blather, wince, repeat

Someone once said, "If you want something done right, do it yourself."  This is a thing that people often say.  What a stupid thing to say, folks.  I'm here to tell you right now, if you want something done right, you should not do it yourself.  What you should do is, you should find someone who knows how to do it right, and cares about it getting done right, and then get them to do it.  Of course, the catch here is that it is difficult to determine if a person knows how to do something right, and it is exceptionally difficult to judge whether they care about it getting done right.  On top of that, "get them to do it" almost always means an exchange of money, which will pretty much never be in your favor.

Someone else once said, "Makin' your way in the world today takes everything you've got."  Boy, now there's some legitimate wisdom.  Life is hard, folks.  Let's face it.  There will be some jokers who will try to tell you that life is easy, and you're just making it harder than it has to be, and you'll want to believe that, but come on.  Come on.  Seriously, jokers, come on.  Even if you've got an easy life, and no business complaining, life is still going to be hard.

Modern mobile America is going to continually place demands on you.  This isn't easy living, like how the frontierspeople had it.  If you were living on the frontier in the 1800s, life would be so easy.  You'd get up and milk the cow, because, hey, it's the cow, and it needs to be milked, especially if you want milk later.  Who else is going to milk that cow?  The genius at the Apple store?  News flash, it's the frontier, in the 1800s, there is no Apple store.  Oh, I bet you think maybe a bear will milk the cow.  Well guess what, you just had to shoot the bear, because the bear wanted to eat you, or at the very least, you once heard a story about a bear eating a person, and you're not going to chance it.  And also because you want a new rug.  So milk that cow, because you've still got to get started on making that rug.  Who else is going to make the rug?  The cow?  (To be honest, the bear has already done the lion's share of the work on making the rug.  Or at least the bear's share.  Well, very literally the bear's share, actually.  All you really need to do is cut away all the stuff that isn't a rug, and then ... uh ... well, there's probably some other steps, I don't know, Google it.)  Anyway, the point is, you haven't got anything better to do besides milking the cow, and you're never going to regret killing that bear.  These decisions make themselves.  Those frontierspeople just didn't know how easy they had it back then.

Modern mobile American life is hard.  You can drive yourself crazy just thinking about all the decisions you've made in a day.  Should you have eaten dinner at home instead of going out?  Should you have skipped that stupid lunch-and-learn?  Should you have spent time practicing drawing instead of reading that book?  Is it unethical to refer to binge-watching Netflix as "reading that book"?  Should you have become a helicopter pilot?  Should you start your own t-shirt company?  What if you hadn't broken up with that one person you were dating that one time?  What about that great idea for a novel you had that other one time, how come you never worked on that?  And that's just the decisions you've already made, that doesn't even begin to touch on all the decisions you still have to make in the present and the future.  Work stuff happens, relationships end, people move away, family stuff happens, you move away from people, the government wants you to do things, the future keeps flying right into your face all the time, other stuff happens.  These are all challenges, every day.  So don't let anyone take that away from you; celebrate what you've accomplished.  We're all just doing the best we can out here.

Anyway, what's all that got to do with anything?  Life is hard, and stuff needs to get done, and there's stuff we want to get done, and people who know how to do it want money to do it, but we can take satisfaction in the things we do ourselves, anyway.  So where does that leave us?

Well, somehow, it leaves me with the better part of a 1965 Super Sport Impala in the garage.  Which means many things.  Sometimes it means a reason not to quit my job.  Sometimes it's a thing to make future plans around, whether it's daydreaming about how to finish it, or daydreaming about a bigger garage to work on it in, or daydreaming about taking it to track days in the future.  When I fall asleep on the couch after dinner and then wake up and wander out to the garage, pick up some parts and start messing around with assembling something or installing something or test fitting something or painting something, it means something like a refuge from all those things that make modern mobile American life hard.  Kind of like Chewbacca tinkering with putting C-3PO back together to take his mind off his troubles while locked up in Cloud City, high above Bespin.

But it also means a massive job to get done, which can feel overwhelming, for sure.  Like that time in the garbage masher on the Death Star when Han Solo says, "I got a bad feeling about this."  Or that time inside the space slug on the asteroid in The Empire Strikes Back when Princess Leia says, "I have a bad feeling about this."  Or that time in Jabba's Palace in Return of the Jedi when C-3PO says, "I have a bad feeling about this."

A couple weekends ago, a buddy came down to help me try to bleed the brakes and the hydraulic clutch.  When I got the car back from the body shop, one of the things I decided to work on first was mounting the hydraulic clutch master cylinder, because I thought that would be one of the last major things that would require a lot of cutting and fabricating and modifying and customizing, so I figured it would be easier to do that before a bunch of other stuff was in the engine bay, and I figured I'd get it out of the way before the "easy" stuff.  So it felt like progress to have the master cylinder mounted, a reservoir mounted, all the lines connected, etc., etc.  But when I filled the reservoir, I don't think we even put pressure on the system before it started leaking.  Fortunately, the hydraulic clutch uses brake fluid, which is easy to clean up, doesn't damage paint, and feels really good on your skin (if you don't know anything about brake fluid, everything about that statement is the opposite of true).

Times like that can be very discouraging.  You think about everything that needs to be done on the car, and that's daunting enough.  When you find out that things you thought were done need to be re-done, that is worse.  When you start thinking about all the other things that you think are done which you may just not yet realize that they need to be re-done, that is even worse still.  And when you get around to thinking about all the things that you haven't even done the first time yet, let alone realizing in the future that they need to be re-done, that can quickly become pretty soul-crushing.  The project can really start to feel unachievable.

But, I try to regroup, refocus, rethink, and press on.  I try to do that.  Instead, though, I usually just wallow in my own misery until I get distracted by something shiny for long enough to forget about all that.  With any luck, the shiny thing will be a car part, and then I can focus on that one tiny part of the total project and try not to think about every thing that's going, has gone, or will eventually go horribly wrong.

Anyway, details on the hydraulic clutch deal, and other stuff that's been done since the last entry, follow below....

Lurking in the garage like a monster under the bed....

When I first got the chassis back to the body shop, one thing I started working on was the dashboard.  I've mentioned in earlier posts that I was planning to customize it with aftermarket gauges, and I still had the plastic insert that installs into the metal dash, so it was something I could work on while they had the body and chassis.

I thought I had more in-progress photos, but if I do, I can't find them.  So the photo below shows the parts as they are today, disassembled.

The black piece is the plastic insert.  The large rectangular opening on the left would be taken up almost completely by the speedometer in the stock arrangement, so I decided that I could probably make better use of that space if I did something else with it.  The smaller rectangular opening on the right is where the radio would go in the stock arrangement.  The round pod on the left side housed some small factory gauges, and the pod on the right side had one giant manifold vacuum gauge.

I started by carefully trimming a piece of cardboard to fill the space between the circular pods.  This would cover up both rectangular openings, and it was rounded on the left and right ends, to conform to the shape of the pods.  You might not notice at a glance, but the right side pod is actually larger than the left side pod, and the whole plastic insert tapers slightly from right to left.  So the fill panel is not just a simple rectangle.

The piece of sheet metal I had to work with was not quite wide enough to match the full width of the cardboard template.  It was about wide enough to fit between the two pods, but not wide enough to curve around them and fill the corners they create.  As a result, I decided to make one large (roughly) rectangular piece to fill the space between the pods, and then two smaller pieces to fill those corners.  I tried to make those pieces symmetric, just for aesthetics.  This way they kind of frame the space where the gauges will mount.  I cut everything with a cutoff wheel on an angle grinder.

The next problem is how to mount those parts to the dash.  One thing to keep in mind was that I needed to be able to mount the plastic insert into the dash before the metal fill panel went in place.  The plastic insert kind of slants away from the driver, and it just mounted lenses in front of the stock gauges.  So if you mount your gauges to the surface that the lenses mounted to, your gauges would be angled up towards the ceiling.  To put my fill panel at the angle I wanted, I needed to space it off the plastic at the top.  To get the geometry I wanted, I ended up using coupling nuts as standoffs.  By cutting them to the proper lengths and angles, they could be made to fill the gap between the fill panel and the plastic insert, and to provide a threaded hole that the panel could be bolted to.

Each coupling nut is bolted to the plastic insert from the back.  The standoffs fit a little bit loose, so they can flop around a little bit.  This would make it difficult to bolt the fill panel in place, with the bolt holes flopping around, so I used JB Weld "SteelStik" to help secure them.  SteelStik is a two-part epoxy that has the consistency of clay until it cures.  So you can shape it how you want it before it hardens up.  I used it around the base of each standoff, and then I used it around the end of each standoff, just to position the bolt holes where they needed to be.  The photos below show some details of the standoffs, from the front and from the back.

Is this garbage?  Essentially, yes.  Will it most likely break after it's installed in the car?  Probably, but then you're assuming that it doesn't break before it's installed in the car.  Am I just going to install it anyway, with a song in my soul and hope in my heart?  That is the plan as of now, yes.

There are six standoffs in total, and they allow the fill panel to be secured in place with six 1/4-20 button head screws.

After I had the fill panel pieces cut out, and the standoff arrangement finished, I measured the diameters of my gauges, and cut out cardboard circles in those same sizes.  These would allow me to lay out an arrangement of "gauges" on the fill panel, to see how it would look in the dash and decide how to use that space.

I ended up deciding on the layout shown above.  From left to right, it's fuel level, tachometer (centered over the steering column), speedometer, water temperature, oil pressure, voltmeter.  The cardboard circles were sized to match the outer diameter of the gauge bezels, so the holes I needed to cut would actually have to be a little bit smaller than the cardboard circles.  Because I had used a compass to draw the circles on the cardboard, the compass point had left a mark in the center of each cardboard circle.  So I use that center mark as a reference and used a spring-loaded center punch to transfer those centers to the metal, through the cardboard.  Then I measured the outer diameter of the gauge bodies, then drew circles of those diameters, centered on the punch marks.

I cut out the holes for the gauges using a cutoff wheel on a Dremel.  It would probably be smarter to use a hole saw, but I've often had bad luck with hole saws walking on me, and I already had enough time in the panel that I didn't want to foul it up.  So I just took my time and carefully cut the holes with the Dremel.  After all that, you can see a test-fit of the dash insert, cut for gauges.

You might notice three small holes around the tachometer hole.  The two small ones at the bottom will take indicators for the turn signals, and the one small hole at the top will take an indicator for the high beams.  I have plans to make use of the circular pods at the left and right ends of the insert, but that stuff's not ready to show yet.


So, moving on from the dashboard ... as I mentioned above, after I got the body and chassis back from the body shop, I decided that maybe one of the first things I should do would be to get the master cylinder for the hydraulic clutch conversion mounted.  I couldn't find any hydraulic clutch kit for the '65 Impala, so I ordered a "universal" kit from McLeod.  Any automotive hobbyist knows (or will soon find out) that "universal" means "doesn't fit anything."  So I was expecting quite a bit of modification to be required, and I figured I might as well get that out of the way sooner than later.

I started by trying to figure out how to mount the master cylinder for the clutch to the firewall.  There isn't a whole lot of "open" space on the firewall in that area, so I decided to mount it at the hole that was already in the firewall for the stock, mechanical clutch linkage.  The stock arrangement has a steel ring that screws to the firewall around that hole and retains a rubber boot, to seal around the mechanical linkage.  That ring is shown below.

To use that feature, I decided to make my own replacement for that ring, which would sandwich between the master cylinder and the firewall.  I traced the stock ring onto a piece of paper, then traced the master cylinder mounting ears over that same pattern, and used that to create a template for a part that would fill the space of the ring, and fit around the master cylinder.

Because operating the master cylinder would be essentially trying to push the master cylinder off the firewall from inside the car, I decided to also make a heavy washer plate to go on the inside of the firewall.  I wasn't sure how much force would be put on the master cylinder mounting bolts as a result of operating the clutch, and I wasn't sure how ready the firewall would be to take that load, but I decided that a heavy washer plate would be less likely to pull through the the firewall than just the bolts would be.  So, I also made a paper template for the washer plate, to make sure that it would clear some of the features on the inside of the firewall.

The template for the washer plate is on the left, the template for the mounting ring is on the right:

Here are the parts, cut out of steel:

That allowed me to mount the master cylinder to the firewall, and then I connected the master cylinder's pushrod to the clutch pedal.  Unfortunately, I hadn't really thought the whole arrangement through very well.  The master cylinder that came in the universal hydraulic clutch kit was made to mount with its stroke perpendicular to the firewall.  This meant that the pushrod extended to about the midpoint of the clutch pedal, which meant that there was only an inch or two of pedal travel, and also only about a 2:1 pedal ratio.  This would mean that it would probably take a lot more force to push the clutch pedal down than what it should take with a higher pedal ratio.  Checking the instructions that came with the hydraulic clutch kit (always best to do that well after you've started cutting and modifying), I saw that they recommend a pedal ratio around 6:1, which would require connecting the pushrod much closer to the pedal pivot point.

I started looking for ways to mount the master cylinder at an angle to the firewall, to angle its pushrod up towards the location where the stock, mechanical clutch linkage would have connected to the clutch pedal.  I had a couple of ideas for how to do that, but didn't really love any of them.  Then, while looking around on McLeod's website, I found that they have a hydraulic clutch conversion kit which is intended for first generation Camaros and third generation Novas, but it featured a master cylinder that is made to be mounted at about a 45-degree angle to the firewall.  Even though this kit would still require a lot of modification to adapt to my car, I decided that it would require less work than adapting the master cylinder I had.  The photo below shows the master cylinder that came with the universal kit (bottom), as compared with the master cylinder that came with the Camaro/Nova kit (top).

The bolt pattern on the new master cylinder was a little different from the bolt pattern on the first master cylinder, so I made two new plates for the mounting arrangement.  They are shown below, after being painted black with POR-15.

The master cylinders in these kits are made to take a plastic fluid reservoir mounted directly on the master cylinder, or to use a plastic reservoir mounted remotely on the firewall.  A big part of my approach to this project is based on aesthetics, and I like for things to look like they could be "period correct" for a 1960s era race car.  So, I don't like the look of plastic parts because they don't look "right" to me.  I suppose the hydraulic clutch conversion as a general concept is not period correct for a 1960s era race car, but I guess I can live with it as long as there isn't a plastic reservoir under the hood.  Anyway, I started looking for some kind of metal reservoir to use for the clutch.  My original plan was to use the cast iron single-reservoir brake master cylinder that was in the car when I bought it, and adapt it for use as a clutch reservoir.  As I got further down that road, though, it became apparent that there just wasn't going to be room to mount that reservoir on the firewall in a place where it could serve its purpose.  Eventually I checked on Summit for reservoirs and found a really trick aluminum piece from Canton Racing which looked like it would do the job.  It's beautifully made and probably looks too pretty to be found on a race car, really, but I find it preferable to the plastic ones.

So, the photo below shows the reservoir mounted to the firewall, the disc brake master cylinder and vacuum booster mounted to the firewall, and the hydraulic clutch master cylinder mounted just below the brake booster.  

There is a hardline that runs from the bottom of the reservoir, under the brake booster, and over to the top of the clutch master cylinder.

Looking from inside the car, the photo below shows the heavy washer plate reinforcing the firewall, and the pushrod from the clutch master cylinder running up out of the frame, towards the clutch pedal.

To make the connection at the clutch pedal, initially I just made a hole in the pedal arm and attached the pushrod end there.  I then discovered, however, that with the pushrod attached here, there was not sufficient pushrod travel to get a full stroke from the clutch master cylinder.  The kit instructions say to make sure you have "at least" one inch of stroke, which is pretty much the full stroke of the cylinder.  After thinking about it some more, I realized that, in order to get maximum stroke from the master cylinder, the pushrod should be tangential to the arc traced by its mounting point on the pedal arm.  In order to move the mounting point closer to that tangential position, I made a mounting block, shown in the photo below.

The bolt holding it to the pedal is in the hole that I drilled for the original pushrod mounting location.  The extension that is painted black is part of the stock pedal geometry.  I cut my block to fit very closely to that extension so that I could attach it with one bolt.  It is braced against the stock extension so that it won't rotate around the single bolt that secures it.

After that modification, the pedal travel was still not sufficient to get a full stroke from the master cylinder.  I cut another block, moving the mounting hole further from the pedal pivot, shown below.

With this block, I was finally able to get a full stroke from the master cylinder, but now the pedal only went about halfway to the floor.  And it might turn out that that's what I want, but intuitively, I feel like I probably want a longer pedal stroke than that.  So, I made a new hole in the original block, based on what I'd learned from the second block.  That finally gave me a geometry where the pedal goes almost to the floor, but still gets a full stroke from the master cylinder.  And it's good to know that if I decide I don't like that geometry, I can swap in the other block, or make a third block, and I can just unbolt and bolt up those blocks to get different options.  The photo below shows how the pushrod is connected to the mounting block at the pedal.

The connection is made using a swivel rod end, which is spaced off of the side of the block with a cylindrical spacer that I cut to length to align the pushrod with the master cylinder as much as possible.

The issue that I mentioned (much) earlier, with the brake fluid leaking out of the clutch lines before I even put pressure on the system, seemed to be due to bad flared connections.  I couldn't seem to get a good inverted flare on the hardlines I'd made.  The flares seemed to be off-center.  On the adapter that I was using, the pin that goes into the line you're flaring was bent.  I found that I was able to buy just that adapter, instead of a whole new flaring set, off of Amazon.  That seemed a little better, but still not great, and then the pin on that adapter broke.  I decided maybe there was something wrong with one of the other parts of that flaring tool set, so I decided to buy a whole new flaring set.  A buddy also showed me a YouTube video with some tips on inverted flares, so I tried to apply all the tips from that video.  The clutch kit was made to use a high pressure 37-degree JIC hose, but I was trying to adapt to an inverted flare hardline.  In the end, I had so much leakage from the adapters that I decided to just use the high pressure hose after all.  But I used the new flaring kit to re-flare the hardlines that I had to make for the brake system.  The flares look much better now, so I'm hoping they will make good seals, but I haven't put fluid in the system yet to find out.


Lastly ... the other major item I've worked on is the radiator and fan shroud.  I was debating whether I should get an aluminum radiator, or just a four-core copper one, and then one day while talking to one of the guys at the body shop, he said, "...and you're probably going to get some badass aluminum radiator...," so then I figured I'd hate to disappoint him, right?  I ended up getting an aluminum radiator made by DeWitts, because it's supposed to be a factory fit, and it wasn't as expensive as a lot of other factory fit aluminum radiators.  I hope it's sufficiently badass to satisfy the guy at the body shop.

Well, as it turns out, apparently to DeWitts, "factory fit" means "zero of the holes line up."  When I went to bolt up the radiator, the top two bolt holes looked to be at the correct height, but the wrong width.  The bottom two holes were at the wrong width, and the wrong height.  The top holes were off by about a half a hole (of course), so I couldn't just make new holes there.  I tried to slot them as best as I could, to get the width I needed.  The bottom holes were off by enough that I could just drill new holes.  The photo below shows the slotted holes at the top of the flanges, and the extra holes at the bottom of the flanges.

For a fan, I got a Flex-A-Lite piece that is similar in design to a factory fan.  A single two-inch Flex-A-Lite spacer between the fan and the water pump pulley put the fan well within the dimensions that the manufacturer specifies for clearance on both sides.

For the fan shroud, I ordered a reproduction of the stock fiberglass shroud.  The flanges on the sides of it were molded solid, but are supposed to have four "windows" in them.  I cut those out with the Dremel, which made a LOT of dust.

Radiator in car:

Radiator in car, with fan and shroud:

In the photo above, I was using binder clips to hold the shroud in place.  That allowed me to adjust the shroud's position to check for blade-to-shroud clearance.  When I had the shroud centered on the fan, I marked the shroud's position and made bolt holes to line up with the bolt holes in the radiator.  I was able to use the upper bolt holes in the radiator, but the lower holes were too low to line up with the shroud flanges.  I eventually decided to just drill new holes in the radiator flange, so that I could bolt down the lower ends of the shroud flanges.  I figured I would need to use nuts on the back side, because my holes wouldn't have threaded inserts welded to the back side, like the holes supplied by the radiator manufacturer.  But, when I was using a spring-loaded centerpunch to mark the locations of the holes, one of the welded inserts fell out.  I realized they weren't welded on, they were pressed in.  So I popped the other one out, drilled my new holes a little undersized, then used a rat tail file to open them up until I could just press in the threaded inserts.  So now my holes have threaded inserts in them, which is nicer than fumbling with nuts on the back side of the flange.

I had--and still have--some concern about the large gap between the front side of the shroud and the face of the radiator.  It makes me wonder if the shroud is really going to direct airflow through the radiator, or if it's just going to pull air in from the sides.  I thought maybe I should try to install a "universal" metal shroud, instead, but I couldn't really tell how those were supposed to go together.  So, I started looking to see if I could find a YouTube video that showed how to install one of those.  I didn't find any, but what I did find was a guy with an AMX who was explaining that he'd replaced his mechanical fan and stock shroud with electric fans, and then the electric fans didn't cool as well.  So he was re-installing the mechanical fan and shroud in the video.  I think he must have made some mistake with the electric fans, or else I don't know why they wouldn't cool as well as the mechanical fan, but the interesting thing was that the stock shroud he was re-installing seemed to also have a gap between its front edge and the face of the radiator.  And he said it worked.  So I'm hoping mine will work, too.

So anyway ... I guess that gets the blog just about caught up on the major events of the past five or six months.  I am anticipating some significant progress in November, so I will try to update the blog again before that, and then hopefully all kinds of exciting stuff will happen after that.  Either that, or else I'll be reworking all these same items after I realize I fouled them up the first time.

jiggity-jog

There is a saying that the first 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, and the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time.  This is probably debatable, but anyone who has ever taken on a major project probably knows the feeling.  There are always some persistent minor details that take a disproportionate amount of time to resolve.

The body shop had Matilda for about nine weeks in total, even though at first glance it appeared the majority of the work had been done after about one week.  Within one week they had the body on the frame, but then they still had to install a steering column, polish and install brightwork, align the front fenders and hood, and various other details.  One good example of a persistent minor detail that eats up time was the rag joint.  The rag joint joins the steering column to the steering box, and the first one they ordered turned out to have the wrong spline count on one side, so they had to wait a week for the correct one to show up.

Another thing that took some time was the back seat area.  When I started this project, my original plan was to have a complete, essentially stock, interior.  As the project progressed, at some point I thought maybe I'd rather replace the back seat with a panel to block off the holes in the rear bulkhead, and install a four-point roll bar.  I went back and forth on the idea several times, but finally decided that, if nothing else, the roll bar would provide a good place to attach shoulder harnesses.  And I thought shoulder harnesses would be a good idea if I was ever going to take the car to a track day or an autocross or anything like that, both of which I want to do.  So I decided to go ahead and scrap the back seat in favor of the roll bar.

Here's a picture of the car after the shop had had it for about a month, I'd guess:

You can see the side of the roll bar through the side window, but you can see the chrome trim around the back window and other brightwork has not yet been installed.

About a month later they'd gotten the correct rag joint, installed most of the trim, installed all the glass, and called to say it was ready to pick it up.  I went to get it on a Monday morning.  When I got there, they rolled it out the back of their shop, and I took a few pictures while waiting for the rollback to arrive:

So shiny!  This is before they've even cut and buffed the paint.

I should probably clarify the plan, actually, for anyone who doesn't already know:  I am going to install the gas tank, radiator, brakes, and so on, get the car running and driveable, then take it back to the body shop again for them to get the stripe painted on it and finish up some last details on their end.  The painter they work with works by himself and requires cars to be driveable when he gets them, because otherwise he can't move them around by himself.  So anyway, I still have a ton of work to do.

As another example of a small detail that delays the project, I ran into a complication on the very first item that I decided to tackle after getting the car home.  Once I had the car home in the garage, I thought I'd start by installing the gas tank.  Before I did that, I figured I'd install the fuel level sender and pickup in the gas tank, which is when I ran into trouble.

I had gotten a set of Stewart-Warner gauges for the dash, including a fuel level gauge, and the set of gauges included a fuel level sender with the correct resistance to work with the gauge.  Their sender has a long arm on its float, which is intended to be trimmed so that it will be the correct length to put the float at "top" when the tank is full, and "bottom" when the tank is empty.

I was going to install their sender in my tank, but when I got it out of the box, I found that their sender is really just a fuel level sender, and does not include a pickup tube.  Once I thought about it, this makes sense, because they don't know the shape of your gas tank (the gauges are intended to work with any vehicle), so they don't know how long to make the pickup tube so that it will be positioned at the bottom of the tank.  So I guess their intent is that you will make a new hole in the top of your tank, weld in a mounting flange, and install their fuel level sender there.  Then you would also install the stock sender, in its stock location, just to use its pickup tube.

Well, I didn't want to do all that, I just wanted to have one sender/pickup in the stock location and be done with it.  So first I checked the resistance of the stock sender and compared it to the resistance of the Stewart-Warner sender.  Of course they weren't even close.  The stock sender was something like 0-90ohms, and the SW unit is something like 30-240ohms.

So in the end, I decided to hack up both senders and Frankenstein something together for my purposes.  I removed the electrical sending unit from the stock sender, which left a convenient flange where it had been mounted.  I removed the electrical sending unit from the SW sender, and started working on a bracket that would allow me to bolt it to the flange on the stock pickup.

I had meant to take pictures of the process as I went, but I kept forgetting to, so when I was done I took some pictures to try to show what had happened, after the fact.

I started by making a bracket out of cardboard:

Then I flattened it out so I'd have a two-dimensional template for what I needed to cut out of metal:

Maybe the only good thing about junk mail is that it provides a virtually endless supply of this kind of heavy paper/light cardboard that can be used for things like this.  I used a sheet of steel that I already had in the garage, I think it was 22ga.

At this point is where there are a bunch of missing, undocumented steps, but the following four pictures show the end result:  

So this is the stock pickup tube with the SW sending unit bolted to the side of it, using the SW float and arm.  I bent the SW float arm to replicate the travel of the stock float arm.  I used four small nuts, screws and washers to bolt everything together.  The bracket didn't end up matching the template exactly, as I discovered some areas that needed to be clearanced as I put it all together.  I used Permatex red threadlocker on the screws, to try to make sure they don't come apart.  Permatex says the red threadlocker will maintain its properties in gasoline.

So that's about it for that, the sender is now installed in the gas tank, but I still haven't got the gas tank installed under the car.

Anyway, nobody likes looking at photos of brackets, so here's one more beauty shot for the folks who read all the way to the end:

accessorized

So, I left things in my last post with the rolling chassis assembled, but needing to figure out some details on how to mount the engine accessories.  This turned out to be mostly a question of tracking down people who made reproductions of the appropriate brackets, pulleys, etc.  But, true to the auto restoration industry's proud tradition of making things that don't fit right, not everything fit right.  And true to my proud tradition of breaking things, I broke some things.

The worst thing that didn't fit was the upper alternator bracket.  It has a hole which is supposed to mount to one of the bolts on the water pump, but that hole didn't line up with that bolt in any way.  So I had to trim that corner of the bracket and kind of notch the hole.  Then it would line up, but it was at least a quarter inch away from the surface it was supposed to bolt to.  So, I went to Lowe's and got a 3/8" I.D. spacer and cut it to the right length to fill the gap between the bracket and the water pump.  That seemed to get everything where it needed to be.

The thing that I broke was a spacer that was supposed to go in the rear bolt hole of the lower alternator bracket.  The spacer was essentially a roll pin that slid in the rear bolt hole of the bracket, so that when the bolt that runs through that hole is tightened, the spacer will clamp down on the alternator.  It fit so tightly that I ended up using Channel-Lock pliers to remove it, and then it cracked and broke.  Haste makes waste.  I tried to order some roll pins with the correct O.D., but their I.D. was too small for the bolt.  Eventually, I couldn't come up with anything else, so I got another 3/8" I.D. spacer from Lowe's, and cut it to the length I needed for this spacer.  Then I also got a piece of 0.005" steel shim that I could use to shim the spacer to the bracket for a good fit.

The problem was, how to cut the spacer to length and keep the cut square all the way around.  I ended up taking a piece of the first 3/8" spacer I'd cut, the one that I used for the upper alternator bracket, and I taped it to a 3/8" drill bit, like so:

That gave me a shaft with a shoulder, so that I could put the new spacer on the end of the drill bit and it would be held squarely in place, but still allowed to spin on the drill bit shank.

Then I got a cut-off wheel on my Dremel...

...and I just put the cut off wheel to the spacer where I wanted to make the cut.  The wheel spun the spacer on the drill bit while simultaneously cutting it, sort of like an extremely poor man's version of parting it off on a lathe.  It worked so well, I even decided to press my luck and use the flat side of the cut off wheel to put a bevel on the end of the spacer, similar to how the end of the broken spacer was shaped.  That also worked very well, and I ended up with these parts (shim and spacer):

Here's a picture of the lower alternator bracket with the spacer and shim in place:

A closer view:

And a closer view from the other side, showing the taper on the spacer:

The other major problem had to do with a bracket which supports the back side of the power steering pump, and it has a slot to allow the pump to pivot, to adjust belt tension.  That bracket mounts to the block in one location, and it shares a bolt with the engine mount in another location.  Because I shimmed the engine mounts to get clearance between my headers and the steering box, that meant that one mounting location of this bracket also got shimmed out, which made the whole bracket cockeyed, which made the power steering pump cockeyed.  So, I did some re-bending of the bracket and wallowed out one bolt hole so that it would mount up square again, and that seemed to work OK.

So, accessories mounted:

The alternator is at top right, the power steering pump is at bottom right, the crank pulley and the water pump are in the middle, but inquisitive observers might wonder what the black pulley towards the upper left is...?  I have a picture of an early Mark IV big block Chevy on the wall in the garage, and it has that pulley on it, but I never really noticed it or thought about it until I was scrolling through some restoration parts website and saw that they were selling it.  I wondered what it was and found out that it's an idler pulley that was only on the "high performance" big block engines.  It's basically just a tensioner that allows for the addition of a second belt on the crankshaft and water pump pulleys.  I'm not really sure what it's purpose was.  I could imagine that it might have been for redundancy, or additional belt wrap to prevent slippage, or something like that, but I don't really know.  From a performance viewpoint, it seems like all it would do would be to bleed off power as another parasitic load, but I'm sure it must have served a purpose in somebody's mind.  Some places where I saw it referenced called it a "high performance" option, but I think others referred to it as a "heavy duty" option.  Either way, after some deliberation, I decided that this was the belt arrangement I wanted for my engine, so I ordered the pulley.  I really haven't built the engine for all-out performance, but more for driveability, durability and dependability, so I decided that the "heavy duty" pulley arrangement made sense for me.

Anyway, a few days before the weekend when I was planning to finish bolting all this stuff up for the last time, the body shop called and said they were ready for the car.  So, that weekend I painted the brackets I'd hacked up, gave the paint a few days to cure, and then Thursday night I bolted everything up and on Friday my favorite tow truck driver, who's done all the moves of Matilda for me, came and got her and took her up to the body shop.  A major milestone, to say the least.

So the body shop has had the chassis for about a week now, and I just stopped in this morning to pay the weekly bill and see how things are going.  So, finally the pictures that everybody's been waiting for...: