Goodbye, Billybob, hello Sedagon.

About a week ago, a guy called up and offered me $3000 for Billybob. I tried to sell both trucks as a project for $3500 for a few months running, from about march to october last year, with no luck. Lots of callers, none from NSW, none willing to move the trucks interstate. Eventually I withdrew the ad, and as anybody out there bothering to read this will know, started chipping away at the job of making one whole, viable vehicle out of the two of them.

So then about a week ago, this guy calls me up out of the clear blue sky (no, not God himself) and basically offers me $3000 over the phone. I dismissed him at first, I've had numerous over-the-phone cash offers that expire the minute I hang up the phone, but sure enough a few days later he fronted, cash in hand. He took the yellow truck and all the panels off the white truck, but left me with the complete chassis, engine and box from the white truck, which is includes the better of the 292's and the power steering. Some day, I might put a '50s or earlier cab on the chassis and make myself a hotrod towtruck, but that's a long ways off.

Coincidently concurrent to these events, whilst checking out an old hearse that an interstate friend was interested in buying, I crossed paths with another hearse, also for sale from the same stringy junkie that was selling the one I was there to inspect. It's a '62 Chevy and at first glance I thought it was just a wagon, but a bit more inspection revealed it's a sedan, modified to a wagonesque shape, with a lot of cutting and stitching and bogging over the surgery scars. Anyway, last weekend, I brought it home on a trailer and winched it into my lair.

It's a '62 Belair that was once a sedan. The rear window has been made part of a very heavy, top-hinged, one piece tailgate. The back doors are the standard sedan shape (curving window frames, as opposed to square) and the rear windows are apparently custom made. Let's hope I never break one. That said, it's flat, so it should be relatively easy to get one cut, I suppose.

It's got no motor or box, but is otherwise complete, and according to the seller it once had a 283 and holden 4-speed in it. When I first saw it, I took some pictures of the manual pedal setup, because it was a hurdle I was facing with my Red Lady. A few days later, I called up the guy and asked if he'd be interested in letting me swap my auto pedal setup for the manual pedal setup, so as not to leave the car missing parts, but he declined and offered me the car for $2500. I went back and had another look a few days later and ended up buying it for $2250. So welcome another member to the family, who's preliminary name is Sedagon. The red wagon at the bottom is for comparison; it's a 'real' wagon.

 

Any car is a good car

I've been known to have opinions about cars. Yes, I do humbly admit to having strong and sometimes unreasonable opinions about cars. The truth is though, I'm part of a lucky generation. We get to experience the wonderful freedom of an automobile, albeit tainted, as it is these days, with the growing crisis of climate change, to which the transport sector contributes about 15-20% of the damaging gases.

We are still lucky, though. The ability to independently and easily cover great distances, on our own schedule, is an ability that we have only been imbued with in the past hundred years or so, and with increasing affordability and practicality. I just got back from Tasmania. We rented a car, a Suzuki Swift. Superficially, it's not my cup of tea. I don't like the styling of modern cars, I don't like the materials, the sound, the feel, the driving experience. I particularly don't like the soullessness; they are simply goods, the byproduct of the profit of a corporation. Still, I couldn't help myself but to love that little car, in a way.

Yesterday, we were due to fly out at 5:50 pm. That meant we had most of the day to accomplish what we planned, which was to visit historic Port Arthur, which is about 80-some kilometers of beautiful, winding road from Hobart. It's a convict settlement, and in it's heyday was serviced entirely by ocean, there being no road through the rugged forest of the peninsula it occupies to nearby Hobart, and it's remoteness made it the ideal place for a convict settlement. There were frequent escape attempts, but many of the escapees returned willfully, upon finding out just how hard it was to make their way to anywhere at all. This is no small fact- their return to the settlement after escaping would have resulted in torturous punishment to say the least. But us in our little Swift, we allowed just over an hour to get to the airport.

This is my point- we are lucky to live like this. We are blessed. Any car is a good car.

Change of plan- 383 for The Red Lady

Back in October 2004 I scored on ebay a motor for $2600, which was a bargain. It's a 4-bolt 350, 010 (meaning 10% nickel, high-strength block) with World Sportsman II heads, Victor Jnr manifold, Yella Terra roller rockers, and a ridiculously big cam. It also has, stupidly, a cast 307 crank, factory rods, and forged pistons. What all this adds up to is a motor that is not well thought out, with a top end that will support, even require, rpm in the 7500 vicinity, but a bottom end that will have disintegrated long before that point. Sort of like a bodybuilder with osteoporosis. It's a mess.

This is not to say it wasn't a bargain; the collective value of the parts is in excess of $5000 even by conservative estimate, the heads alone are worth the $2600 I paid for this engine, while a good 010 350 with no core shift can be worth upwards of $1000 and it was with this in mind that I bought it in the first place. My intention, after a few years of mulling, was to use it as it was for a while but eventually pull it out and build a big-inch, 400 based smallblock capable of using the heads more sensibly, and being a far more satisfying drive in general. The more I have thought about this engine, though, the less interested I am in driving it the way it is.

Concurrently to all this, I bought another engine, another 4-bolt 350, in pieces in 2009. I got it for the bargain price of $400, and it's been rebuilt and run-in, but then disassembled. Presumably, the scores on the crank are the reason it was disassembled, though they are not bad enough to have prevented it from running, and it seems unlikely that they would even cause a detectable symptom while the engine was running. The heads are '65 327/300 or 350hp factory heads with larger 2.02 inch intake valves installed (standard for these heads are 1.94). So this engine is a bit of a mystery, having been abandoned by it's builder after considerable effort had been expended. Not that I mind of course, being the beneficiary of whatever loss of momentum befell the previous owner, but it does frequently baffle me as to why projects seem to get routinely abandoned after considerable cost and effort has already been contributed.

The plan that slowly coalesced around this new acquisition was to built a stout, cheap, streetable 383 to go into Teddy, along with his T5 gearbox. I also bought a good 400 block, crank, rods and pistons in late 2009, and this was intended to become the engine for the Red Lady. Ever since this last purchase, the question of how to assemble my now impressive pile of parts into two well-planned and well-executed engines while keeping the spending to a minimum has occupied a lot of brain cycles whilst the long hours of workdays roll by under the wheels of Sir Bertram St Rodeo Delacroix.

I bought a bunch of new parts in October last year that were intended for Teddy's 383, ancillary stuff, like a harmonic balancer, timing set, timing cover, a cam that's just a bit 'bigger' than the one in the Dodge now and perhaps most significantly, a Scat cast 383 crank for the absolute bargain price of $230, from VPW. This is an astounding amount of engineering and quality for this price, by the way, as a comparable Eagle crank is more than double this price. I can only hope it's not indicative of some sort of change of management at
Scat where the good name of the company that's been hard earned for 40 years will be stripped of all it's worth in exchange for a couple of years of selling second rate garbage by some disrespectful corporate punk.

The 383 was intended to be a cheap thrill engine to build to fling Teddy into the 13-second arena of fun, fast street car whilst spending the barest minimum to achieve it. This was the state of affairs up until late last year when I realised that even on the cheap, the 383 was going to cost a few grand once I figured in things like exhaust, crossmember fabrication for the T5 box, an ignition system, carby and so forth. I decided to shelve that particular project for the time being and concentrate all my effort on the Red Lady, and this approach has served me satisfyingly well for the past couple of months.

Still, that engine sitting between her frame rails mocks me with it's poor selection of parts, and about a week ago the pieces all sort of fell together in my head. It was one of those satisfying epiphanies that makes you say something out loud, to nobody in particular, and that epiphany was that the 383/T5 combo should go, temporarily, into the Red Lady.


Yes, it will involve more cost and complexity for The Red Lady, and, realistically, make the goal of registering her on the 25th of November 2011, 13 years after her last registration expired, untenable. However, it is unacceptable to me to put all that work and effort into a car I won't enjoy driving because of a long ago idiot's selection of parts. It'll also bring the long-term goal for the Red Lady (a brawny, torque monster 400 with triple deuces and a strong, capable 5- or 6-speed box backing it up) closer to fruition, because if I sort out the mounting of the cheap, EA Falcon-sourced T5 now, I can later purchase a strong T5 based aftermarket box and bolt it straight in. So this is the current state of affairs- the stupidly built 350 will come out, the heads and intake will be used on probably the non-010 block 350 (the 010 block is overkill for what I want, and is valuable to sell... though I might just use it anyway... haven't really decided on that yet) with the parts I have been accumulating for Teddy's ultimate transformation from tired old 253 that still has a ton of panache to a hot 383/5 speed street warrior that'll be quick enough to embarrass all those generic taxicabs out there sporting misbegotten Chevrolet bowties. That engine and box will then be fitted to the Red Lady, involving the installation of a clutch pedal, a modified crossmember to hold up the T5, and a hole in the floor, filled by a shifter that'll (hopefully) clear the front of the bench seat. It's a sort of 1 1/2 birds with one stone deal.


Later, and I indulge a little here, I will build the motor I really want to build for her, which is going to use the 400 block, possibly a stroker crank, have a short cam so that all the power happens between 2500 and 5000, and topped with the undeniable beauty of 3x2s. She'll also get a gearbox befitting her near royalty status, probably a Richmond 5+1, which I believe is designed to fit into the same hole as a T5. Only then will Teddy get his funjection. Looks like that little 253 has some life left in it yet.

Big Brake Day (The Red Lady)

February 7th was the day I somewhat arbitrarily picked as the Big Brake day. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the involvement of a professional in working on the car adds deadline which provides motivation to do peripheral tasks, plus the work done on the day itself, and so it came to pass that I contracted John The Mechanic (whom I have known since I was about 12) to render his services for the day and get the braking system working.

In the leadup to this day I finally pulled my finger out and mounted the master cylinder on the firewall and attached it to the pedal box. The master cylinder, bought from Master Power brakes in the USA, was equipped with brackets for '58-'64 Chevy fullsize, but of course they didn't fit my righthand drive car. At least not straight out of the box, but it was a fairly simple job to make it fit. The existing mounting holes on the firewall side of the bracket were in the wrong spot, so I had them welded up and redrilled them to fit the four studs on the pedal box that poke through holes in the firewall and perform the dual task of securing the lower end of the pedal assembly and mounting the master cylinder. After that was done, the lower part of the bracket on the left side interfered with the steering column hole in the firewall, so a little cutting and reshaping was required. Sure makes for a more confidence-inspiring setup than the old single circuit, manual master cylinder.

It's also been interesting, incidentally, to check out these two pictures of the engine bay, separated by almost 15 years. I had all the holes welded up in the inner guards with the intention of running the wiring out of sight, tucked between the inner and outer guards.

Anyway, most of what John did on the 7th of Feb was laying the plumbing for the brakes, flaring tubing, adding the fittings and connecting everything up. In hindsight I probably could have done all this myself, it's not rocket science after all, but the tradeoff of money vs expediency in this instance was a good one anyway. After filling the master cylinder and beginning to bleed the system out, we found a leak, not at one of the fittings oddly enough, but at the plug at the back of the proportioning valve where, after machining out the interior from a block of brass, a plug was put in the end of the hole that the bore passed through. This plug was ever so slightly out of square with the seating surface, and as a result it leaked. This is obviously a manufacturing fault, but since I acquired these parts all the way back in April 2004, it's probably a little too late to make a warranty claim. One of the pitfalls of procrastination I guess. A little thread tape seems to have fixed the problem and with that done the Red Lady now has WORKING BRAKES!

Time spent: About 30 hours all up
Cost: Labour, $442, Parts (entire brake system) $3715.15

When to delegate

As you will know if you read the last post, I've contracted the services of John the Mechanic for next week, to do the bulk of the work on the braking system on the Red Lady. The benefit of adding a professional into the equation is, in addition to having actual work done, a large incentive to produce results of my own.

Since the car came back from the panel shop, painted, looking like a car but really just a shell, the work has been all my own. Only one smallish task has been done by a professional in the past 5 years, which was the installation of the headlining, a task beyond my experience if not my ability.

I noticed back when that was done (September 2009) that I was incentivised to do the tasks that necessarily preceeded the work of the upholstery man that did the headlining, such as sanding, painting the roof, and installing sound deadening material, because of the looming deadline of his arrival. Not wanting to waste the time of a professional by rescheduling or cancelling, I was forced to knuckle down and get things done, and this upcoming appointment with John is the same. Really, I could do this work myself. It's not beyond my ability, nothing about the car (except maybe the paint and body) so far has been beyond my capability. The difference between myself and a professional is the speed with which the task is done, and in some cases the quality of the result (and that difference can go in both directions- the 'professional' job of installing the exhaust manifolds on the Dodge demonstrated how shitty a job someone can do when they don't have the personal motivation of owning the car and caring about the result). The point I'm circling here is that I can keep deadlines when someone else is involved, but I slack off when I'm on my own schedule. The risk associated with taking this train of thought to it's logical conclusion is winding up with a chequebook hotrod, the idea of which I find most unpalatable.

Happily, I've done enough work myself on this car to be pretty confident that scenario is no longer possible. The hours and hours spent on my back underneath it sanding back 40 years of road grime and leaked oil can attest to that. However, I'm not willing, nor is my budget able, to allow the remainder of the work on the car be done solely, or even mostly, by paid help. I forsee one big task, and one lesser, that will involve a third party, and these are the wiring and the window channels, respectively. Both of these tasks I could probably do on my own, but every time I think about them I internally groan and roll my eyes. They're not fun, and that's the essence of it really, I want to enjoy the car, not suffer it, and though I see the logic in some suffering in exchange for the big payoff of finally driving it, under it's own combustion, out of the garage, the bottom line is it's been too long and I just want that day to hurry up and arrive.

Brake bits, and the leadup to the Big Brake Day

A couple of weeks from now I have a deadline to meet with the Red Lady. John the Mechanic is doing a day's work with me on Feb 7th, the goal of which is to have a fully functional brake system by the end of it. To facilitate this, I've been on a shopping errand today, to get the parts I'll need to have ready for the big day. As usual, I've made this task seem bigger than it really turns out to be once I get involved in it a bit.

A recurring theme with the car in the past 6 months is re-learning my own plan and inventory. The master cylinder, booster, and rear brakes were all purchased together way back in april 2004, nearly 7 years ago, so it's little surprise it now seems a bit unfamiliar to me. With experience and hindsight, I probably could have accomplished as good a result as I'm going to with less money than what I've spent on this brake system, but there's no use lamenting that now. On the plus side, the parts themselves are quality bits and they'll end up providing great stopping power.

The calipers on the rear brakes caused a bit of a grumbling discourse from the grandfatherly guru at Martin's Clutch and Brake this afternoon (I assume the guy in question is the namesake patriarch of said establishment) which was both somewhat amusing and somewhat insulting. I either didn't get, or have subsequently lost, banjo bolts to fit the calipers that came with my USA-purchased rear brake kit. The calipers used are from a '80-'85 Cadillac Eldorado (and other similar vintage American GMs) and at the time I purchsed them, I remember making the assumption that the calipers would exist on an Aussie car too, probably a VN-VS or something like that. Apparently they don't, and Martin somewhat derisively informed me that he hadn't seen the calipers before. He commented that I could have had a locally produced caliper that would do the job just as well and wouldn't have a weird metric banjo inlet (yes, metric, on an old Caddy, it IS wierd) but the essence of this is that he didn't have the banjo bolts, which he says are a metric 10mm x1.5 thread. Subsequent research seems to indicate that they are in fact readily available, but time will tell on that one.

Despite all this, I think I'm almost ready for the big day, at least as far as supplies go, but I still would like to mount the pedal and master cylinder ahead of time. The more I can get done before the day, the more I can get done on the day, so I'm hoping I can also accomplish a fuel line by the close of business on Feb 7th. At any rate, things are moving along nicely. More soon.

Total Spent Today: $186.10
Time Spent: About 2 hours

Trinkets: The expensive part

Buying the big ticket items for cars is rarely the expensive part. A new motor for example, you might spend a few grand on that in one chunk, but the peripheral stuff really adds up.

The motor in the Red Lady right now is a 4-bolt 350 with a 307 crank in it. It has excellent World Sportsman heads on it, an ridiculously big cam, and Victor Jnr intake, but unfortunately it also has a cast crank and factory rods. It's built stupidly. The top end is built to make horsepower that the bottom end can't support. For such a small-ish displacement (331 ci) the heads and cam will make power up around 7200 rpm, but the more or less stock bottom end will have flown to peices long before it ever sees that sort of engine speed. So it's not how I would build an engine. I really only bought it because it was cheap. I paid $2600 for it, and it was more or less complete, or so I thought.

It's not that I got ripped off, on the contrary, the heads alone on the motor are worth $2500, and a 4-bolt 010 block is probably worth $1000 on it's own too, not to mention all the machine work that's been done on it. It's just that there are so many little bits and pieces that are required to make it REALLY complete. The engine I bought was basically a long engine, plus intake. That means I had to add a carb, distributor, alternator, water pump, oil filter adapter and filter, fuel pump, brackets and pulleys, valve covers, torque converter, flexplate, water outlet.... the list just goes on for miles. So today I bought a few little things for the motor that aren't really expected in a "long motor" but that are necessary to have a running motor. The total was $121, and the parts were as follows:

• Oil Filter
• Oil Filter adapter and the unique bolts that hold it on
• PCV Valve
• Timing Tab
• Exhaust flange gaskets (between exh. manifold and pipe)
• Fuel pump fittings

This lot of purchases got me thinking, and I decided to do a quick comparison of the cost of the "engine" vs. the cost of the peripheral stuff subsequent to the motor purchase (not counting things that pertain to the previous engine, of course) and it confirmed my suspicion: $2600 for the engine and $2837.27 since the purchase of the engine on related parts. It really adds up!