field work

If you're ever looking to buy an old car, there may come a time when you're talking to a seller and it sounds like they say something along the lines of, "Yeah, the thing was just sitting in a field for a couple years before I found it."  And it will really sound like that's what they said.  But I promise you, that's not what they said.  What they actually said was, "Do not buy this car."

I've recently been considering the possibility of adding a pickup truck to my fleet.  I remember when I was in college, me and my buddy Allen reasoned out that you need at least three vehicles in your fleet:  one to drive, one as a long-term project, and one as a back-up in case your driver unexpectedly turns into a short-term project, or even a second long-term project.

On top of that, I've thought for a long time that there would be some obvious advantages to having a pickup truck.  Right now I have to borrow a friend's truck to do things like taking an engine block to the machine shop, or taking a differential to be rebuilt, etc.  So, because I like old things, and because I like Chevys, I've been looking at old Chevy pickups.  I'm especially taken with the 1961 model.  It's just so ... ugly.  It's hard to resist.

The hardest thing is trying to balance the need for a decent driver against my inner cheapskate and my penchant for what has become fashionably known as "patina."  I went to look at a 1961 out in Schertz a few weeks ago.  It looked real good in the pictures in the advertisement.  It was primered, but appeared to be solid, from what I could see in the pictures.  It also had a straight six, which I thought was cool.

When I showed up, I could immediately see that the truck was not what it looked like in the pictures.  I'm not sure if someone did a crap job of finishing their bondo repairs, or if it was just unrepaired rust bubbling up, or a little of both, but the body looked really bad under the new primer.  Judging from the overspray that I could see, it looked like the engine had been painted in the truck, which implied to me that nothing else had been done to the engine in a while.

I had lost interest before the owner even came out of the house, but I talked to him for a little while anyway.  He said at one point that the truck had been sitting in a field for a while before he acquired it.  He had described his asking price as "firm" in the ad, but as he realized that I wasn't interested, he started dropping it without me even bringing up the subject.  He knocked more than 10% off the asking price in two minutes of casual conversation.  "I want you to have this truck, man."  Not as bad as I want you to have it, sir.

I once looked at another vehicle that the seller said had been sitting in a field.  That was Matilda.  I bought her anyway.  You can see how that turned out in other posts here.  Learning as I go, I guess.  In addition to all the rust damage that had to be repaired on the body and floor pans, some of the bumper mounting brackets were pretty rusted up, and there were some parts of the frame that showed some rust damage, too.

Probably the worst part of the frame is the passenger side front corner, where there appears to be some rust damage, and where the vehicle appears to have also sustained damage from a wreck.  For example, there is a brace that runs diagonally from the frame rail to the front crossmember on that right front corner of the car.  There is a mounting hole that passes through both the frame and the brace, and I noticed a while ago that the two pieces of metal didn't sit flush against each other like they should at that hole.

You can sort of see the gap between the two pieces in this picture:

This recently became an issue when I tried to bolt up some of the aftermarket suspension stuff that I bought.  The stock strut rod is supposed to mount to the frame through that mounting hole, with a big rubber bushing that makes it a little more forgiving of the damage from the wreck.  The aftermarket strut rod that I got has a hard-mounted bracket with a swivel joint and no bushing to flex or wear out.  When I went to bolt that up, I noticed that the lock washer hadn't compressed even though the torque wrench had already clicked.  Then I remembered the damage I'd noticed before and realized that it was causing problems.

When I first noticed the damage, I was hoping that the process of bolting up the strut rod would compress the two pieces of metal together, but it didn't work out that way.  It looked like there was a lot of crud accumulated between the two pieces of metal, so they couldn't pull together even if they wanted to.  So, I stared at it for a while, and then my buddy John said why don't you just cut that brace out, clean out all that crud, and weld it back together.

Well, I wasn't real wild about the idea of cutting up my frame, but the more I thought about the problem, I eventually decided it was the right thing to do.  There were three welds at the crossmember and two long welds at the frame.  I studied it for quite a while and decided I could get at all of them well enough to do the job with a cutoff wheel on an angle grinder.

Here's a view of the brace running from the frame to the crossmember:

And here's a photo from after I cut it out:

And here's a close-up view of all the crud packed in there:

I'm still not sure what it was.  Some of it crumbled away like it was just dirt that had packed in there over time.  Other stuff was a lot harder to grind away, and even looked kind of shiny where I cut into it.  I know that the factory used lead filler in some of their body work, and I started to worry that maybe they used it in their frame, also.  I don't know.  I was almost done by the time that occurred to me, so I just finished up.  Then I went inside and looked up the symptoms for lead poisoning.  Hmmm ... irritability, decline in mental functioning, memory loss.  Well shoot, how am I supposed to know if I have that?  Sounds like just another day....

Anyway, here's a close-up photo from after I cleaned all the junk out of there:

Then I went back and ground away the powder coating to get it ready for welding back together.  The brace would sit nicely in place without anything holding it there, so here you can see how it was prepped for welding:

I figured the best thing to make sure that the strut rod would mount up properly would be to just use the strut rod to hold the pieces together during welding.  So I torqued up the strut rod, and then John came over with his welder and stuck it all together:

A photo from after the welding was finished:

Next thing was to paint it all.  I was planning to use POR-15 again, because it is supposed to give excellent protection from rust.  The heat from the welder looked like it had kind of burned the powder coat in some places, so I went through and ground off any powder coat that looked questionable.  There were some scratches in the powder coat around the middle of the crossmember, so I was planning to paint that, too.  I went over everything that I planned to paint with something like a 120 grit sandpaper, to scuff up the powder coat and give the paint a better surface to adhere to.

This picture is after paint prep:

This picture is from a similar angle to the first picture and shows that the two pieces of metal are now drawn up closer to each other:

And this photo is after paint:

I did four coats of POR-15 semi-gloss black.  On the inside where the two pieces of metal come together, I slopped a bunch of paint in there to try to coat and seal everything as best as I could.

Here's another photo showing how much better the two pieces of metal fit together now:

Not sure why the paint looks green-ish there, trick of the light or something, I guess.  Anyway, this whole deal was an unexpected setback, but I think it looks like a decent and effective repair.

It should be ready to bolt up the strut rod and the rest of the front suspension now.  I think I'm going to need the weight of the engine on the frame to be able to compress the front suspension springs, though, so now I'm working on getting the engine put together.  Pictures of that to come.

Mmmm ... sandwiches.

"OK ... let me tell you why you're a moron."

The guy at the machine shop didn't exactly say these words to me, but ... you could read it in his eyes.  I had just explained to him everything from the last two paragraphs of the previous post here, and I could tell that he was already mentally rejecting it faster than I could talk.  That was a little discouraging, but then he walked me back into the shop and explained to me how a smart person would do it.

I had tried to look around online about how to install a cam button and set cam endplay, and I didn't find anything that was much help, but the guy at the machine shop explained that what he does is to take an old cam button base, put some clay on it, the cam button base in place on the front of the cam, then assemble the timing cover over it, then disassemble and measure the clay to see what length cam button you need.  It's so simple, I felt like a moron for not thinking of it myself.  But he gave me some clay to use.  So that was nice.

Then he told me that I had the wrong timing set (although in this case "wrong" means "not what he prefers").  I had the gears that Comp sent me with the cam, but he said he doesn't like those, he likes to use a timing set with a Torrington roller bearing integrated into the cam timing gear.  So he ordered up one of those for me.

I ordered a disc brake conversion kit a while ago, and the kit requires the steering arms to be machined a bit for clearance, so while I was there I gave the guy the steering arms so he could machine them.

Fast forward to last Friday, I took the day off from work and went back to the machine shop to pick up my steering arms and my new timing set.  I also went and picked up my rebuilt rearend on the same day, and then, because of Labor Day, I had three days to put everything together.  Visions of a fully assembled suspension danced in my head.

Instead, I ended up spending three days painting stuff.  I wanted to paint the steering arms, and I wanted to paint my spindles, and I had to cut my aftermarket lower control arms a bit to clear my steering arms on my aftermarket spindles, so I painted the exposed metal where I cut the lower control arms.  It's a special paint called POR-15.  "POR" stands for "Paint Over Rust."  It is supposed to neutralize surface rust, and form a durable coat of paint to prevent future rust.  But they say to apply at least two coats and wait two hours between coats.  So if I do three coats, it takes four hours, which makes it a time consuming process.

I also worked on the frame a little bit.  The car seems to have been in a wreck on its right front corner some time in its past, and the bumper bracket mounting holes on that right front side of the frame were all bent out of shape.

The left side looks like this:

The right side looked like this:

You can see that the bolt holes are torqued out.

My best idea for how to fix it was just to make a steel plate sandwich that I could assemble around the frame, and flatten the frame wall by torqueing the sandwich together.

So first I went to the home improvement store and I bought a piece of steel, 3/16" thick, and four inches wide.

Then I cut out a cardboard template of a shape that would fit on the inside of the frame rail:

Then I traced the template on to my piece of steel, and I cut off that shape using an angle grinder and a cutoff wheel:

I actually made both sides of the sandwich this shape, even though I realized later that it would have been easier and better to just make the outboard side an oversized rectangle.

Then I held the inboard piece in place and marked the centers of the deformity on the bolt holes.  I center-punched the marks to get ready for drilling:

I drilled one piece, used those holes to mark centers for the holes on the other piece, then drilled that piece:

I took some Grade 8 hardware and assembled the two pieces of steel on either side of the deformed bolt holes.  I forgot to get pictures of that, but I think you can probably imagine.  I torqued the bolts down as tight as I could, and then I hit them with a cordless impact wrench, too.  By the time I was done with that, the plates had drawn the frame pretty flat, but the bolts seemed to have galled, so I cut the heads off the bolts to get the sandwich apart.  At that point, I had this:

That was pretty good, but I thought it could be a little better, so I just took a hammer and started pounding down any high spots that were left.  By the time I was done with that, I had knocked off some of the powder coat, but the frame was pretty flat, at least:

The next step was to paint over the area, to cover where I'd knocked off the powder coat.  I used more POR-15, which I had in a semi-gloss black, so it doesn't quite match the flat black powder coat.  Good thing my priority is functionality over appearance:

From a little bit different angle:

I also did get around to measuring for my cam button.  I didn't have an old button to use as a base, so I bolted the cam gear on to the cam, and then I packed some aluminum foil into the cam button hole, to form a base.  Then I stuck the clay on top of the aluminum foil base.  Then I bolted on the timing cover over the clay, but when I went to remove the timing cover, the clay wanted to stick to it.  So, I got another piece of aluminum foil, flattened it, and stuck it to the timing cover side of the clay.  Then I had a clay sandwich on aluminum foil:

That arrangement seems to work pretty well.  I've gone through the assembly-and-disassembly process several times over the course of a few days, and I feel pretty good now about the measurements I got.

While bolting up some of the front suspension stuff, I found some other crash damage on the frame, which I'm going to attempt to repair, as well.  I am supposed to get a delivery of some parts today or tomorrow, at which time I'll be able to put the rear end up under the back of the car and get the rear suspension put together.  That will be exciting, as I think it will be the first time that I start to feel like things are actually going back together.  On the other hand, that's not the first time I've thought that, so I might just discover more problems, instead, but ... we'll see....