Today I took the beast on a decent test drive. I had to pick my route carefully, because the turn signals don't work. But I managed to get it up to 60 miles per hour. It did pretty good, with plenty of power. It did not overheat, and there were no leaks of any kind. The 4-speed automatic transmission is going to be nice for highway driving. It drives straight and true, so the alignment seems OK.
There are some things I have to address.
1. I need to fix the turn signals and make sure all lights work properly.
2. There are a few minor suspension klunks I need to check.
3. The brakes are a bit spongy compared to my other Fieros, which are also 88's. But they work.
I had to rig up a second coolant expansion reservoir in the back of the car. There is a radiator cap in the back, which corresponds to the thermostat cap on a stock Fiero, where you can add fluid and burp the car, etc. But because it is a radiator cap, and not a water-tight cap, water can come out from expansion. The car previously had a drip tube rigged up, but that allowed expansion to just drip out, which meant that air would be sucked in when the system cooled. So I added an expansion reservoir, and used a 20 pound radiator cap, so that most of the expansion would go out the front, where the normal 16 pound cap is. It seems to work OK.
One other thing I may address is the way the engine is mounted. Instead of a normal dog bone mounted to the trunk wall, there is a metal rod welded to where the deck lid torque struts are on a normal Fiero (and instead there are gas struts to hold up the deck lid), and there are two dog bone like things connecting that rod to the engine -- one at the front of the engine (passenger side), and one at the rear. This causes more noise and vibration to be transferred into the cabin than you'd get with a proper dog bone.
