shop truck

There have been many times when I haven't updated this blog because I was getting things done on Matilda, but I was too lazy (or too busy, but most likely too lazy) to write an update.  These past few months, however, I simply haven't been getting anything done on Matilda.  I had gotten to a point where I thought that I was almost ready to send the chassis back to the body shop, and I figured I'd catch up on the blog once the chassis was out of my garage.  But, one of the last things I did before I thought I was going to be ready was to put oil in the rear end.  A couple days after I'd done that, I noticed a puddle on the floor under the rear end, and then I saw this:

That is a photo of the front of the differential, with the front of the car towards the right side of the photo, and the rear of the car towards the left.  The gold-colored piece in the middle of the photo is the pinion seal.  At the top of the seal, you can see a gap between the seal lip and the housing.  And at the bottom, you can see that gap is filled by differential oil, which is slowly leaking onto the garage floor.

I had taken the rear end to a local shop to be rebuilt, because you need a press to put the rear end together, and even then there is some guess-and-check that might require disassembly and reassembly and so on, requiring a press each time.  I don't have a press, and I also thought it would save some time if I had a shop rebuild the rear end while I rebuilt the engine, so I took it to a shop.

Having paid someone to do the job and then finding it leaking was aggravating, and I decided it was going back to that shop for them to fix it.  I'd originally borrowed a friend's truck to take the rear end to the shop and to pick it up, but by the time I found the leak, that truck was "out of commission," awaiting driveshaft U-joint replacement.

I had, however, bought a truck in January.  I've been feeling for a while now that the Corvair was on its last legs, and it doesn't seem to respond to investments of time, effort and money, so I started looking for a replacement.  A truck seemed like a handy thing to have, so I started searching Craigslist.

I looked at a lot of different Chevy trucks, but ended up settling on the mid-'60s Chevy C10s, and for whatever reason I thought I'd like to have a straight six.  I test drove a '64 that had a new clutch in it, and the clutch pedal was at a very awkward angle, which was compounded by an awkward bucket seat that the owner had installed.  When I got out of the truck, I about fell on my face just because my leg felt so weak from working that heavy clutch at that uncomfortable angle.  When I got in the Corvair and pushed in the clutch, I thought the clutch cable had broken, just because it went to the floor so easily after working the heavy clutch in the truck.  It took several miles to get used to it again.  At that point I thought maybe I'd look for a truck with an automatic transmission, just because I know the Impala will have a manual transmission, and I thought maybe I didn't want more than one clutch pedal feel to keep track of.  But, the automatic transmission is a nice thing to have for a variety of other reasons, too.

Anyway, it seems that the overwhelming majority of (if not all) straight sixes came with manual transmissions from the factory, so when I saw a 1965 C10 with an automatic, it got my attention.  Turned out that a previous owner had replaced the original manual three-speed with a TH350 automatic.  Someone had also installed a nice front disc brake conversion kit, another plus.  The truck needed headlights and taillights and some other items, but seemed to drive around the block OK.  For better or for worse, we struck a deal.

I named her "Clementine."

When I bought her, I thought she just needed "a few small things" to put her on the road, and I thought I'd be driving it in February.  Well, it was May when I found the leak from the differential, and Clementine was still not on the road.  I had been working on her pretty steadily, but the more I got into it, the more things I discovered she needed.

For starters, I tried to drive her home, with my buddy following me closely in another car, since the truck had no taillights, but just as I was about to get on the interstate, the truck started to sputter a bit.  I quickly changed tack and started moving from the left lane over to the right lane.  Also known as ... "the breakdown lane."  I ended up in the parking lot of a Harley-Davidson dealership, and the truck was idling fine there.  It drove around the parking lot fine.  But, as soon as I started to drive out of the lot and back on to the road, it started to sputter again.  I pulled into a McDonald's parking lot, and wound my way back to the lot behind the Harley dealership.

We noticed a bunch of rust particles in the inline fuel filter, and our best guess was that fuel tank must be full of rust, and had plugged the filter.  We went to the parts store, picked up another filter, and hoped that would be enough to get the truck home.  But, Clementine still didn't want to go.  So, I decided to leave the truck over night at the Harley dealership, and come back in the morning to try again.  The next day I drained everything out of the gas tank, and replaced the inline filter again.  My buddy came out to try and help again, and play chase car, and we tried to make the drive to my house after putting in clean gas.  This time we made it maybe another mile up the road before the truck started to sputter again.

We pulled into a movie theater lot, and again the truck idled OK, but didn't want to go at all with any kind of significant acceleration or load.  We tried playing with the timing, but without any significant effect.  Finally I decided to just get the truck towed to my house.

When I bought the truck, a lot of people told me that I should finish one project before I start another.  I'll file that under "Great Advice I'll Give, Not Take," as they say on the editor's page of Hot Rod Magazine.  It's an idea that makes sense, but the two projects (Clementine and Matilda) actually dovetailed pretty nicely, to where I could work on one while I was waiting on parts for the other, and vice versa.

The very first thing I did was to put a couple headlights in, just to make it look a little nicer for the neighbors.

I also knew now that I was going to rebuild the entire fuel system, and that I had a lot of wiring to do, as there were no wires running to the taillights, and the wiring to the headlights didn't seem to work.  As I got into the wiring, I decided that the job looked simple enough that I would just re-wire the entire truck.  The distributor in the truck looked to be an HEI piece out of a junkyard.  It didn't look good to me, in terms of aesthetics, and also in terms of the wiring looking old and cracked, and the whole thing looking very much like it came out of a junkyard.  It also had a large cap that interfered with access to the number one spark plug.  For all these reasons, I decided to replace it with a Pertronix distributor that looks stock, but comes with a transistorized ignition instead of points.

I started the fuel system rebuild by replacing the tank.  The gas that came out of the tank looked like a cloudy brown cider, and the tank had chunks of rust rattling around in it.  That was somewhat encouraging, in terms of feeling like I was on the right track.  I also bent up all new hard lines to run from the tank to the carburetor, and got a rebuilt fuel pump to replace the unit on the engine.

Of course, I also rebuilt the carburetor.  The carb is an interesting little one-barrel Rochester B.  I bought a rebuild kit, but then I found that a previous rebuilder had screwed up a couple parts that weren't included in the kit.  I got the kit from Carburetors Unlimited, and the other parts I needed from Mike's Carburetor Parts.

The fuel inlet to the carburetor looked like this:

All that brown stuff on the "floor" of the fuel inlet there is a pile of rust particles that made it through the filters and screen and settled out in the carburetor.  Not a good thing, and ugly to look at, but encouraging in terms of telling me that I've found the problem and I'm on the right track to fix it.

This picture shows the engine bay as it looked when I got the truck:

The carburetor is removed there, but you can see that there is a lot of rubber hose running around the engine for fuel lines, vacuum lines, PCV lines, etc.  As long as I was running hard lines for the fuel system, I decided to replace as many of those rubber hoses as possible with hard lines.

Here is a photo of the engine bay now:

You can see the difference in the two distributors there, and you can see that some of the wiring over towards the left side of the photo has been cleaned up a bit.  You can also see that I painted the "Chevrolet" script on the rocker cover.  I thought that would probably be important, uh ... in order to pass the Texas state inspection, let's say.

I had started out ordering parts from LMC, because a lot of people had told me that they were a good source for old truck parts.  My experience with them was not great, though.  I ordered one part from them that was backordered.  Eventually I called to ask when I might expect to see it.  The person on the phone said they didn't know.  I asked if they could find someone who did know, they said no, nobody knew.  I asked if they could find out and get back to me, they said no, but if a certain amount of time went by and they still hadn't received it, they would let me know and check if I wanted to cancel the order.  I asked what the "certain amount of time" was, they said they didn't know.  Awesome.  Another issue was that when I started re-wiring the truck, there were a lot of wiring harnesses that LMC didn't even offer, let alone stock.  I was going to try to rebuild the harnesses I had, but this was looking like a major undertaking, so I tried one more internet search for old C10 wiring harnesses, and I somehow stumbled on to Classic Parts of America.  They had every harness I needed, including ones that LMC had backordered, and ones that LMC didn't even offer.  What's more, Classic Parts had them all in stock, and the ones that were backordered at LMC were half the price at Classic Parts.  Classic Parts only does parts for Chevys and GMCs, so I think that's why they are able to stock more stuff than LMC does, but either way, I was sold.  Anything I needed, I ordered everything I could from Classic Parts for the rest of the project.  There was also one incident, while I was trying to piece together a working parking brake arrangement, where I had ordered the rear parking brake cables from LMC, and I really didn't like the design of the parts.  There was a groove in the part that was supposed to take a retainer clip, but the groove had a rounded cross section to it, so that as you pulled on the cable it would just pop the clip out of the groove and come apart.  I had ordered 1965-style cables originally, but eventually decided the 1966 cables might work better for my arrangement, so I ordered those from Classic Parts.  The retainer clip grooves on those had square cross sections, so the clips actually stayed in place and did their job.  If other people have had good luck with LMC, that's good for them, but I strongly recommend Classic Parts of America, based on my experience.

So anyway ...

That's a photo of a spider which had built a web from the rear axle housing to the tire on the truck.  Maybe an indication that the project was dragging on a bit.  This might have been taken around the time that I found the leak on the Impala rear end.  At this point I was pretty much out of things to do on the Impala, and started focusing just on Clementine, to get her running so I could take the rear end to get repaired.

I left the truck in front of the house while I did the fuel system and the wiring.  I also put a new wood bed in (the truck had some junk wood held in place with wood screws when I got it), and I put carpet in the cab, new rubber seals around the doors, installed rearview mirrors in the cab and on the driver's door, and a variety of other items.  I also went through the suspension and replaced all four springs.  That was partly because the truck had a bit of a "lean" to it, and partly because it had been lowered to the point where the left front tire would rub the wheel well when turning to the right.  So I put four new springs under it, which lifted it up a little bit, and then I ended up mixing and matching the rear springs I had to get rid of the lean.  Not sure if the frame is twisted, or what, but it sits level now, at least.

When I was done with all that, I finally put gas in the tank and started the truck up again.  It drove around the neighborhood pretty well, but once it was up to temperature, I remembered one other symptom it had shown on the original attempts to drive it home:  it sounded like the fuel was boiling in the carburetor.

Whenever the engine was shut off after being brought up to operating temperature, there would be a bubbling sound from around the base of the carburetor.  I couldn't think of anything else it might be, so I thought maybe the fuel was boiling in the carburetor.  The exhaust manifold has an integrated heat riser valve which is supposed to divert exhaust gas to the bottom of the intake manifold when the engine is cold, which will heat the carb and help vaporize the fuel until the engine warms up.  That valve was frozen in one position, and I thought it might be allowing the exhaust to heat the carburetor to the point of boiling the fuel.  The valve was absolutely locked up and I couldn't get it to move, so I decided to replace the exhaust manifold with a new one, with a working valve.

I moved the truck into the garage, now that it was drivable, and started removing the intake and exhaust manifolds.  I noticed, though, a small puddle of water on the garage floor, under the engine, and once the manifolds were off, I realized that one of the freeze plugs in the side of the head was leaking.  In the photo below, you can see a brown rust streak running down the side of the engine from that freeze plug (the freeze plug itself is already removed in the photo):

The gasket for the intake and exhaust manifolds covers up that freeze plug, which is why I couldn't see the leak prior to disassembly, but I believe now that the bubbling sound was actually the sound of coolant bubbling out of the pinhole leaks in that freeze plug.  So, I replaced all three plugs in the side of the head, the three plugs down the side of the block, and the exhaust manifold, and put everything back together.

Also while it was in the garage, a buddy helped me replace the windshield, which was cracked.  This was not easy, but it's very satisfying to have a nice, new, clear and crack-free windshield in the truck.

At this point, the truck was running and driving pretty good, and I took it to get an alignment.  But then I discovered that the brake pedal was not fully returning.  It would hang up just a little bit short of fully returned, and it would actually hold pressure on the brakes, so that they were dragging a little bit.  So, I started tearing into the brake system trying to figure out what the issue was.  I had read where one person said this could be due to mixing DOT 3 brake fluid with DOT 5.  I read in another place where someone said it could be due to mixing conventional brake fluid with synthetic.  I read in another place where someone said it could be due to a bad vacuum booster.  I read in another place where someone said it could be due to a missing/weak pedal return spring.  Or booster return spring.  Or master cylinder return spring.  Etc.  I didn't really find anything, though, that sounded like it made sense and the person knew what they were talking about.  All the return springs seemed to be present and functional.  I had no idea what kind of brake fluid was in the system, but I had topped it off with conventional DOT 3, so it was possible I'd mixed something.  Not sure that theory makes sense to me, though.

Anyway, I started to tear into the system, looking for possible causes.  I never found a smoking gun, but I found a couple places where linkages might be binding, so I clearanced those areas, and I bled the brakes enough to purge the system of whatever brake fluid was in there.  I ended up using synthetic DOT 3, because it seems to be a lot easier to find than conventional, for some reason.  Or at least it was at the stores I went to.  In the end, when it was all back together, the pedal hung up one more time, but I decided to just drive it a while and see what happened, and it hasn't bothered since.

The last major hurdle had to do with some "customization" that a previous owner had started.  Someone had put a fill panel in place of the rear bumper, with cutouts to mount late model Cadillac taillights sideways, and then they had also welded the tailgate shut.  I had cut out the fill panel and mounted a reproduction bumper while the truck was in front of the house, but I still needed to cut out the welded tailgate.

I pulled the truck back around in front of the house, so that I wouldn't fill the garage with bondo dust, and I cut the tailgate out with an angle grinder.  It only took a couple hours at a casual pace, which was a lot better than I was worried it might be.  I pulled the truck back into the garage then and mounted the new reproduction tailgate.  For some reason, I really thought I'd like the look of a black tailgate on a white truck, so when the reproduction tailgate showed up black, that was perfect.

The next problem was that it looked like the guy who did the customizing had cut off the bolts for the tailgate chains and welded/bondo'd over them.  I ended up just measuring out about where they should be (and you could kind of barely see their outlines a little bit, too) and then drilling and tapping right through the endcaps of the bed.  That worked out pretty well.

The "CHEVROLET" lettering is actually vinyl stickers.  The tailgate is stamped with those letters in it and the lettering is normally painted, but Classic Parts of America had those vinyl letters for seven dollars.  Seven dollars sounded like a bargain for avoiding the hassle of masking and painting the letters, and they look great, too.  Everyone is surprised when they find out that they're decals.

So, once all that was done, I took the truck to get it inspected, got it registered on a Friday, and loaded Matilda's rear end on Sunday night to take it to the differential shop on Monday morning.  Using the engine hoist to load the rear end into the truck is a lot of fun, it really makes you feel like you're doing some work.

In the photo below, you can see a bit of the new wood bed:

I took the rear end in to the shop on Monday morning, and they fixed the leak while I waited.  I think the main problem was that the seal that was in there was not installed to the right depth, it was hanging out a bit.  That problem was compounded by a few gouges in the bottom of the bore around the pinion, where the seal was supposed to seal.  The guy put some RTV in the bore to help seal those gouges.  The rear end is now back up under Matilda, full of oil, and does not appear to be leaking.  I should be very close to being ready to send the chassis back to the body shop.

Clementine is still running well so far, and has become my daily driver to work.