'67 Fiat 124 Berlina - build and maintain

[grrrdot]

I thought all early 124s had rear anti roll bars. Its great but the bushings where the bar meets the axle seem to be NLA. At some point I'll need to track down a substitute.

In the mean time as with most 124s the electrical system is showing its age. Despite a 65A alternator electric things are slow. On cold and rainy evenings with the heater fan, wipers and headlights the system really struggles. So I figured I would swap out the bayonet style fuse holder for a fuse / relay panel. Here is the wiring diagram for the early sedan, its amazing how much runs off that first fuse!


To get this going I picked up a 2000 Jeep PDU with wiring off ebay for ~$5, a bunch of Metri-pack 280 crimp connectors and a Cooper Bussmann 15303-4-0-4 Mini Fuse Panel. Despite being called bussmann this panel has no busses. I picked it out to have the most flexibility but in retrospect I could have gone with a buss relay side and saved some wiring. Here is a pic of the panel and some of the wires after pulling them out of the PDU.


Here is the wiring diagram I cooked up, I tried to label the color wires from the existing Fiat fuse bar:


I think technically I should have the fuses before the relays but for the high & low beams I wanted to keep a R/L fuse but only use two relays so I put the fuses after the relays. The relays are 30A and fuses are all <=20A so I think they will blow before the relay melts.
I also want this to be close to drop in for the existing fuse bar, I'm not looking to re-wire the whole car!
I left one relay & fuse for future accessories, thinking usb charging port, blue-tooth amp etc.
The last relay I was leaving for the fuel pump ( right now the electric pump is wired to the ignition ) but I am not sure how this would work with the Fiat's oil pressure switch, only posts here I could find were talking about needing special timer delay relays....

[djape1977]

good luck with that. i have a wire monkey working for me so i don't know anything about those, apart from the fact that lada electrics are worse then fiat's, so don't be tempted to buy a new lada wiring loom

[grrrdot]

OK,
Finished wiring up the box.


I drilled and tapped holes in the box for two M6 posts, you can see them in the bottom of the photo. The post on the right will be battery and the one on the left will go to the extra ignition switched relay.

I also mapped out where the existing wires on the original fuse block will attach to the new fuse/relay block by using the numbers and letters off the existing fuse block and --> mapping them to the new blocks number system like this:
Accessory System:
1 Blue/Black --> D1&3, Green/Red Wire
B Red & White --> AA 1
Remove and cap current Pink wire into position 2.
A 2XBlue/Black and 1XYellow/Black --> AA2 Double Red output.

Low Beams:
4 Grey/Red --> D5
C Grey/Black --> AA4
D Grey --> AA5

High Beams:
6 Blue --> D7
E 2xGreen/Black --> AA6
F Green --> AA7

Parking Lamps ( No Relay )
8 White/Black --> A8 A9
G 3XYellow --> AA8
H 2XBrown --> AA9

Now its time to install, pulled and labeled everything hope to get the box in next weekend!

[grrrdot]

I fully installed the fuse relay box and wow... what a difference.
I have a 65A alternator and with the fuse relay box at idle I can step on the brake with the heater fan, headlights and windshield wipers on and everything stays the same speed and the volt meter hardly moves. I need to snap some pictures but I used a cheap sheet of aluminum remnant from off ebay to mount it.

Continuing on with the electrical system I also bought all the parts to put in a 90A alternator on the passengers side, which now feels like I didn't really need to. I picked up a used 3G Ford alternator locally and then pulley from AR. A couple of hits with the impact gun and I was in business:


The stock alternator has an M12 bolt where as this "new" one takes an M10 so I tracked down an M10X1.25X55 bolt and an M12-OD M10-ID bushing for the lower alternator mount. I cut the bushing in two so I could still access the center nut holding the lower alternator mount to the block. To keep the bushings in place I poor man's knurled the ends:


I had installed the engine with the alternator attached so I didn't realize what a pain it is to get it out! I fought for awhile to pull it out from above but the battery tray was in the way. In the end I had to remove the lower shield, the lower alternator mount and then move the radiator to get enough clearance.

Once I got it in there the last thing was fitting a thicker washer at the back of the alternator, I think it was 3mm. You can kinda see it at the back of the alternator mount in this pic:


For the upper mount I just had to bend it slightly forward in the vice to get it to meet with the upper ear. Then the upper alternator ear took an M8x1.25 bolt, which is great cause those are all over Fiats!

Wiring the 3G was a breeze and I threw some wire loom around it so, done:


At idle the voltage at the battery is around 14.8V, the old alternator was 13.8V or lower so this feels high but after googling around its within spec so that's done!

[grrrdot]

Back to the driveshaft vibration.
I got the whole assembly back from the driveline shop. They re-welded the u-joint yoke on straight and balanced. It needed a pretty big weight, they didn't charge me for the work since it was supposed to be done the first time.


But... I got it all back into the car and, it still vibrates....
So I started measuring again and djape is right, the yoke on the end of the driveshaft it bent. I don't think anything on this car is still straight... There is no way the shop setup and balanced with the yoke on. I'm done with that shop so I called another and they claim there is no fixing it and I need to buy a new yoke, only problem is the yoke is, special:


The spider yokes are all longer, below is an image from another thread:


This being an early Torque Tube 4spd Sedan the driveshaft splines are not long enough to accommodate a Spider's yoke so need to figure out something here. I am thinking a Lada yoke might be a fit but will need a different seal:

[djape1977]

the one thing i dodn't throw in the box

[djape1977]

you can just cut off excess length off a spider flange

[grrrdot]

Continuing to reinforce that Florida has the craziest people I found a guy there that sells Lada parts:
http://piezasladaparacuba.com/
Apparently his typical customers are Cubans who buy the parts to bring back to Cuba. I ordered a new yoke hopefully will get here next week.

-G

[djape1977]

plenty nice stuff for 124 there

[grrrdot]

Got the Lada part in... and its garbage, not that I am totally surprised.

Looks like the machinists were not careful. The bolt holes are just barely too small and the yoke will only go a little way on before it binds.
https://youtu.be/dsQU0XWgMHU



Maybe I will look for a Fiat yoke and see if it can be modified to fit.
-G

[djape1977]

yup. chinese shit quality parts. google lada gearbox china and you'll get 20 pages ....
now imagine a gearbox made out of these parts. they cost 150$ each if you order 100units or more.

i'll be rebuilding another lada GB in next few days and i'll look into your reverse issue

[grrrdot]

I finally made some progress on the drive line vibration and my hunch back in March was right. The angle of the engine/transmission, front driveshaft and torque tube was wrong and the strain on the U-Joint was creating pulses down the drive line.

U-joints create pulses as they spin. Fiat's later open drive-line has two u-joints setup out of phase, so as long as the pinion and transmission are parallel pulses from the U-joints cancel out. This torque tube setup has only one U-joint so there is nothing to cancel out pulses they just need to be minimized by using the smallest angle possible. Here is a pic of the system laid out without the torque tube around the drive shaft, you can see the one U-Joint in between the two shafts.


This set of pages contains trouble shooting documents for drive-line vibrations, which was super helpful in bringing me back to this realization and understanding how far out things were:
http://www.autocats.ws/manual/chevrolet ... 24.en.html
From the document:

For prop systems with 1 U-joint; compare the working angle to the following specification guideline:
Specification Guideline
Prop systems containing only 1 U-joint: The U-joint working angle should be between 1/2 and 3/4 degrees.

My U-Joint was at ~3˚.

So I went through a set of trial and error with the jack under the transmission moving it to various places then starting the car and bringing it up to speed. The best place I found was to put the transmission about 1" higher and 1.5" closer to the drivers side than where the Lada mount and crossmember had it. My old Fiat 4spd cross-member was about the right height but the wrong side to side so I drilled some new holes to get the transmission in about the right place.

There is still a very slight vibration but its now tolerable. To make this really work the single U-Joint needs to be replaced with a high-speed CV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugYx3flITPw
or double cardan joint:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IttUsogU4AQ

I found that the Nivia has some CV joints
https://www.drive2.ru/l/6017154/
I'll see if I can track down any more info on them.

[djape1977]

i truly envy your stubborness to keep torque tube rear end

i have thrown propshafts and rear axles to scrap for lesser problems.

swap it for later type 124 rear axle with upper control arms and two piece propshaft. far less problems to get it right, and far more options for upgrades, diff ratios, LSD...

[grrrdot]

Been awhile so I will catch the thread up.
Finally fixed the drive line.

I noticed that many modern cars just use a CV joint in the drive-line so I went overboard and just swapped out the single U-joint for a CV joint from a Nivia 2131.

It was surprisingly easy, I bought this:
http://max-autohelp.ru/catalog/vaz/zapc ... us-promval

Once it arrived from Russia I pulled it apart.


Had the driveshaft cut and the spline end for the Fiat 3-arm yoke attached. The flange on the other end of the Nivia unit fits on the torque tube shaft and bolts to the CV joint so it all fits together like it was stock. While I had it apart I also re-packed the CV joint with some new grease to make sure it lasts.
Here is a shot of the original shaft next to the new one and it installed in the car.




The shop that did the welding was a little sloppy so I had to peen the weld a bit to get the driveshaft closer to straight, its within 8 thou now.

Now the drive line is now smoother than I have ever felt. With the car on stands at 70mph I wouldn't even guess the car is in gear.
With the LSD taking a corner is different even with the light pre-load the diff is noisy. Rolling around the garage it makes a clicking noise driving in the city it kinda sounds like a turkey! Or maybe its just that time of year I just hope the sound is not the diff destroying itself, time will tell... good thing I have spare.

Since everything works last weekend I took the car up to Rochester and back ( about 650 miles ) with no issues. Using the 4.10 rear and Lada trans I was able to do 65-75MPH most of the way with the engine ~3000-3500RPM and 25-30MPG. Overall very happy!

[grrrdot]

While working out the drive-line I did a few other mods to the car.

Always thinking safety I rigged up the inertia switch from a Ford to turn off the fuel pump in the event of an accident. I mounted it in the trunk just ahead of the fuel tank and next to my fuel pressure regulator. Electrically the switch just sits in-line with the power to the fuel pump.


I also picked up a bluetooth amp from kenwood. I mounted it under the drivers seat and wired it to a set of 6" speakers in the back deck. With this I just use my phone to listen to music or directions. Works great, gets plenty loud and I dont have to mess up the lines of the dashboard by installing a stereo head-unit.