Black Diamond
 or ....

how to restore a Taurus SHO in 8 years, more or  less....!


OK...as promised, this is the on-line presentation of the restored 1990 Taurus SHO called "Black Diamond", which was originally purchased in 1999, and was to be re-engined within that year.  As time went on, and circumstances developed, the car waited and waited for its day to come.  That day has come.


Finished Photos     Here


Prologue--The Beginning. 





You've seen these pictures before.....this is what it looked like for about 5 years, while it sat in our back yard, after I bought it from Anthony Northrup of BaySHO, in 1998 or so.  He spun a bearing while driving it near San Francisco International Airport, and parked it at an auto service center in Milbrae, right next to SFO.  It sat there for a while, until I got the chance to go pick it up.  Eva was a relatively new arrival, and she wasn't particularly happy with me going to get a "junk" car.  She had no idea what was going to happen.  When she heard it start, with the #6 piston hammering against the cylinder head, and the exhaust blowing huge clouds of smoke everywhere....she was rather upset at me wasting my money on something like this.  Little did she know!!!  Buhahahahahahahah!!

Sorry about the quality of the pictures....they were taken long before I had any idea of what a digital camera was.





This was at our old house....the one where Zach Leahy came over in Feb of 2001 to help rebuild this car and the Plus from Hell.  It is very near the Sacramento River Delta, and we have brackish water behind us that is available for use to water the lawn, if I am too cheap to pay the relatively high price Suisun charges for water.  There are lots of heavy metals in the water.....I wouldn't even consider washing my hands in it, but most of the time it kept the lawn fairly green.  It was after a year or so that I saw what it was doing to the paint on the car.  When I first picked it up, it didn't look too bad, other than having a few small dents here and there.

Several years before this, in 1995 or so, I had sold Anthony the original factory radio out of the Slorider wagon for this car....he did not want to upgrade the radio, but wanted to keep it stock.  Slorider's radio worked.....sorta....back then, and he was satisfied with it.  Now it just LOOKS stock.  I'll keep it for whatever....I keep everything...just ask Eva!!


So.....the car sat in the back yard for a couple of years, waiting for me to decide what to do to it and when to do it.  Finally, after the Plus from Hell made it home from Florida in 2001, I decided to have Zach Leahy come out from Indiana during the winter of 2001 to fix the two of them, BD and PfH.  I had gotten an engine from a wrecking yard in Sacramento, for BD, and was just waiting for the right time and help to get it installed.  Hopefully you recall the presentation I had here about the reincarnation of the two of them.  I've removed it now, since the Plus from Hell is not here anymore (and it is ancient history).  As a reminder, here are a couple of in-progress pictures of BD's swap.  (I thought I had lost the running picture, but it turned up.)  Basically it started from half an engine and a good tranny, and in a day and a half it was running (fueled by boxes of 2 year old Girl Scout Cookies....oh, sorry....that was me!), with the new engine installed. 
Thank you, Zach!!!!!!!













It's RUNNING, powered by /GS cookies!


The saga REALLY begins.


After it was running, I got it (and PfH) smogged so that their registrations could be finalized.  They both passed fine.  BD had a pesky oil leak from around the pan somewhere, so I used the PfH for a while to commute, but I still had not discovered the bad wire to the PCM, and it cut out a couple of times, so I didn't use it a lot.  It ran OK most of the time, and Nick Chrimes finally happened to discover the loose wire at the battery cable at a BahSHO event.  That solved that problem, and it was just about ready to go to my cousin, for whom I originally got it.  It had been to Autohaus, and had the a/c and heater system totally overhauled.  But during the convention in Frederick Maryland in 2002, when I had the Lexus IS-300 due to Lowrider having been rear-ended, and not fixed yet, the PfH got vandalized in my back yard.  It was actually repairable, but that was the end of its rope for us....Eva said it had to go.  I sold it to Joseph Van Oss, and his brother came out and drove it to LaCrosse.  He sold it to someone, and it should be running now.  All this time BD was sitting, with its new leaky engine, waiting for something to happen.  At the Frederick convention, I arranged with Mark Nunnally to ship it to him in New York state to install a 3.2 with all the extras.  The engine is stock, but very healthy, and Mark replaced lots of bushings underneath, and installed an H brace in the back.  I shipped it to him in the fall of 2002.  He kept it for just under a year, and it came back just after we moved into our new house, in the fall of 2003. 










Here it is going onto the car carrier.  The driver wasn't very good at modulating the clutch, and he slipped it pretty bad.  It was newly installed by Zach, and has the ceramic bearing.  I was worried after all the smell about how bad it might be, but Mark said it was fine when he took it out.  It went on the bottom of the trailer initially, but after getting to a point further down the road, and being joined by more cars, it was to be backed onto the top level, over the cab of the tractor.  I am glad I wasn't there for that.  I'd have been pretty upset at the driver for the potential clutch damage.





Here it is arriving at Mark's place.  It most likely didn't suffer quite the stress coming off the truck as it did going on. 

Notice the hood.  That is the hood off the "parts Plus" that I have stored away.  That car is an apparent story in itself...the front brakes were worn so bad that the inner surfaces of the rotors were totally gone...the pistons of the calipers were pushing on the cooling vanes inside the rotors.  The original hood had apparently flown up and been broken against the windshield....real smart cookie driving THAT one....and this was a standard Taurus replacement hood.  It appeared, when I purchased that car, that it had also come unlatched, and flown up and hit the w/s.  I had a Plus hood already from my local PnP, and so used the metal hood just to cover the engine on this car during its trip.  I had found a hood in Pennsylvania just prior to shipping the car, so I arranged with Mark to go get it after the car was running, and then he could just toss this hood.  It worked out pretty well, overall.













Here are some pictures of Mark's shop, and the car there, getting its transplant.  The 3.2 block only had about 80K miles, so it was just broken in.  The rest of the engine was what it came with, other than a few new parts, most noticably a brand new oil pump.  Considering that this car will only make my 110 mile daily commute maybe once a week, when it is finally done, I think it will last quite a long time.  In fact, it is in my will.  It will probably get no more than 10K miles a year...unlike Lowrider, which got 30-35K a year, as long as I could keep people from running into the back of it.




Shakedown Cruise





After it was running, Mark took it on a shakedown cruise, to make sure everything was good, and at the same time he went out to where the hood was, and got it installed.  I got an Email with this picture attached, saying "do you know this car?" from Tom Wallenhorst.  If you are still around, Tom, let me know.  I was VERY pleased to see this picture.


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