%#@!&# YOU Mother Nature!

Dam! That is terrible! I have to agree with everyone else.....take her apart and dry her out. I also live in a flood zone, not that bad tho. The water got pretty deep around here a couple times and my neighbors let me park the Mark in there driveway. The 4x4's sit up high enough to not worry about.
 
Marcus said:
Thanks for the offer Kevin, it'd be cool to meet you. I live in Palatine off of Rand just west of 53. I have some friends (fellow Mark VIII owners "Trixie" and "Beerdog" on LOD) in Buffalo Grove where I can take the car and work on it assuming I can get it running on it's own power. I'm gonna be out of town Friday and Saturday, but Sunday might work. Being unemployed, I have lots of free time on weekdays LOL.
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Ah that sucks I work Sunday unfortunately..but yeah one of these days we gotta get a few people from the area together..maybe all meet up at one of the local car shows. I think I recognize those apartments..looks like the ones behind that self service car wash on rand..not far from me at all I'm over by arlington park racetrack.
 
I got the car started after checking fluids and pulling the seat fuses. It started like nothing had ever happened. I tell you, this is the most reliable car I have ever owned by far. It's never let me down. I might have to start calling her Christine.

The outside is clean as a whistle, the inside not so much. A nice film of mud on the floor. At least I hope it's only mud and the "other" sewer didn't back up. :D No smell though. The drain plugs are pulled out and it dried pretty fast. Once the seats are out I'll probably just hose everything down. The jute insulator on the firewall is soaked pretty good, that'll be a pain to dry out.

The seat bottoms weren't as bad as I thought. Wet in the back but dry up front. Hopefully I can pull them and squeeze them out and reuse. The electronics are probably fried, but I'll dry them out and see if they still work. Unfortunately I have something important to do out of town Friday and Saturday and I can't get out of it, so I won't be able to do any more until Sunday. It's at a friend's house for now.

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Good news!! That car is too beautiful. It would have been tragic to kill it. From the outside, it looks like nothing ever happened. Good luck with getting it back together. Hopefully, this will be the last time!
 
This is a copy and paste from the other site. I'm open to opinions on either site.

Update:

The insurance adjuster is coming out tomorrow to take a look. Other than trying to dry everything, I'm not attempting any cleanup until he's gone.

For the hell of it, I plugged in the seat fuses. No go. You'll see why below. Same with the air ride. Nothing. Luckily I've got new Ford bags on all four corners so it hasn't slammed down. I'll pull off the bumper and take a look at the damage after the car's moved to it's storage place.

PICS:

1. Mike and I removed the seats and we now get a good idea of how high the water got.

2. Driver's side connector. This was like new when it was replaced after the last flood in 2011. Can this thing really have corroded and broken in a span of around five hours under water or do I have some other problems to investigate? It seems impossible for it to go from corrosion-free to this in such a short time.

3. Ditto passenger side. Oh yeah, the seat did exactly what it did last time... slid back and reclined all the way back on its own.

By the way, the seat tracks are definitely fried. Green fuzz on everything and fresh rust coming out of the motors. I've got a handle on a pair of tracks from a local guy for a fair price.

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I'm REALLY tempted to try and install a complete harness rather than splice in another set of connectors. The car will be in a friend's garage for as long as needed, so time is not an issue. Just how far does this monster harness reach into the dash and into the back? If I have to pull the dash out of the car, so be it.
 
I mean how hard can this be?

harness1.jpg


And that's a 95. Yeah I guess I'll back off of that plan. LOL
 
It still looks very clean underneath. Good luck getting it going again. If it didn't pop a fuse under the hood when you went to start it, then the electrical connectors underneath like the bulkhead, etc must be ok. If your bulkhead connector on the tranny was waterlogged, the car will not start. It must have dried out. You might be looking good man. Good luck!
 
I definitely need to do a full inspection of underbody and engine comp. electrical once it's in a garage and I can get it on jackstands. Despite the fact that it starts and runs fine, I'm really paranoid about something going pop at an inopportune time. The fact that the air ride is dead means I have more work to do than just the interior.
 
I would want a new harness
The dash is a separate thing all together and cause the water wasn't that high I wouldn't worry about it
The dash comes out as a unit you would still need to pull it to do the body harness
The tedious part is redoing the doors
 
Yeah, unfortunately I kind of agree with Luke. Those corroding harnesses will be electrical gremlins until the end of time.
 
KStromberg said:
Yeah, unfortunately I kind of agree with Luke. Those corroding harnesses will be electrical gremlins until the end of time.
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Just so we're clear, by "harness" we're talking about the hundred pounds of wiring that I posted a pic of above.

I'm not totally opposed to replacing the entire harness but after a through examination of what I could get to, the only things that were visibly damaged were the seat plugs. I checked the plugs that are behind the kick panels, and the water never got up that high. The plugs are mint. Same with the doors.

I saw no joints in the harness where it had been submerged. So as long as I properly solder new pigtails onto the existing harness, use marine-grade shrink wrap (this), and glop a bunch of dielectric grease on the plugs (something I didn't do last time), what can go wrong? That's not a rhetorical question. I'm asking seriously because I don't know.
 
If you inspected and all looks fine you should be good
And yes you need to use some dielectric grease.
 
Hey! I'm new to the site and came across this thread... wow! The first pics were horrible... I live in Wheeling, and had about an inch of standing water throughout our entire home and got a reflex sick feeling when I saw the pics of that gorgeous Mark in the water. UGH... but it's great to see how well it's held up and how the clean up was going!
 
rtav said:
Hey! I'm new to the site and came across this thread... wow! The first pics were horrible... I live in Wheeling, and had about an inch of standing water throughout our entire home and got a reflex sick feeling when I saw the pics of that gorgeous Mark in the water. UGH... but it's great to see how well it's held up and how the clean up was going!
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What year and color mark do you own? I'm in arlington heights, wondering if I've ever seen your car around..I always keep an eye out for them.
 
Hi Kevin

I used to have a 97 Toreador Mark VIII base but had to sell it. I'll be in the market in the coming months for a triple black 1998 LSC. I've loved Marks since my friends dad bought a new black Mark IV with custom-spoked wheels in 1976, and loved everything about my 1997 Mark VIII (except that the previous owner had wrecked it and not done a lot of front end work properly and the repairs were becoming prohibitively expensive). I'm delighted to see so many fellow local Mark enthusiasts online here, and can't wait to get back behind the wheel again!
 
I'm in Palatine, so not far from either of you. A couple of other Mark VIII people are in Buffalo Grove but they mostly hang out at the LOD site (Beerdog and Trixie). Since I live in an apartment, my car's at a friend's garage in Island Lake, about 20 minutes drive from me. It's still sitting on jack stands, as I'm doing some resto work on the underside, but suddenly ran out of free time so it's going slow. Most of the flood damage has been addressed though. It wasn't as bad as I first thought, other than the seats being completely fried electrically. I just figured that while I had it jacked up and in a safe place I'd do some work I've been meaning to do for a while. It's getting a partial repaint soon and some semi-major interior upgrades. But I'm not talking about that yet. HEHE.
 
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