Keith and I finally got an afternoon together to work on his street Galant. This car has been 6 feet in the air on a lift for over 4 years.
It’s almost ready to get back on the road. Just a little more TLC and Keith will be G2G!
Resurrecting a car that’s been apart for so many years brings with it special circumstances. Mainly, where did all the nuts and bolts and parts go? They have a habit of disappearing. Fortunately, Keith has a slight variation of this problem. You see, since this car went airborne on the lift, he’s inherited all the spares from not one, but TWO Mitsubishi rally teams. We’ve filled a small trailer with spare parts at least twice in the last couple years and now there’s an entire storage unit full of spares. Thing is, it’s not always easy to find what you need when you need it.
Keith had the engine hung on the lateral motor mounts, but when we went to bolt it in all the way, we discovered he might have cleaned up a DSM front motor mount horn instead of a GVR4 piece. These two cars might have a lot in common, but there are still a number of odd little differences between them. Remember, the DSM was made exclusively in Normal, Illinois, while the Galant came from Japan. The picture above shows the two mounts side-by-side.
Seen side-by-side, again, the GVR4-specific piece is stamped ’344.’ The DSM piece is stamped ’347.’ Pay no mind to the piece of slag welded to the back of the 344 bracket above. That was likely for a rally-specific reinforcement at some point in the past. We cut it off before installing it in this street car.
We also ran into issues when we went to bolt up the AC compressor. The GVR4 has a different series of brackets for the AC compressor and belt tensioner. Pictured, above, the DSM unit is on the left and the Galant version is on the right. The tensioner bracket mounts to the compressor girdle, so if you get these mixed up (it happened to me a couple years back, actually), you’re pretty much SOL. Just a head’s up.
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