40th Fiero Anniversary Celebration

[pmbrunelle]

I arrived in Pontiac on Sunday night. I haven't been to the USA in a while; my first time in Michigan.

I came with my friend Guy and his 1988 Fiero with an LZ4 engine swap. My Fiero is not currently roadworthy, as it is missing its front suspension. I don't like rushing things to meet a deadline.

Today, we checked out the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. It had a lot of cool stuff, lots of it from about a century ago. This is a sample of what stood out to me:
Old trains
Old cars
Douglas DC-3
Multi-spindle milling machine, used for surfacing many (tens?) Ford engine blocks simultaneously. It had brazed carbide tools. 1930s era?
Multi-head (8) drill press for drilling things like water pumps. Each head was adjustable, and was driven by a dual U-joint shaft connected to a central power source.
Older steam engines, with oscillating beams.
Newer piston steam engines, with expansion in multiple stages.
Electric power generators.
Farming equipment.

Harbor (Horrible?) Freight is legendary on the internet; I've read about it in forums, but never had the chance to shop in one. I need to spend some time in one going aisle by aisle. I think I'll be buying a well-rated bench grinder from there.

I don't have pictures; Being unfamiliar with Detroit, I don't want to bring too much attention to myself walking around with a camera in my hand looking touristy. My friend and I speak French to each other (as we always do), but that probably makes us stand out to anyone that hears us...

[Shaun41178(2)]

I went to the Ford museum as a kid. I found it boring. But I was a kid so....

[pmbrunelle]

I liked my visit to the Henry Ford museum because of all the machinery type stuff on display. I skipped over some sections that didn't interest me, such as the section about TV chef Julia Child.

Harbor Freight is pretty awesome, though it looks like there's a mix of good and bad value. I found a used Baldor bench grinder locally on Marketplace. I'll probably get the Baldor when I get back home.

O'Reilly Auto Parts was not as cool as I had imagined it to be.

This morning, the Pontiac Transportation Museum invited the Fiero gang to visit their museum. The "Pontiac" in the name of the museum is in reference to the City of Pontiac, not the car brand. The city donated the land & building (an abandoned elementary school) to the museum.

When I was at the museum, I thought of Will and snapped this picture:

Motorhome.jpg (751.26 KiB) Viewed 1015 times

In the afternoon and evening, we listened to perhaps ~25 people involved in the Fiero project.

Some takeaways from their speeches:

The first prototype Fiero, designated 3P01 was built on surface plate (I guess it was standard practice for building prototypes).

Production-grade tooling was built to make the instrument cluster of the 1989 prototype Fiero. The mothballed tooling was later revived to produce the instrument clusters for the 4th-gen F-body.

Prototype Fieros were equipped with front-facing side scoops. They got packed with snow in testing, and starved the engine for air. Therefore, the production car received the engine air intake that it did.

Some engine tuning was done on the road, for things such as throttle tip-in response. Staff did long test drives, and wrote notes/comments on paper as they went.

The decision to rubber-mount the early cradles was taken because "because that's how things were done", without much consideration for other alternatives. Tests with aluminium bushings in early cradles (with different powertrains) led to engineering staff having the opinion that NVH was not significantly improved with rubber-mounting, so they opted for solid mounting with the redesigned suspension.

The proposal to upper management for the redesigned suspension missed the deadline for the 1987 model year by one week. Therefore, the new suspension was delayed to model year 1988.

GM engineering had become a matrix organisation. Some folks may have been working on up to 10 programs at a time.

When the Fiero plant closed, the plant manager worked to ensure that the plant employees could find other jobs, not necessarily within GM. A number of employees, having developed manual dexterity with automotive assembly work, became dental hygienists.

[ericjon262]

I'm sure you took more pictures! when you get around to it, I'd love to see some of them! I wish I could have made it up there, it was a bad time for me to try and take work off.

[The Dark Side of Will]

When I was at the museum, I thought of Will and snapped this picture:
Motorhome.jpg

D'AAAAAWWWWWW. Spanks!

The first prototype Fiero, designated 3P01 was built on surface plate (I guess it was standard practice for building prototypes).

Production-grade tooling was built to make the instrument cluster of the 1989 prototype Fiero. The mothballed tooling was later revived to produce the instrument clusters for the 4th-gen F-body.

Prototype Fieros were equipped with front-facing side scoops. They got packed with snow in testing, and starved the engine for air. Therefore, the production car received the engine air intake that it did.

Some engine tuning was done on the road, for things such as throttle tip-in response. Staff did long test drives, and wrote notes/comments on paper as they went.

The decision to rubber-mount the early cradles was taken because "because that's how things were done", without much consideration for other alternatives. Tests with aluminium bushings in early cradles (with different powertrains) led to engineering staff having the opinion that NVH was not significantly improved with rubber-mounting, so they opted for solid mounting with the redesigned suspension.

The proposal to upper management for the redesigned suspension missed the deadline for the 1987 model year by one week. Therefore, the new suspension was delayed to model year 1988.

GM engineering had become a matrix organisation. Some folks may have been working on up to 10 programs at a time.

When the Fiero plant closed, the plant manager worked to ensure that the plant employees could find other jobs, not necessarily within GM. A number of employees, having developed manual dexterity with automotive assembly work, became dental hygienists.

Interesting. I'd heard the rumor that the '88 suspension was ready for initial production in '83, but was mothballed in favor of cheaper hardware. I guess someone working on the project over-rules internet rumor about that.

My experience as well is that solid cradle bushings have no impact on NVH, but sure do give the car a bunch of lateral blips from the powertrain twisting the cradle on its mounts, due to the off-center dogbone. I also noticed zero or essentially zero NVH increase from installing rod-ends on the lateral links in my Formula.