Square peg in round hole

As of last year, I had intended to put off the auto-manual conversion till the car was registered and running. That changed early this year when I decided to make the car much closer to my ultimate vision earlier and get the TKO in it. I'd put it off because I (typically) shied away from an unknown pathway. However, my attitude towards unknown paths changed in a fundamental way last year, and I took the plunge and ordered the TKO while the motor was out getting made awesome.

Still, it's a trial by fire. Doing something for the first time, to a fastidious standard, with no clear instructions, with combinations of parts that were made 50 years ago, designed 60 years ago, and some parts that were made just this year, is never going to be a walk in the park on a cool spring day. This week just gone, I've been working on the clutch. The clutch pedal I'm using from the '62 is, presumably, originally an American part. I don't think any of the Australian delivered cars were manual, at least none I've ever seen. The American cars have a mechanical clutch linkage system where the pedal operates on a long pin, and on the other end of that pin is a lever, above the accelerator pedal, where the linkages connect. In an aussie car, this lever is closer to the ouboard side of the car than the engine, and presumably because of this, the wagon had it's clutch master cylinder operated directly off the pedal itself, rather than the lever on the far side.

Well, true to form, that wasn't good enough for me and I decided I would put the clutch master to the outboard side of the brake booster and operate it off the lever rather than the clutch itself. It tucks neatly away behind the brake booster, out of the way, miles from anything it might interfere with on the engine.With some competent fabricating assistance, I was able to connect a rose joint via a threaded tube extension to the master cylinder pushrod and bolt it to an internally threaded standoff welded to the pedal lever. I cut the holes in the firewall, bolted everything together, and it all worked beautifully.

 
Unfortunately, I underestimated how much force would be applied to this mechanism once the fluid was added and the clutch was actually disengaging. There's so much twist and flex in the long pivot shaft, the lever, and the welded standoff that some master cylinder stroke is lost and the clutch doesn't fully disengage.

The solution will probably end up being moving the master cylinder to the inboard side of the brake booster and attaching the rose joint directly to the pedal, eliminating the flex of the pedal shaft and lever. Of course, this will mean a few unnecessary holes in the firewall on the outboard side of the brake booster, but I think I might be able to cover up this little snafu by putting the fuse box there when I do the wiring.

Frustratingly, the weekend I spent doing this ended up being wasted, at least from the perspective of progress with the car, if not from the perspective of personal experience. Still, I guess it's sometimes necessary to find out what doesn't work prior to finding what does. Nikola Tesla once remarked that he never had to resort to what he regarded as the subhuman practise of trial and error; he worked everything out in his head before he lifted a single tool. For the rest of us plebian engineers, some fuckups are to be expected.

The serendipity of two

I've been accused of having too many projects, of spreading my car time too thin.

This is no doubt a fair call, the C20 is a good example of having loftier ambitions than time and inclination perhaps justifies. Still, I'd rather aim high and fall a little short than aim low and achieve low. So when serendipity brought the Baron Von Schwarz into my life, I took a long hard look at what would realistically happen with it. To be honest, I was 50/50 between wrecking it out (mostly so I could get the manual pedals and column for the '63) and keeping it as a project. Well, more accurately, when I first considered buying it, I was 100% for wrecking it out, but that changed to about 70% when I went back for my second look, and by the time it was on the trailer, the idea of wrecking it out was a distant second to the much better idea of turning it into a down-n-dirty road zombie.

Now that it's gotten comfortably nestled in the garage, stuff leaning up against it and the interior full of parts for the Red Lady, I've come to realise how, far from detracting time and focus from the Red Lady, it's been remarkably conductive to progress.

First came the pedals. I had been wondering for a long-ish time how the pedal setup for a manual Chevy would work, how it differs to the automatic cars. As it turns out, not very much at all. A longer pivot pin and a third pedal. That's about it. So I swapped the pedals from the '62 into the '63, and that was one problem solved. I bought a clutch pedal from a '61 on ebay and so now with the auto pedal from the '63 and this new clutch pedal, I have the makings of another manual pedal setup to go back into the '62, which I plan to use a T5 in.

Next was the column. A few years back, in a fit of 'Umgunnagetthiscardoneonceandforall', I pulled out the steering column and pulled it to bits. All the bits went into a basket and for the next 5 years got moved around, spread out and partially lost. Time stealthily thieved the blueprints from my mind and when the time came that I was prepared and motivated to rebuilt it, I had no idea where to start. I had thought to buy another column from somewhere, use it as a model to rebuild my own, and possibly sell to recoup the money. With the complete column from the '62 to look at though, this wasn't necessary and I managed to locate all the bits of the original column and see how it should look all put together. I also bought some new bearings and indicator switch. Now it's back in the car (along with the pedals) hooked up and completely functional. So for these two things alone, the '62 was worth what I paid for it in terms of negating stumbling blocks.

Now a third positive outcome has made itself known. The '62 has no engine and gearbox, but most of the connections TO the engine and box are still there, including the original accelerator pedal and linkages. I didn't want to remove these from the wagon, partly because they've been chromed in ugly aftermarket chrome (which is acceptable in the "with character" '62 but not in the beautiful and perfect '63) and partly because I didn't really consider using a factory linkage setup in the '63 anyway. The old iteration of the Red Lady involved a floor mounted pedal on a pivot and a cable which seemed to have been lifted from a Kingswood or Torana or something else '70s vintage. I was going to find something similar, but better.

The '62 four door hardtop parts car I recently acquired (very rusty, no front panels, no motor or box) had a complete factory accelerator pedal and linkage setup, also. I figured, what the hell, and pulled it, to test fit in the Red Lady to investigate whether it would work on her. It all fits, of course, the mounting points and linkage are the same on the '63, but as it turns out, I think the parts car was originally a 6 cylinder. There was a 6 cylinder air filter assembly on the front seat (under a pile of mouldy carpet and pillows that had been home to some mice for a while), and the linkage seems to suggest it was a six, as well. The lever that connects the intermediate linkage to the carb linkage is offset to the left, compared to the lever on the hearse (which I know had a 283). So, in short, I have a 6 cylinder linkage that I want to use in my V8 car, and a V8 linkage in the car I'm going to put a six into. See the serendipity there?

So in conclusion, I reiterate my wisdom in purchasing another project.

First run of the 383

It's been about 4 weeks since I was up at the engine shop running in the 383. I took a video of the first run. Crappy camera sound aside, this thing has a big hairy pair. You can hear with that first firing that there's compression there, and she's breathing deep through those Sportsman II heads. Can't wait to hear it through a full exhaust.

Enlarging holes

The task I've been attacking this past couple of weeks has been the big, landmark operation of putting the engine and box together and putting them both in the car. True to form, this has involved much more friggery than originally anticipated, and yet, paradoxically, it has also been a bit of a breeze. When you consider the extent of the changes I've made, and the lack of a plan anywhere in the proceedings, things are going remarkably well. It seems like there have been a lot of little obstacles, but apparently my problems solving ability has come a long way since I first started putting this car together, and every little problem seemed insurmountable.

The first thing that presented a bit of a problem was the insufficient clearance between the hydraulic throwout bearing I used on the gearbox and the fingers of the clutch diaphragm. There are shorter bearing cylinders available to alleviate this problem, but the instructions suggested another method, which was to move the box back from the bellhousing. In the end, I cut two 0.080 inch thick shims from an aluminium speed limit sign. With the additional 0.160 thickness the problem was licked.

It's important to note, for me at least, this would have been something of a showstopper had it happened a few years ago. I used to have a habit of mentally 'talking up' issues and blowing them out of proportion, allowing them to delay the whole project by months or years. I guess this is a reflection of my altered attitude nowadays towards this car. I used to do nothing when I didn't know what to do, out of fear that I would do something wrong. Now I'm focused and driven, and these little hurdles just get trampled by my drive to see this car on the road again.

Currently I'm working on two problems at once. Firstly, the engine and box seem to sit crooked in the car. This problem manifested years ago, when the 350 first went in, then with the automatic behind it, and it took a great deal of cursing and levering to push the transmission over to get the bolts in the mount. I'm not sure why this problem exists- I originally suspected the engine mounts, but the message board community seem to think I've got a bent frame. I don't know about that, the frame looks perfect, there's no ripples or creases or anything else to make me suspect it's been bent at some point. At any rate, the symptom is that with the engine mounts bolted in place, the transmission mount is about 3/4 inch to the right of where it should be. I've mostly resolved this now, by filing out the holes of one of the motor mounts to make them slightly oval.

The other half of the problem is the fitment of the transmission in the tunnel. It's a very different shape to the TH350, and it looks a lot bigger in the car than it did in the box. To date, the solution has been to cut out a rather large, transmission shaped hole from the floor. I plan to make a bolt-in cover for this, probably made out of the floor of the rusty '62 4-door hardtop parts car I bought about a week ago for the very reasonable sum of $200.

Looming on the horizion is the next issue of drivetrain alignment. This, too, I think I've got pretty much premptively solved, at least in theory, because with this I now know the goal. There's a lot of misinformation out there about driveshaft angles and how it's all supposed to work, and this is largely due to the fact that there's no catch-all rule on how it's done. I think I'm pretty well armed with knowlege now, after this morning's research into the subject.

I'm liking this newfound confidence in my own capabilities.

Playing the Undertaker

Some people shouldn't be allowed to buy cars.

I've wrecked out about 15 cars. A lot of the time, they're worth more as parts than as cars, the cars are so devalued you can buy them at practically scrap value. This has been the case with the XD-XE-XF falcons, fairlanes and LTDs I've done. They're profitable to wreck, because they're cheap to buy and people still work on them, creating a market for the parts.

Some of the cars I've wrecked though, have been cars I'd have preferred to keep, if they were in salvagable condition. A HJ prem, the Chevy truck I wrecked, and this most recent aquisition, a ZH Fairlane.

I got it for $250, complete less engine and box. I really dig the lines of these cars, they have one of the best looking faces on any australian car and they're based on the XC Falcons, one of which I owned and was rather fond of back in the day. It might look alright in the picture, except for the buggered door, but believe me, it's mostly scrap metal now. The roof is shot through with holes, the sills are practically nonexistant, and there's a hole in the floor behind the driver's seat you could get both feet through. It is, in short, fucked.

There's a rego label on the floor on the passenger side that says it was last registered in June 2000, almost 11 years ago. The guy I bought it from said he's had it about 10, so it had probably just run out when he got it, or he got it with a bit left and didn't re-register it. It came from a house on the semi-rural fringes, probably a half-acre-ish block with a somewhat large house on it, and in the back yard, down the driveway, on the front yard, and in the street, around 30 cars all of the same sort of vintage. Not one was in roadworthy condition, and this Fairlane was, in fact, one of the best cars there.

Without much prompting, the seller began to spill the beans. He'd had some land, 38 acres, and had filled it with cars, from what he said, somewhere between 60 and 80. At some point, someone had vandalised most of them, probably a pissed off neighbor sick of looking at them, so most of the cars I saw had all the windows busted in. It was about 10 years ago that this had happened, and no effort to cover them up had been made, so they were mostly worse than this fairlane. He had moved to this semi-suburban house and had, over the past two years, moved all the cars to this house and another nearby house, where another 27 were supposedly parked. Presumably they were each as fucked as the ones I was looking at. Too many projects, he said. He told me over the phone that this Fairlane had "half a chance of getting back on the road". Buddy, no way.

I've seen it before. There's a wrecking yard in Cooma, just off the highway that leads to Jindabyne, where maybe 300 cars make their final resting place, and they range from '30s stuff to '70's, including maybe 50 Fords between mid 30s and late 40s. Not one of them has a chance of ever seeing asphalt again, but the owner thinks he's sitting on a goldmine. I tested him- asked prices for a few things- exorbitant. He even wanted twenty bucks just to get in, as if it were some sort of national attraction. Granted, there are a few decent parts among the lot of them, but for the most part they're scrap at best. They'll be nothing more than one big iron deposit in the ground at some point, or, with any luck, it'll get cleaned out and they'll get recycled into soup cans and park furniture.

I always feel a little sad, ending the 'life' of a once nice car, but I have to remind myself, it wasn't me that killed it, it was 10 years in a paddock. And why the previous owner thought he'd ever get around to doing anything with it other than allowing time to destroy it before selling it at, presumably, a big loss, I'll never understand. I've been known to have a lot of cars, probably slightly more than I can handle, but I will never be like that. I will never allow nice cars to deteriorate into uselessness whilst hanging on to the delusion that I have the capacity to restore 50 cars or more, or that storing them in a paddock, surrounded by dirt and long grass, with the windows smashed in, is any better than buying them and lighting them on fire the same day.

Epilogue- When I went to pick the car up, only a day after I had looked at it in the first place, the seller, after giving me the story that he was seeing the light, downsizing, cleaning up, had bought two more cars. Due to this he declined to sell me a second car I was interested in because he was, to quote, 'afraid of not having enough parts to finish the two new ones'. Another two bite the dust.

Home stretch

I feel like I'm on the home straight with the Red Lady. She's beginning to feel like a car. Like a thing that lives and breathes and moves through your life with you. For so long she was just a concept, a collection of ideas, and the memories of the car that she was sort of went sepia toned and nostalgic. I guess that part hasn't changed, she's as different now as I am different to the kid I was when we first rode together. Those memories won't be coming back, but plenty of new ones will be made.

There's not much left to do now. I thought, earlier this year, that my November goal was a bit optimisitic. Now I think I might even beat it as the to-do list shrinks down to the point where I can think of it in terms of how many weekends of work there are left in it all. Money is a bit of a problem now, I really gotta sell the '68 before I can take care of some of the last few things on my shopping list. Two semi-major components remain to be bought: A driveshaft and a new windscreen. Apart from that, most of what remains is free or cheap and the jobs that still need doing aren't the ugly, pain-in-the-ass kind but the fun and exciting ones. The wiring, the thought of which used to fill me with dread, is now exciting and piece-of-cake thanks to a wonderful wiring kit I was able to buy from Late Great Chevy. It's more or less an exact, complete wiring reproduction, including new headlight switch, ignition switch and highbeam switch, plus all the lightbulb sockets. It's also somewhat modified, intending to be used with a high output alternator and full-voltage ignition like a HEI or MSD. So that's pretty awesome.

This weekend I intend to get stuck in, I've got a fair bit I want to accomplish before monday morning rolls around. Having the engine ready to go in would be nice, though I've got to repaint it, and I don't know if my old can of POR15 engine paint will be ok, seeing as it's at least 5 years old. Still, if I can get the body number restamped, the floor cut out, and the engine and box put together, that will be almost enough to satiate my desires... for now. Really, though, I've a feeling this fire will stay lit till I slap a rego label on that big beautiful curved windscreen. See ya soon, Hume Highway.

So many irons in the fire

There have been times in the past when I've wanted to make some progress on the car and have had some time earmarked for Chevy progress, only to spend it wandering aimlessly in the garage not knowing what to do. In those times, it was because I've had no one area to work on, nothing stood out as a pressing "next step", or worse, there WAS a next step and it was a sticky, unpalatable, involved task that I had no desire to do, such as the countless hours I spent on my back under her belly, scrubbing off forty years of accumulated road crud and old body sealer in order to prepare it for paint. That really sucked.

Lately though the problem seems to be (and it is a good problem) that there are many fronts I'm working on, and they're almost all fun, rewarding, clean tasks that can be done in a finite amout of time. On the downside, all this progress costs money and I've been giving the Visa a right royal hiding this past two months. It's a little frightening actually, but it's a calculated risk- the US dollar is expected by most to be much stronger by the end of the year, so the credit card interest on all the stuff I've been buying recently should be less than the cost of buying things later with a cheaper aussie dollar. But enough about that.

There's so much good stuff going on with this car right now. Cheifly, tomorrow morning I'll finally get to light the wick on the 383. Last week, Ivan told me it'll be "knocking on the door of 500HP and as much torque". 500HP and 500 lbs/ft is a nice set of numbers. I don't think it'll be quite that high- I'm guessing more like around 460 HP and 450 lbs/ft. Still, that's enough to make for spirited driving to say the least. What's more, the clutch, flywheel, gearbox, driveshaft and diff are all adequately strong to make good use of every one of those horses. No pussyfooting this lady around, fearful of the box or diff scattering like a pile of leaves in a gust of wind if I decide to open the throttle up. So stay tuned for a possible video of the 383's first run. This engine now has all forged internals, H-beam rods, World sportsman II heads, compression around 9.7:1, solid cam with 230/236 deg at 0.050 and 0.488/0.501 lift and an LSA of 110, roller rockers, Edelbrock Victor Jnr manifold and a CHROME OIL DIPSTICK! (which I'll be ditching at some point in the not-too-distant future... DEATH TO ENGINE BAY CHROME!) The shape of the pistons and the zero deck height make for excellent quench and Ivan told me that this bottom end- Eagle forged crank and rods, and SRP pistons did 100 laps in a sprint car at 8200 rpm without cracking. So it should be good enough for my little lady. Contrast all of this with my last post regarding the engine- this reciprocating assembly was quite a bit more substantial than I intended for this (at the time) stop-gap engine, but Ivan offered it to me for a very reasonable $2k. It was from an abandonded project for a customer of his. So this 383 might end up being a little more permanent and a lot more tough than originally intended.

In other news of significance, the TKO arrived last week. The TKO is a five-speed box, capable of taking up to 600 lbs/ft, with a 2.87 first gear and a 0.64 overdrive. I looked at a few gearbox options and it was pretty obvious the TKO was the way to go. I had originally intended to stick with the Turbo 350 and do the box swap after rego, but the more I thought about that, the less I wanted an auto in this car. Real cars have three pedals, and it turned out easier than I thought to get this conversion under way. There are still two semi-complicated jobs to do, and these are mounting the clutch cylinder and cutting the floor to fit the tall-and-narrow TKO in place of the wide-and-low auto box. For the latter, I'm thinking the way to go will be to cut part of a driveshaft tunnel out of a scrap car and make a removable cover out of it that can be bolted in place over a hole in the floor where the box can stick through slightly. I'll be able to take it off to work on the box if necessary in the future, so it's win-win.

I've also had lots of little bits and pieces arrive recently, including the only recently available quarter vent window rubbers, which were previously only available for coupes, convertibles and hardtops. This is good news; the old rubbers on the quarter vent windows are perished and cracked, and were about the only original rubber left on the car. Also got my gauges, tacho, oil pressure and water temp. They're beautiful old style gauges with modern electronic guts, made by Autometer. I was originally going to get Bonspeed Roulette gauges, but apart from being quite expensive they're also slightly silly- more at home on a rat rod than a classy lady. I've already mounted the tach on top of the steering column, which I've also finished rebuilding and is now completely functional.

Also in the recent purchases is my hydraulic throwout bearing and clutch master cylinder set, which is a kit supplied by McLeod racing. It was recommended to me, subtly and with a nudge and a wink, by the very knowlegable and helpful tech guy at Hurst Driveline. They sell their own setup but this McLeod kit looks like a very well engineered piece of kit.

There's bit lots of other stuff too, but less interesting. To quickly sum up: Crossmember, trans yoke, bonnet hinges and springs, rev limiter module, shift light, scattershield (consisting of an amazing, SINGLE PIECE SPUN steel bell with a welded on gearbox flange- stunning piece of engineering), gear stick, an excellent wiring kit from Late Great Chevys, which has all circuits fully terminated, grouped and marked, with reproduction sockets on virtually everything, AND a new headlight switch, high beam switch, ignition switch, all for a measly $600. This will make the wiring, which was going to be an infuriating chore with the other, generic loom I bought, into a fun one-day operation.

Times are good. This is the fun part.

No updates due to updates

It's been a few weeks since my last post, but that doesn't mean I've been idle. Quite the opposite, I've been too busy to blog about all the stuff I've been doing. In fact, that is more or less the current state of affairs; whilst I sit here and write, I'm itching to get back out and do some more. In a nutshell though, the past few weeks have seen the following developments.

Glass Run Channels: The 'tracks' that the windows go up and down in consist of a steel u-channel coated in rubber, with two felt strips glued inside, and a stainless mould clamped over the outer edge. At each end a backing plate is riveted on which then bolts inside the door. Remaking these took about four hours per door, not including the time uninstalling and reinstalling, and the total cost was around $600.

Door Guts: One door is complete and completely functional, the other three are 'nearly there', though I plan to pull the front doors apart again to replace the vent glass seals (the little triangular windows) which have only recently become available as reproductions. I have some on order currently. This might end up being an 'after rego' job.

Boot Area: I removed the bootlid temporarily to put some paint inside it on some of the bare areas. Although it's impossible to get to all of it, I think I've done the most rust-vulnerable area way at the bottom. The bootlid is now back on, but realigning it was a long and tedious process, consuming about two and a half hours, and much swearing. It's now as good as it's going to get. Since the paint inside the bootlid was the thing preventing the taillights and trim from going back on, I spent this afternoon doing that. The back of the car is now complete apart from the aluminium number plate panel that goes on the rear bumper.

More to come soon, I have gauges on order, a hydraulic throwout bearing and master cylinder kit, new bonnet hinges and some other little bits. I'm expecting the motor to be assembled this week. Should fire it up in the next week or two.

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!

Little Steps relating to paint- BillyBob

In between stages of work on the Red Lady's fuel tank (see below), I've also been doing little things pertaining to BillyBob. Yesterday and today, it was painting the rocker cover and sideplates, and preparing one of the doors for paint.

The stripping of old paint was already done on the engine parts back in December when I got them hot-tanked, which is basically a bath in boiling degreaser. It's not freindly to your skin, but great for engine parts, which basically come back brand-new looking. The paint is Chevy Orange engine enamel, and the engine will be getting a two-tone paintjob, with the block, sump and head being flat black and the rocker cover and sideplates being a nice contrasty bright orange. So far so good:

It's important to recognise the importance of these sorts of jobs- the ones where a substantial, satisfying result is achieved in a relatively short time. Stuff likes this gives me a boost with the shitty jobs that have less obvious reward, like the 60 or so hours I spent on my back under the Red Lady removing old paint, sound deadener, and accumulated road crud.

The other work I did today was sanding one of the doors for the truck, and later tonight I'll probably stick some red-oxide primer inside it. After that, it'll be ready to hose some primer onto it in preparation for the top coat, which I'm thinking will be orange, though a slightly lighter orange than the engine parts above. That decision is not finalised yet though.

Cost: $30.14 for engine paint, and a few bucks worth of sanding pads
Time spent: 1/2 an hour on the engine parts, and about 45 mins on the door

Fuel tank freshen up- The Red Lady

Been working on the fuel tank for my lovely red lady. It's in remarkably good shape for a 47 year old piece- gave it a kludge version of a pressure test with the air hose and some fuel, no apparent leaks despite at least 3 repairs, inside is spotlessly clean and you can even see some sort of marking inside- looks like a date code and some other factory markings, in some sort of ink.

Anyway, first step has been to strip off the old paint, and I've been using these plastic stripping wheels. I used them extensively on the underbody surfaces, which were not sandblasted when the rest of the body was stripped of old paint.

Although expensive (the 4-inch grinder mounted version was $24) they last quite a long time if you keep them away from protrusions and edges. I used probably 33% of the life of one disc to do the entire fuel tank, so this works out much cheaper than the faster-wearing but cheaper sandpaper discs, and the plastic wheel is much less abrasive to the steel underneath, while still stripping the old paint quite quickly.

It took about an hour to remove most of the paint from the tank, and a little more around the seams, in the grooves, and around the fiddly bits with some wax & grease remover and a scouring brush. Next is some cold gal spraypaint- this is a primer containing some sort of powdered zinc- so it's a sort of cut-rate galvanising process, though the results are far from as good as galvanising- as long as it avoids being scratched it will do the job. This is currently drying in the garage, and tomorrow I'll squirt some flat black top coat over it, and when that dries, it'll be ready to go back in the car. 

Cost of this job:$75.19 (paint, stripping wheel) 

Time taken: 3 hours, plus the time it takes to apply the flat black