the Vintage Rims web site is dead. It apparently is supposed to go to the MWS web site fitment page: http://www.mws.co.uk/custom/FitmentGuide/FindEntry.asp?category=87 They list only British cars there. Vintage Rims make rims to order in NZ and sells worldwide. I would call them and ask. Offset, diameter, etc. all work together to make the car steer right and such. In particular, if the kingpin axis (strut axis, or steering axis) doesn't pass through the center of the tire patch, the steering wheel will pull to one side and then the other on braking and such. So for a daily driver you need to make sure that the mounted wheel and tire works for the suspension on the car.

I believe that you have the same transmission that I do. Things are tighter in the Sport mode. If you use the Sport Manual mode, you might keep it in 6th when it would be downshifting, and the TCC might be holding in, but that's the only thing I can think of. It's possible that the TCC is more aggressively holding in when the transmission is in the Sport mode. If you put the suspension in Sport mode, that will reduce losses in the shock absorbers by reducing wheel travel. That's not a lot of energy but all energy comes from the gas tank, and less energy used is better gas mileage.

I get one by e-mail a week or two later.

The ride height sensors are used by the ABS, TC and ECS as well as RSS. You would be better off to fix or change the sensor.

Some come with the F45 suspension and some come with the F55 suspension with the magnetic shock fluid. The 2003 Seville comes only with F55. If the F55 system can be fooled with the same 4.7K resistor as the F45 suspension, that is something we need to keep handy.

If you want RSS and the magnetic switching shocks that give you a smooth, quiet ride on most roads but stiffen on washboard or other poor surfaces, you should consider sticking to the OEM shocks. In addition to a better ride, it helps with ABS, TC, and ESC by switching the damping from "best ride" to stiffer when needed. A lot of people do disable the RSS with older cars if they don't care about this feature. For safety, shocks and struts that don't switch must be stiff enough, all the time, for the ABS/TC/ESC to work and for the car to be stable above 80 mph. Some people actually prefer a stiffer ride and get premium performance shocks/struts that don't switch. I don't see a listing for switching shocks or struts listed for the 2003 by Monroe. This is probably because you can get the GM parts at a reasonable price, which was not so for the 1992-2002 E and 1992-1997 K platforms, where your only choices were AC/Delco and Monroe for electronic shocks and struts, but the AC/Delco price was high enough so that Monroe could make a profit selling them at a much more attractive price.