So after having a liesurely pre-blog surf and doing nothing much important (mostly YouTube) for a while after eating, I hied myself out to the garage to see what kind of sense I could make of the Fiero.
As I'd predicted, reassembly didn't take very long. Mostly it was just figuring out where to lay the vacuum lines; the Fiero's 2.8 V6 has them all neatly clipped together, so all I had to do was to figure out the correct orientation, then get everything lined up. Had to reroute a few pipes, but otherwise that went smoothly enough.
Getting the EGR pipe attached to the manifold was a bitch, of course, but I got it done; I found that one gasket had stuck to the manifold at disassembly, so I do indeed need only one gasket. It's literally a $2 part and it's the only thing keeping me from attempting to start it today. Of course it is not available locally. Rockauto.com has it, though, so I'll be ordering it a little later on.
Got the upper plenum mounted to the lower, and all bolts snug. I'll torque them later, as I need to find a torque pattern, but since I'm not starting it today this isn't critical. Finally, for want of anything else that I could do--the battery needs to charge and I need the EGR gasket to go any further--I put the hood back on. I reached down the front of the engine and turned it a little bit, by hand, so--hallelujah!--it's not seized.
The only bolts I have left? The nut and stud for the air cleaner. Everything else is on the car. I'm not surprised, though. I took it apart in an evening, for crying out loud, and it just sat like that for four freakin' years.
I have a lot more work to do, of course. Once the engine is running I must attend to the brake problem, and change the oil, and clean clean clean clean clean, and give 'er a good waxing, and fix some other issues here and there.
* * *
The problem with having spare assemblies on hand: while digging through the trunk trying to sort out the various bits and pieces, I came across a distributor, complete with cap, and for a hideous, horrifying couple of minutes I thought I might have put in the wrong distributor. The one I found had no markings on it, which meant a bad couple of hours trying to find TDC and then reinstalling the distributor.
Then I saw that there was a distributor cap in the engine bay, still attached to half the plug wires; and since the distributor that I put it was lacking a cap--and its pickup coil still had the protective tape around the wires--I knew that I had indeed put in the correct distributor, and breathed a heavy sigh of relief. The one I'd found was my spare, thank all that's holy.
I have at least three complete sets of fuel injectors. I do believe that somewhere in the garage I also have a complete plenum for a V6, including throttle body. All that came from the '86, which (long-time readers may recall) I sold in 2009 for the princely sum of $100 as it was lacking its engine and transmission. Or maybe I threw the plenum in with that car? I can't recall, and it doesn't really matter anyway.
As soon as I cool off a bit (it's like 95 outside) I'm going to go attend to a few Jeeply matters. Whee!
Addendum:
1) I still can't find an EGR gasket for the thing. I can order one from Rockauto.com. The gasket costs $2; the shipping is $13. *sigh*
NAPA has them for $4.45 each...in quantities of 10. Argh.
2) Started doing the Jeepy things, and it started raining. It's stopped now, but I'm finishing up with ordering my EGR gasket. What a thrill.
