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.