another weekend blowout

There are two things I want to do before sending Matilda to the body shop.  One is to test fit the engine, bellhousing and transmission together, to make sure the mounts all line up.  If they don't line up, then I might have to make some new mounting holes somewhere, so I want to do that before the frame gets powdercoated.  The other thing I want to do is to put in some mounting points for blowout straps over the back window.  I ordered my transmission a couple weeks ago, but it hasn't shown up yet, so it seemed like it must be time to work on the blowout strap mounts.

Well, I didn't feel like I got enough done last weekend, so I went out to the garage and did a little work each night this week.

So, the basic idea for the blowout straps is, I want to run two straps down the length of the back window.

Like I said in an earlier post, blowout straps are a common feature of race cars that are based on production cars.  When the car is at high speed with the side windows down, it is possible to generate a pressure difference across the back window that can be sufficient to suck the window out.  My car won't really need them (I hope?), but I thought it would be a cool design cue to play up the race car angle.

But, how to mount them?  From what I've seen/heard, on the old race cars they'd typically be mounted with rivets or sheet metal screws.  That's fine for a race car, because they don't have to worry about aesthetics or rain water leaking into the car or anything like that.  I wanted to work out a better way to do it, though.  Something that would look nicer, and most importantly not leak.

The idea I came up with was to use a threaded standoff.  I ordered four zinc-plated standoffs from McMaster-Carr.

The standoff is threaded all the way through, but my plan was to weld one end shut, so that it would be blind.  I figure that with the end welded shut, and with a thread locker and/or thread sealer on the fastener, there should be no way for water to leak through.

McMaster-Carr has a very searchable/sortable website, which made it easy to find what I was looking for.  In picking the standoff, the main thing I wanted was a 3/8-16 thread, and it turned out that the hex-shaped, zinc-plated standoffs were the best option available for that. They also had stainless steel, but I didn't want to be trying to weld stainless to regular steel.

So, for starters, my buddy Allen helped me mark Matilda's centerline last weekend.  You can see a couple of the marks in this picture (a long one on the trunk lid, and a very small one at the rear window molding).

We made one mark on the trunk lid, one mark at the base of the rear window, one mark at the top of the rear window, and then checked with a straight edge to verify that all three marks lined up with each other, and with the hole for the lock in the trunk lid.

Next I picked a spot that looked like a good place to put the blowout strap.  I just did this by eye.  After years and years of looking at photos of old race cars, I felt like I had a pretty good feel for where it should go.

So, I measured the distance from the centerline to the spot I'd picked, rounded it off to the nearest inch to make it easy, and then marked it, and marked a corresponding point on the other side of the car.  I spaced the marks an inch and a half off of the inner edge of the rear window molding, and fourteen inches from the centerline of the car.  Then I centered a standoff on each mark and traced around it, to show the hex shape that I would need to create.

To start making the holes, I took a Phillips head screwdriver to use as a punch, and a hammer, and made a small punch mark at the center of each mounting point.  Then I drilled it out, stepping up the drill bit sizes until I didn't have any larger drill bit.

From there, I took my Dremel and started milling the hole out to match the hex shape that I'd traced on to the car.  I went slowly and kept checking size of the hex hole compared to the size of the standoff.

When it felt like the standoff was almost ready to fit into the hole, with just the slightest interference, I took a hammer and tapped it in.  My idea was that I wanted it to fit tightly enough that it would stay where I put it, because I didn't really have any good ideas for how to position its depth for welding.

Unfortunately, once it was in the hole, and once I moved it around any little bit at all, it already fit loosely enough that it wouldn't stay where I put it, it would just drop right through the hole.  Part of the problem with that is that, the way the body is built, there is another panel just underneath the outer body, so there's no way to put a hand or a tool or anything on the standoff from the other side of the body panel.  And if the standoff dropped in, it would be very difficult to get it out without cutting a hole in something.

Because of the inner body panel, the depth of the holes at the base of the rear window were just a little bit too shallow for the standoff to drop in.  So those standoffs would need to be cut shorter, but for the time being, it allowed me to at least set the standoffs in the holes to see how they'd look.  I decided that for aerodynamic purposes (by which I mean to say, "to look cool"), the best fastener to use would be a button head cap screw.  I ordered these from McMaster-Carr, also.

Here's a picture of the two standoffs at the base of the rear window, with cap screws in them.  Each one also has a washer on it in this picture, because even though I was pretty sure they couldn't drop in, I wanted to make sure they wouldn't.

So next, I cut the standoffs short.  I had to cut the two at the base of the window so that they could fit, but I cut the upper ones, too, just because I wanted to minimize the dead space between the end of the cap screw and the bottom of the standoff.  To cut them off, I just clamped each one in a bench vise and cut it with a cutoff wheel on an angle grinder.  Crude, but effective.  And the cut didn't need to look pretty, because it would be completely concealed after installation.

So, I did all those steps over the course of the week, spaced out over a few weeknights.  The plan all along was for my buddy John to do the welding, because he has a welder, and (much more importantly) a good amount of practice using it.  It looked like we were going to be ready for Saturday, so the plan was to go ahead and weld the standoffs in after breakfast.  The weather, just for the record, was beautiful, so we rolled the garage door up and went to work.  The picture below is looking up the street behind my house, at the end of my driveway.

To do the final preparation for welding, I used a sandpaper wheel on the Dremel to remove the paint around each hole, and I used the wire wheel on the bench grinder to remove the zinc plating around the surfaces of the standoff that would be welded.  Then, John put each standoff in the bench vise and welded the end of each one shut.

Next, we went to place the first standoff in the body and weld it.  My idea had been to make a small clip, shaped like the letter "Omega" from the Greek alphabet.  The idea was that one of the cap screws would fit through the circle of the "Omega clip," and hold it to the stand off, and then the "legs" of the "Omega clip" would keep it from dropping through the hole.  That would hold the standoff in place for John to tack weld a couple places, then the clip could be removed and the weld completed.

Well, it turned out that the whole arrangement was pretty clunky and didn't look like it would work very well.  Fortunately, John had a much better idea, which was to use a magnet to hold one side of the standoff flush with the body while John tacked the other side.  This sounded like a much better idea, so we went ahead to put the first standoff in place, and ... damned if it didn't drop right through the hole and into the small cavity inside the body.

I had almost kind of assumed that at some point we were going to lose one of the standoffs into the body, but I had figured that we'd mess around for a little while, and eventually fish it out of there.  What I never would have imagined was how difficult it was just to find the standoff after it fell in.  The space it fell into is so small, it seemed like it couldn't have gone far, but with extremely limited access into that space, it turned out to be seemingly impossible to even locate the standoff.  We fished around with wire, magnets, and a mirror.  We thought maybe it had bounced over and fallen out of one of the holes at the bottom of the cavity and fallen in to the trunk, so we emptied everything out of the trunk, and still didn't find it.  We took turns laying on our backs in the trunk, fishing around and trying to find it.  We must have looked for it for about an hour, and actually, we never knew where it was until finally I had just tried fishing a length of wire around in there again, and pulled it out, and then I bent down to look in there, and suddenly I saw the standoff just sitting there, in plain view, where I could just reach in and pick it up.  Crazy.

So, then we decided to try the Omega clip.  But, it turned out to be every bit as clunky and ineffective as it had looked like it would be.  Fortunately, John had another better idea, which was to just thread a long bolt into the standoff, which would allow him to hold it where he wanted it with one hand while he tacked it in place with the other hand.  He also left the bolt in place while he finished the weld, to keep slag and weld splatter from fouling the threads.  That worked really well after a little practice on the first standoff, and from that point John was off and running, welding all four standoffs into the body.

After welding, John went around with a grinder and ground all the weld beads down.

Then he went back, welded over each one again, to try to make sure there was good weld penetration all the way around each one, then he went back with the grinder again.  After that, each one looked something like the picture below.

The body shop should be able to clean up what's left, smooth out and/or fill in any imperfections, and it should be good to go.  I'm a little bit worried that the body shop will present me with a list of all the reasons why this was a stupid idea and tell me I've ruined the car, but I really think it should be good to go.

The last thing I did was to wipe some used motor oil over the exposed sheet metal to prevent rust, and then put a cap screw in each one, just to see how it would look.  The next thing will be to make the straps that will run across the window.

I'm not going to make the straps, though, until the car is back from the body shop.  That's because I'm also a little worried that the body shop might want to, or need to, replace the panel at the base of the rear window, which would mean removing the panel with the two standoffs in it. If that's the case, we can always repeat this whole process again, but hopefully they'll be able to just repair any rust damage on that panel and use it as-is. We'll see how it goes.

Anyway, I did get some material to use for the straps.  Lowe's had some strips of aluminum that are perfect for the job.  They are six feet long, one inch wide, and a sixteenth of an inch thick.  I should be able to cut these to length, bend them to match the contour of the window, and put holes in them for the cap screw to go through.

 

I think I will also try to put a thin gasket under each end of the strap, to protect the paint under it, and maybe some kind of weatherstrip-type padding under the strap, to cushion it from slapping against the rear window if airflow ever gets under it or anything like that.

 

Anyway, me and John had finished all this before lunch on Saturday morning, and I already felt like I'd accomplished so much, I basically goofed off the rest of the weekend.

Hopefully my transmission will show up this week, then maybe I can do the drivetrain test fit next weekend.

scheming

The nice thing about a cart is, it's never too early to go ahead and get it out in front of the horse.  With that in mind, I started thinking about paint schemes for Matilda before I even bought her.  Now I'm close to being ready to send her to a body shop, but I still can't decide what paint scheme I want.

Soon after I bought Matilda, I decided to find a photo of a 1965 Impala that I liked, trace it off of my laptop screen, and then I made photocopies so that I could color them to try out different ideas.

When I first started thinking about it, I thought I wanted the car to be basically white, partly in tribute to Bertha, and partly to try to keep interior temperatures down in the hot Texas sun.  One of the early ideas I had was something like this:

 

The pattern of the stripes is a tribute to a really great old Matchbox car called the "White Lightning."  Somewhat coincidentally, the paint scheme of the White Lightning was modelled on the paint scheme of the Gatorade-sponsored Monte Carlos of the DiGard Racing team, which is the same team that Darrell Waltrip was driving for when he was driving the original Bertha, which my Bertha was named after.  I also built a pinewood derby car with a paint scheme inspired by the White Lightning, and it won a trophy.  Seems like these stripes are central to some kind of Unified Field Theory of my personal automotive history....

 

As for the red/orange rims, I just like the look of brightly colored rims on a race car, I guess.

 

But, I thought maybe the black stripes on the roof would defeat the purpose of the white car, as far as heat was concerned, so I also tried an inverted scheme:

Eventually, though, I started to think that the stripes were too flashy, and I thought I'd consider something simpler.  I love the look of a flat black hood, and it's functional, too, in that it prevents the sun from glaring off your hood when it gets low in the sky.  A simple white car with a flat black hood and red rims would look pretty good, I thought:

 

One of the more successful 1965 Impalas that raced in NASCAR was painted a light metallic purple color called "Evening Orchid."  I read somewhere else that this was considered a signature color for GM in the 1960s, to the point where a Ford driver who was unhappy about the lack of support that he was getting from Ford once decided to paint his Ford Evening Orchid just as a "screw you" to Ford.  Anyway, I like the idea that the cars were still so literally "stock" back then that they were actually run in factory colors, so I started looking through other colors that were available from the factory for 1965 Impalas.  One of my favorites is a very pale yellow called, "Goldwood Yellow":

 

A lot of people have told me that they don't much care for that color, but I like it.  It's almost a cream color, and I think it looks good.  This scheme would keep the flat black hood, but it's meant to have gloss black rims in this picture.

 

Some of the other factory colors that I liked were "Madeira Maroon," "Glacier Gray," "Cypress Green," and "Danube Blue."  I also discovered that Matilda was originally "Cameo Beige" when she left the factory.  The problem with anything Maroon down here is that everyone assumes you're an Aggie.  The Glacier Gray looks too silvery for me.  Cameo Beige isn't too far off from a cream color, either, but still ... beige ... kind of boring.

 

I really love Danube Blue.  It's a very deep blue, almost black, like the Chicago Bears' helmets.  I couldn't really recreate it on paper, but you can look it up with a Google Image search if you want to see it.  It's very tempting as a color option, but I just can't think of a color for the rims that I think would look good with it, I guess.

 

Finally, I was looking around online, and I found a photo of a 1965 Impala that Jim Paschal raced, and I thought it looked great.  I think it's black, although I'm not 100% sure that it isn't Danube Blue.  Anyay, it looks to me like it's black with one relatively narrow white stripe down the center, and red rims.  Based on that racing scheme, I drew up this potential scheme for Matilda:

This is definitely one of the frontrunners right now, and maybe my default choice.  The black goes against the original idea of trying to pick a light color to keep interior temperatures lower, but sometimes you have to give up comfort in the name of looking awesome.  And it's probably futile to try to keep temperatures down in Texas heat, anyway.

Yesterday I was thinking that some kind of medium-to-dark-gray with one black stripe down the center would also look good with red rims, though.  Seems like it's hard to find gray paints, though; they all seem to tend to look silver.

Anyway, those are some of the schemes that I've been considering so far.  I think the car will be ready to go to the body shop in the next couple weeks, though, so the time to make a decision is getting closer....

weekend blowout

This weekend I had a guest in from Austin on Friday night, until Saturday afternoon.  He helped me measure out the centerline of the back window, to get ready to measure for the placement of the blowout straps.

For people wondering what blowout straps are, it is a pair of straps that run over the back window to keep it from blowing out.  When a car is moving at high speeds with the side windows open, it can create a pressure difference across the back window which can potentially suck the back window right out.  Blowout straps are common to a lot of production-car-based race cars, and I just like the look of it.  I thought that it would be a good way to have a subtle design cue that would make the car look more like a race car, without having numbers and sponsors painted all over the car.

Similarly, at the front of the car I plan to have a pair of hoodpins put in.  These are pins to keep the hood from blowing open, another common feature of production-car-based race cars.  I know I could do the hoodpins myself, but right now the hood doesn't really latch right, so that will all have to be re-aligned by the body shop, and I figure it just makes more sense to have them do it before they paint the hood, rather than me doing it afterwards.

I think the mounting points for the blowout straps will be one of the most fun parts of the project, and I will document that in more detail when the time comes.

On Saturday, my guest helped me remove the driver door window and crank mechanism.  I'd been going back and forth on whether or not I wanted to mess with that, and by the time I was done removing it, I'd about decided that I wished I hadn't.  Guess I'll put it back together and let the body shop mess with it.  Pretty much every bolted connection in that assembly is slotted, so everything is adjustable, and I'd just rather let them adjust it, because I want to be sure that the windows will seal right, and they probably know how to do that better than I do.  Plus, I will have plenty of other things that I'd rather be working on while they do that.  Anyway, part of the reason for wanting to pull it out was just to learn how it goes together, so now I know that, I guess.

Aside from those minor accomplishments, I also cleaned up some stuff in the garage, and did an oil change on the Corvair.  Feels like I didn't get much done, but I will try to do some more work in the evenings this week.  Also waiting on the arrival of my transmission so I can test fit the drivetrain.

two stories about Edelbrock

Like I said a couple posts ago, Matilda's going to have Edelbrock cylinder heads, and the same Edelbrock intake manifold that was on Bertha, which I've cleaned up and painted the lettering.  I like Edelbrock a lot, and I have two stories about it.

There's a story about how Vic Edelbrock got started in the speed parts business.  Disclaimer:  I could look up the details of this story, but I'm going to just tell the story as I remember it. 

As I remember the story, Vic Edelbrock ran a service station in Southern California.  He was a hot rodder, and like a lot of other early speed parts manufacturers, he started out making parts for his own car.  Then, when his fellow racers saw he was successful, he started selling his parts in small quantities to people who asked for them.  But his main source of income was still his service station.

So, as I remember the story, the turning point for Edelbrock's business came when "Pete" Petersen (I can't remember his real first name, but everyone called him "Pete," as a shortened form of his last name) of Petersen Publishing was starting a new magazine called HOT ROD.  He sold some advertising space to Edelbrock in the early issues of HOT ROD.  When that first deal came to an end, Petersen called on Edelbrock to ask if he wanted to renew the advertisement.

"Well," Edelbrock answered, "I don't know ... I've been getting so many phone calls from people wanting to order parts from me, I barely have time to pump gas for customers anymore."

Petersen paused for a while before replying, "Well, Vic ... did you ever think that maybe you're not in the business of pumping gas anymore?"

Edelbrock renewed the advertisement and grew his business into one of the largest aftermarket speed parts suppliers in the nation.

In spite of their success, however, Edelbrock doesn't necessarily behave like a giant corporation, which brings me to my second story.

It took me a long time to find a job after college.  That was almost entirely my fault, as I hadn't made things easy on myself at all, but as the job search dragged on and on, I started to get more and more worried, and to be honest, I was becoming increasingly depressed about the situation.

Every day I was scanning CareerBuilder and Monster, although I almost never got any responses from replying to their ads.  I found that I had better luck (not great luck, or even good luck, but better luck...) from just sending out resumes and cover letters to companies I was interested in.

My search tended to go by themes.  Maybe one week I'd send out resumes to all the crane manufacturers I could think of.  Another week, maybe it would be generator manufacturers.  And so on.

One week, I thought, what the hell, let's shoot for the stars.  I sent out resumes and cover letters to a bunch of "dream jobs":  basically just every automotive aftermarket manufacturer I could think of.  I wrote to Holley, Comp Cams, Crane Cams, Crower Cams, JE Pistons, and of course, Edelbrock.  I'm sure there were others that I'm not thinking of right now, as well.

Well, I wasn't really expecting to hear back from any of them, just because I didn't hear back from the vast majority of companies I wrote to.  But, I actually did get two responses.

One of the camshaft manufacturers (Crane or Crower, but I can't remember which one) actually sent my resume back to me, which seemed like a strangely insulting gesture.

But, I also got a reply from Edelbrock.  It was actually a letter, written on Edelbrock letterhead, and I still have it.  It says:

Dear Mr. French:

Thank you for the resume and the interest in our company.  It appears you have prepared yourself well for a career in your chosen field.

We have a relatively small engineering staff and the good fortune to have a very small turnover rate.  The result is that we seldom have an opening on our staff.

At present, we do not have an opening and do not anticipate any in the near term.

We will keep your resume on file in case an unexpected opening should occur.

Again, thank you for the resume and interest in us.  We wish you the best of luck in your career.

And it was signed by the vice president of research and development.

Looking at it now, it looks like it's maybe a half a step above a form letter.  But at the time, after about a year's worth of being ignored and rejected, and by comparison to the camshaft manufacturer's response, I thought it looked almost like a love letter.

I appreciated that they'd responded at all, and the encouraging words and personal signature made me feel like Edelbrock really would consider me if they had an opening.  I took some encouragement from it, and it also boosted my opinion of Edelbrock quite a bit.

I'd always liked Edelbrock just because I'd see their sticker in among all the other contingency sponsors (the little stickers around the front wheel well) on all the NASCAR stock cars.  So after receiving this letter, I put Edelbrock among my favorite speed parts companies.

I'm not going to claim that I've bought everything from Edelbrock that I possibly could, but the most expensive items on the engine will be the cylinder heads, and those are coming from Edelbrock, and a big part of the reason for that is because I still appreciate them sending that letter.

if the mount fits...

I always feel like I didn't get enough done when the weekend is over, but there was some progress made.

The big thing was that on Saturday morning my buddy John helped me drop the engine block into Matilda to check if these 1965 Bel Air motor mounts were going to work.

This was just a check to see if the mounts would line up correctly with the frame mounts, so it was just the bare block and the mounts.  It occurred to me later that I should have put the oil pan on the block, just to make sure it wouldn't interfere with anything.

Everything seemed to line up well, though.  There's no guarantee that the frame mounts that are in there are the original ones from the factory, so I tried to check around online a little bit to see if I was supposed to have something else for a big block Impala.  But, it looks like these ones are correct, so that's good.

Even though it was just the bare block, it feels good to see the engine in the car.  We just pulled it right back out, though, and put it back on the stand.  It's supposed to take a couple weeks for my transmission to arrive, and then I'll be able to try fitting the engine block, bellhousing and transmission all together, to check that the transmission mount lines up right with the crossmember, and to see where the hole in the floor for the shifter is going to need to be.

I also painted some of my engine parts that I cleaned up over the past few weeks.  I got a plastic drop cloth from Harbor Freight, put it down in the garage, and sprayed the oil pan, the rocker covers and the timing cover (the fifth part in the picture is the timing mark indicator which bolts on with the timing cover).

I was looking at the bottom of the oil pan as I was painting it.  It's kind of scraped up and smashed in, so it seemed a little dumb to be putting so much effort into cleaning it up and painting it.  But it was already scraped up and smashed in when I bought Bertha, so I like that whenever I change Matilda's oil, I'll be seeing those same old scrapes and dents.

The rocker covers look great after paint, like shiny and new.  My first thought when I saw them was that they looked so nice and clean.  My second thought was, I can't wait til they're dirty again!

I also took a Brakleen cap and sprayed some of the Chevy Engine Orange into that cap, then took a paint brush and painted the "Edelbrock Performer 2-O" lettering on my intake manifold.

 

I had planned to start laying out where my rear window blowout strap mounting points would need to go, but once the garage floor was covered with wet painted parts and overspray, I decided to just stay out of the garage until I could move all that out of the way.

 

I started to work on measuring for where the blowout straps would go during the Super Bowl pregame this evening, but I quickly realized that I was going to need someone else to hold the other end of the tape measure, so I guess that will wait until I can get a little help with it.

 

I think the priorities for next weekend will be cleaning up some stuff around the garage, measuring for the blowout straps and hopefully getting started on making those modifications.

Trying to keep moving along....