because race car

As I said in an earlier post, I've decided to take the work I've done that hasn't been written up yet, split it into subsystems, and write an entry on each subsystem until I'm caught up.  That earlier post was intended to cover the switch-and-relay module for the custom dash.  But then that kind of flowed into talking about the warning light pod, and gauge wiring, so the entry ended up covering pretty much all of the custom dash.  Eagle-eyed readers, however, may have noticed in the last two photos that there was one large electrical switch that wasn't covered in the entry.  I just ran out of gas at the end of the deal, and didn't have the will to cover the battery cutoff switch.

The phrase "because race car" is floated around the internet to describe features and details of cars that serve no purpose other than to make the car look more like a race car.  In other words, it essentially applies to my entire project.  But, some features are better examples than others, and one feature that is a perfect example is the battery cutoff switch.

One day while I was working on the dashboard, I was looking at the hole where the cigarette lighter goes and trying to decide what to do with that.  One option was to put a cigarette lighter in it.  Another option was to leave it empty.  Another option was to try to block it off somehow.  I was thinking I would probably just put a cigarette lighter in it.  There are a lot of electrical accessories that are designed to plug into cigarette lighters, so that might come in handy.  And if nothing else, it might serve as a subtle tribute to this video of Dick Trickle smoking a cigarette in his race car during a caution.

But then, I had another idea ... I could put a battery cutoff switch in the hole for the cigarette lighter.  I immediately loved the idea so much, I knew I had to do it.  But, while I am more than willing to put useless race car features in my car just because they look like race car stuff, I am not willing to install stuff that isn't functional.  So, it had to work.

A lot of racing sanctioning bodies require cars to have a battery cutoff switch as a safety requirement.  It provides a quick way to disconnect the battery after a crash to prevent something from sparking and igniting spilled fuel, or shorting and starting an electrical fire, for example.  Sometimes battery cutoff switches are required to be mounted on the outside of the car so that safety workers can use them when they arrive at the crash, other times they are mounted on the dash so that the driver can use them.  For me the main purpose of the switch is to fill the hole for the cigarette lighter and to look cool, but it will also provide a quick and easy way to disconnect the battery when working on the car's electrical system.

So anyway, I ordered a cutoff switch, took some measurements to see how much battery cable I'd need, bought some battery cable, etc.  I already had a hole in the dash, but it turned out to be a little bit oversized for the switch.  The switch has a main body that fits into a big hole, and then there is a small post designed to fit into a smaller hole.  The purpose of the post is to keep the switch from spinning in its mounting hole when someone tries to use it.  I drilled a smaller hole for the post to fit into, thinking that maybe it would also serve to locate the switch body in the oversized hole for the cigarette lighter, but it was still too loose and kind of flopped around a little bit when you tried to flip the switch.  It probably would have worked, but it didn't feel good.

So, I started out by making a small spacer to take up the difference between the cigarette lighter hole and the cutoff switch body.  I traced the hole in the dashboard faceplate onto a piece of steel, and then traced a hole the size of the switch body onto it, and then cut out that shape.  I cut it a little bit oversized and then started trimming it down, test-fitting the parts, trimming some more, test-fitting again, and so on, until everything fit.

This is the spacer I ended up with:

And this is how it looks when it's pressed into the dashboard faceplate:

The cutoff switch I got was made by Moroso, and it came with a sticker to put over the switch, to label the "off" and "on" positions.  It also says "Moroso," because ... advertising.

I like the sticker because it looks official, and also because Moroso is one of the many companies who I remember seeing their names on toy race cars and photos of race cars in magazines when I was a kid.  So I wanted to use the sticker, but it didn't fit in the available space on the dashboard.

I decided to make a faceplate for the switch which would install over the dashboard faceplate.  The switch plate would provide a place where the sticker could be applied, and it would also sandwich the spacer in the hole in between the switch plate and the dash, so that it couldn't fall out.  I traced the available space on the dash onto a piece of paper, traced the hole's location, and then traced the Moroso sticker on to that same piece of paper to see what size faceplate I could make to fit in that space.  Then I cut that shape out of steel and painted it black with POR-15:

Next, I cut the "Moroso" portion of the sticker off so that I could clock it into a different orientation relative the the "OFF" and "ON" labels:

That allowed me to get the word "Moroso" into a spot where it would be visible, while also clocking the words "OFF" and "ON" into a spot where they would be visible and align with the correct switch positions.  The switch faceplate ended up looking like this:

With everything assembled, it looks like this:

I think it looks pretty cool.  The big lightning bolt sticker also came with the switch and is a common decal that is used to help safety workers at race tracks find the battery cutoff switch.  As it came, there was more of a space between the lightning bolt and the word "OFF," so I cut that sticker and rearranged it a bit, too, in order to make it fit in the space available.

That took care of installing the switch itself, but of course it wouldn't be functional until it was wired up electrically.  In the photo below, you can see the switch installed in the dash, but with the gauge pod removed.  This allows you to see a couple of heavy cables that are routed from the switch straight to the firewall.  They are supported at the firewall by a couple of P-clips with rubber grommets on them, and those P-clips are supported by a stud.  The stud is actually one of the bolts that is holding the reservoir for the hydraulic clutch on the engine side of the firewall.  It passes through the firewall, has a nut to hold the reservoir in place, then the P-clips are stacked on it, and then another nut to hold the P-clips in place.

From there, the cables run across the firewall, they are clipped in another location, then one of them runs along the top of the heater box, and the other one drops vertically down between the heater box and the firewall.

Here's the one that runs along the top of the heater box, until it passes through the firewall, through a red grommet:

And here you can just see the end of the one that drops down vertically before passing through the firewall through a black grommet:

On the engine side of the firewall, you can see the heater hoses and part of the engine, and you can also see the grommets for the battery cables to the battery cutoff switch:

Here's a close-up of the red grommet, where the battery cable passes from the battery through the firewall, on its way to the cutoff switch:

An aside on the red grommet ... I had originally bought grommets from Lowe's, I think.  I had sized the inner diameters for the battery cables that would pass through them, and I didn't care about the outer diameters.  The packaging listed an O.D., which I figured was the size of the hole that the grommet would fit into.  Who cares about the actual O.D. of a grommet?  Well, I drilled a hole for that size and ... the whole grommet fell right through the hole.  I hate drilling holes in any part of the car, it's kind of stressful because you can't easily un-drill a hole.  So when I realized that I had drilled too big of a hole because of my misinterpretation of the "O.D." measurement on the grommet packaging, I was pretty upset.  If the person who decided how to label the "outside diameter" of that grommet had been in the garage at the time, I might have murdered them.  Of course it was my own fault for not taking the time to measure the grommet before I drilled the hole, but that hardly seemed relevant at the time.  Anyway, McMaster-Carr has a fantastic website that is extremely searchable, with very clearly labeled dimensions for all their parts, and I was able to find a couple grommets with the correct I.D., correct O.D. to match the hole I'd drilled, correct thickness, etc.  One of them was only available in quantities of 50, or something like that, and the other one was only available in a high temp material, but could be had in quantities as small as 5.  That one happened to also be red, and that's the one I ordered.

Anyway, in the middle of this next photo, you can make out the black grommet where a cable passes from the cutoff switch back through the firewall, and up to the back of the engine, where it is grounded using one of the flywheel housing bolts:

The photo below shows the negative battery cable running from the battery post along the top of the inner fender and back to the firewall, where it passes through its grommet, and into the car.

And the next photo was taken from under the car, looking up to show where the cable then passes back through the firewall and bolts to the engine using one of the bellhousing mounting bolts.

To make the cables, I bought lengths of cable at O'Reilly's, cut them to length, and added terminals.  For the terminals that clamp to the battery posts, I got a couple that attach to the battery cables with clamps that are bolted on.  For the terminals that bolt to the switch posts and the engine, I got copper lugs that are soldered on.  The soldering process for these large lugs is pretty cool.  You strip off the insulation from the end of the battery cable, and dip the exposed cable in solder flux.  Then you stick that exposed end of the cable into the lug, and use a hammer and punch to roughly crimp the lug onto the cable.  Then the last step is to heat the lug with a torch until it is hot enough to melt solder, and you just feed solder into the joint until the lug is full of solder.  Then a piece of heat shrink insulation over the end of the lug finishes the job.

I decided to run the battery ground to the cutoff switch because ... well, I don't remember why.  I think part of it was because, if a battery cable somehow chafed through its insulation and through the grommet in the firewall, a ground cable grounded to the firewall would just mean that the cutoff switch would no longer work, as opposed to a positive cable grounded to the firewall, which could start a fire.  Some people put the switch on the positive cable, but some people put it on the ground and that seemed safer and easier to me, so that's what I did.

Anyway, the arrangement seems to work, in the sense the it works to connect the battery, it works to disconnect the battery, and it works to look awesome.  I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

exhaustion

After I'd had the Monte Carlo for eight or nine years or so, the Hooker long tube headers that were on the car when I bought it rusted through and a pretty good-sized hole developed right before the collector on the passenger side.  I ordered up another pair of Hooker long tubes to replace the rusted pair, but I wasn't sure if the ones I was ordering were the same as the ones I was replacing.  I wasn't sure if the replacement headers' outlets would line up with the exhaust system that ran from the rusted headers back over the rear axle and to the mufflers, and I knew I needed to get the whole job done in one weekend, so I decided to take the situation as an excuse to get a pair of glasspacks and just run a simplified exhaust system that would exit at each side of the car just in front of the rear wheels.  That would be easy to put together, and it would mimic some of the classic race car exhaust systems from years gone by.  The glasspacks would also be louder than the relatively stock mufflers that were on the car when I got it, and louder is always cool, right?

The whole deal worked out pretty well, all in all.  The biggest problem was figuring out how to support the exhaust pipes under the car.  On a traditional exhaust arrangement where the pipes run all the way to the back of the car, it is usually easy to fit some exhaust hangers under the floor boards somewhere back under the trunk.  But trying to tuck the exhaust pipes under the floorboards with a side-exit arrangement means that it can be difficult to find enough room to fit an exhaust hanger between the exhaust pipe and the floorboard.  If you hang the pipes low enough to fit a normal-sized hanger between the floorboard and the exhaust pipe, then the pipe hangs way too low.  I tried to do what I could to get a couple hangers in place to provide some support, but it never really worked out very well.  The glasspacks and exhaust pipes ended up being essentially cantilevered off of the ends of the headers.  Despite the lack of exhaust hangers, the arrangement lasted through a few more years of service before one of the pipes broke, probably due to a combination of rust and fatigue.  Fortunately, the hangers that were on there kept the pipe from dropping off of the car completely, even though they hadn't been supporting its weight very well prior to the failure.

Anyway, I was not able to devise an adequate support system for the side-exit exhaust system at the time, and I want a side-exit exhaust on the Impala, so a better arrangement is going to have to be worked out.  I have some ideas that might work, but the guys at the body shop say they have an exhaust shop they work with, and that the guy from the exhaust shop is a genius of exhaust installation, so that has me thinking that maybe I'll have that guy work his magic on the Impala.  I'm sure the pipes he'll make will look better than what I would come up with, and I can also learn whatever his tricks are for supporting a side-exit exhaust system.  But in the mean time, I needed to come up with at least a temporary exhaust arrangement to use for the cam break-in, and until a better system can be installed.

I had another problem before I could worry about how to hang the exhaust, though.  The outlets of the headers were pointed into the transmission mount crossmember.  I wouldn't be surprised if a professional exhaust shop could probably work around this in some way, but I was trying to get some kind of exhaust hung before it went to a professional shop.  It's also possible that a solution to route the exhaust around the crossmember would create some restriction in the exhaust flow.  That's not really a big concern in my case, but I don't like seeing sharp bends in exhaust pipes, just on principle.  Anyway, I started looking at aftermarket crossmembers, to see if there were any that would give better clearance for the exhaust.

The photo below shows the exhaust outlets from the headers, and the crossmember is visible in front of them.  It has two humps in it to clear the stock exhaust arrangement, but they are too close to the centerline of the car.  The headers are set wider apart than the stock exhaust pipes would be by the time they got back to the crossmember.

The next photo shows just the passenger side exhaust outlet, and the overlap with the crossmember in the foreground is evident.

My first thought was to look for a universal crossmember, thinking that there probably wouldn't be anything ready-made to fit my application.  I thought maybe there would be something with some adjustability built into it that I could use.  I found one that looked like it might work, but when I looked around online I found more than one person saying they'd tried that crossmember, and it had so much flex in it that they could feel the shifter and transmission moving up and down when they went over bumps in the road.  That didn't sound real good to me, so I kept looking.

To my surprise, I found a Summit-brand crossmember that said it would fit 1965 Impalas, and it looked pretty beefy.  It was fabricated from square tubing and looked pretty stout.  My concern was that the humps for exhaust clearance looked like they might still be too close together, and no measurements were offered on the website.  There was a photo of the part, though, so I decided to measure the distance between the mounting bolts on my car, then measure that distance on the photo, and work out a scale multiplier to try to determine the spacing of the exhaust clearance features.  It looked like the humps were larger than they needed to be, and I thought maybe my exhaust would just clear the outside edges.  Well, I measured and calculated, and it turned out that it looked like my exhaust would actually be pretty well centered in the openings.  Looking around online, I didn't find any negative reviews of the part, so I decided to order one.

The photo below shows the aftermarket crossmember (top), as compared to the stock crossmember (bottom).

In that photo, you can see a hole in the top of the stock crossmember, toward the right hand side of it.  That is where a hook for the parking brake cable is supposed to mount.  The aftermarket crossmember doesn't have that feature, so I drilled a hole in the aftermarket crossmember in about the same spot, as shown in the photo below.

The photo below shows a close-up of those holes for the parking brake cable hook.  The section of square tubing that the hole is drilled in is totally enclosed, welded on both ends, so I drilled another, smaller hole in the bottom of it to allow any water or moisture that gets into the top hole to drain out the bottom.  The inside of the tubing wasn't painted or finished, so I tried to slop some POR-15 in through the hole on the top, to provide some corrosion protection on the inside.  Probably an ineffective waste of time, but I already had the can of POR-15 on hand, so ... why not.

Next thing was just to install the crossmember, which just bolts into place.  The photo below shows the new crossmember in place, and the exhaust outlets have a clear path to the back of the car.  In the middle of the photo you can see the jackstand that I used to support the transmission while the crossmember was out of the car.

A close-up of the passenger side exhaust outlet, showing it pointed through the hump in the crossmember:

And one more picture, which I took to show ... something ... I assume.  I don't know, it's been a while.  I really need to get caught up on this blog.

So the next thing was to work out the actual exhaust piping.  I just wanted something kind of  rudimentary in place so as not to irritate the neighbors during the cam break-in, and so as not to be too much of a nuisance on the road during test drives and when taking the car back to the body shop.  I had already picked out some mufflers, and I had a couple of short turndowns left over from when I put headers and glasspacks on the Corvair.  The plan was just to put those mufflers and turndowns in place and rig up some kind of support for them, and call that good enough as a temporary arrangement.

Glasspacks are pretty cool, but they are also pretty loud.  I decided to put glasspacks on the Monte Carlo because my buddy Allen had glasspacks on his 1967 Galaxie with a 390 in it, and I thought it sounded great.  And there were a lot of things I really liked about having glasspacks on the Monte, but there were also some drawbacks.  I used to put in earplugs if I was going to be driving more than 45 minutes to my destination.

When I decided to put glasspacks on the Corvair, I thought, "It's just a little 164 cubic inch engine, how loud could it be?"  Then one day after I'd ordered and received the parts, but before I had the car running again, I was sitting in traffic behind a Harley and it occurred to me, "That engine is not even half the size of the Corvair engine, and it is pretty loud."  It turned out that the Corvair was pretty obnoxiously loud once it was running with the glasspacks on it.  That was a lot of fun sometimes, but could also be a nuisance.

My buddy Jeff used to live in a condo maybe 50 yards from the railroad tracks, and one time when I went to pick him up, he told me when I got there, "I thought I heard your car outside about five minutes ago, but it turned out it was a train going by."  Another time, my dad had to move the Corvair out of the way in the driveway while I was in the house, and when I heard him start it up, I was amazed how loud it sounded from inside the house.  It sounded awesome, but it was a lot louder than I would have guessed it would be.  I'd never heard the Monte Carlo from inside the house, so later I asked my dad, "Is the Corvair louder than the Monte Carlo?"  He didn't even hesitate to think about it, he just said something like, "Oh, good grief, no."  So, as much as I love the sound of glasspacks, I decided that for the Impala I would look for something a little quieter, for my own comfort, and out of consideration for my neighbors.

Oh, wait, I've got one more glasspacks-are-loud story:  I once got pulled over in Burr Ridge and given a written warning for my car being too loud.  After that I generally avoided Burr Ridge for about a year, until I had some business that took me back there.  I was driving slowly through an outdoor shopping mall, just idling along and looking for the store I was trying to find.  Being that it was Burr Ridge, the street I was on was lined with parked BMWs, Audis, Porsches, and so on.  I was just driving at idle speed, probably even riding the brake, going slowly to try to read all the stores' signs.  As I was slowly making my way down that street, I thought back to that time I got pulled over and received a written warning for a loud exhaust.  I thought to myself, Man, that cop was crazy, this car is NOT that loud at all.  And right as I thought that, the noise from my exhaust set off the car alarm of a BMW that I was driving past.  OK, fine, so maybe the car was a little loud.

SO ANYWAY ... those are my stories about why I didn't order glasspacks for the Impala.  For the Impala, I wanted something that was generally shaped like a glasspack (as opposed to a boxy muffler shape), and with a good sound, but not so loud.  Another drawback to glasspacks is that over time the fiberglass packing from which they get their name will degrade and break down and blow out, and they will get louder as this happens.  I wanted to try to get something that wouldn't degrade like that, so I started looking at Flowmaster products, because I thought that all of their mufflers used chambered designs without packing that could break down.

Trying to pick out mufflers can be frustrating because you don't really know what they sound like until they're on the car.  There are videos online, but the odds of finding someone with the same engine as you, built the same way as you built it, with exhaust pipes routed the same way as yours, and all the same mufflers you're interested in comparing are not good.  And even if you did find that, a video just can't really give a good sense of what they'll sound like in person.

After looking through some information on Flowmaster's product line, I picked out the "Hushpower HP-2" muffler.  Flowmaster has a graphic that arranges their products in order of loudness, and the HP-2 falls somewhere in the middle of the range, maybe towards the louder end of the street/strip section.  It's also supposed to be the loudest of their mufflers that have an elongated shape instead of having a traditional boxy muffler shape.  I like that look better, so it was a factor for me.

I had looked at some information online and I thought that what I saw was telling me that Flowmaster's products are all chambered designs, but eventually, after I'd ordered the HP-2s, I found out that their elongated muffler designs do use a packing material which can deteriorate.  That was a little disappointing, but I already had the mufflers by the time I learned that, so I decided to just go ahead with them.  If the packing deteriorates and they get louder than I want, then I guess I'll have an excuse to try something else.

Putting all these parts together would be relatively simple, but I still needed to figure out a way to support the pipes.  I was especially worried about leaving everything cantilevered off of the headers because the engine now has aluminum heads, and I'm always worried about pulling the threads out of bolt holes in aluminum parts.  I would eventually come to realize that the exhaust manifold bolt holes in the Edelbrock heads actually come helicoiled from the factory, which is nice, but probably still better to support the exhaust somehow.

Looking around under the car, I considered a few different options for rigging up some temporary support for the exhaust.  I ended up deciding to try to use the bosses for the seatbelt mounting bolts.  The bolt holes pass through the floorpan, so if I mounted the seatbelts with long bolts that extended under the car, then I could use the extra length of the bolt as a stud to mount a bracket which could support the exhaust.

To make the brackets, I bought a length of one-inch wide, eighth-inch thick steel, took some measurements under the car, cut the steel into two smaller lengths, and bent those up into two brackets with the shape shown below.

There is an empty hole for mounting the bracket to the car, and then there is a hole at the top of the bracket, with a carriage bolt installed in that hole.  The head of the carriage bolt will butt up against the floorpan of the car, which should prevent the bracket from pivoting around its mounting point.  Probably overkill, but that's kind of how I design things, I guess.

The brackets install in the driveshaft tunnel, so I was a little worried that they would interfere with the driveshaft.  With that in mind, I tried to cut the bolts as short as I could so they wouldn't extend into the driveshaft's space any more than they had to.  It appears that everything will fit.

The photo below shows the brackets mounted under the car, looking forward towards the transmission.  You can also see the exhaust pipe lengths mounted on the reducers and running towards the back of the car.

The next photo shows the same view, but with the mufflers and turndowns installed.

And the last photo, below, shows the same arrangement, but viewed more from the side.  After the photo was taken, I bought and installed six muffler clamps to hold it all together.

So that's the exhaust setup, at least temporarily.  One step closer to being ready to fire the engine for the first time, and one step closer to being caught up on blog entries.  Because I'm playing catch-up, the first fire for the engine has actually already happened, so I'll leave you with a link to a short video with very poor quality audio of how the mufflers sound.

fifth wheel

I've mentioned at least a few times in other entries that aesthetics are a major factor in a lot of decisions I've made on this project.  After years and years of poring through photos of old race cars and noting little details that make them what they are, I want to try to capture at least some of those little details in my project.

One feature that commonly appears on NASCAR stock cars and Trans Am sedans of the mid-'60s is the padded steering wheel.  This usually appears to be just a stock steering wheel wrapped with electrical tape.  I always used to assume that the steering wheels must just be wrapped in many, many layers of electrical tape, but it may be electrical tape wrapped over some type of padding.  Or it may be that they aren't wrapped in electrical tape at all, but rather just something that looks like electrical tape.  Either way, I've decided at this point that they are probably wrapped in something to provide some level of padding, and then that padding is covered in electrical tape to hold it all together.

I really wanted to wrap my steering wheel in electrical tape to get that look, but I figured the electrical tape would turn into a sticky mess and get pretty disgusting pretty quickly.  So I just figured I'd have to live without a wrapped/padded steering wheel.  I thought maybe I'd get a nice leather steering wheel cover to sort of give a similar effect.

But then, when I was unwrapping and re-wrapping wiring harnesses, I noticed that the electrical tape I'd bought just happened to not be anywhere near the sticky mess that other electrical tapes I'd used in the past had been.  And that got me to thinking about the steering wheel again....

The photo below shows what the stock '65 Impala steering wheel looks like.

I think it's a pretty stylish deal, with the four chrome bits positioned in pairs on each side, and the chrome horn ring that traces a chrome arc between the spokes of the wheel.  I kind of wish they'd had a horn button with the "SS" logo for the SS cars that year, but the leaping Impala logo is pretty slick, too.

For a really legit race car look, I'd have to remove the horn ring and go with a little bit more spartan appearance, as shown below.

But, I'd gotten kind of attached to the look of the horn ring, and it would be easier to make the horn work if I kept the horn ring, so I decided to exercise a little artistic liberty and keep the horn ring.

To pad the steering wheel, I ended up going to Lowe's and buying a roll of foam window seal.  The stuff I got is 3/16" thick, 3/8" wide, and comes in a roll 17' long.  And as I said above, the key to this whole deal was the electrical tape.  The stuff I used on the wiring harnesses, which wasn't a sticky mess, was 3M Highland brand vinyl electrical tape.  And the packaging even says it's fire retardant, so ... safety!

I had bought the electrical tape a while back and couldn't remember where I'd bought it from.  I tried a couple of parts stores without success and then found it at O'Reilly's.

I did a little bit of last-minute studying, looking at photos of old race car interiors, and I noticed that not everyone wrapped their wheel the same way.  For some reason I'd assumed that there would be some kind of a standard approach, but I guess it shouldn't be surprising that different people had different ideas about how to do it.  I found some photos where the whole wheel was wrapped, others where just the outer ring of the wheel was wrapped, and one photo where just the spokes and the center hub were wrapped, but the outer ring was not.  That surprised me a bit, but it also opened the door to wrap my wheel however I liked.  I decided to wrap all the exposed portions of the wheel itself, and then to install the horn ring on the wrapped wheel.

As it turned out, one 17' roll of the foam window seal wasn't enough to finish the job, so I wrapped as much as I could with one roll, taped the ends in place with electrical tape, then went and bought another roll of foam to finish the rest of the wheel.  When I was done with that, it looked like the photo below.

Next I wrapped wrapped the wheel with electrical tape, and the photo below shows it loosely in place in the car.

Next photo shows the horn ring loosely in place.

I was really pretty happy with out it turned out.  I think that if I really wanted it to be more authentic, another layer of foam and another layer of electrical tape would get the thickness about where it should be.  But I've always liked the skinny steering wheels on old cars, so I think I'll stick with just the one layer of foam.

I am a little bit worried that the first time I park the car outside in the sun, the electrical tape will still melt into a sticky mess, but the beauty of the window foam padding is that it should protect the steering wheel from the stickiness of the electrical tape, and I can just unwrap it if it ever does get messy.

So at that point, I had the wheel wrapped and loosely in place on the steering column.  But, as I mentioned a couple posts ago, I had some problems when it came time to actually torque the steering wheel in place.  The photo below shows a side view of the steering wheel as it is installed on the column.

As I said in that other entry:

I used an aftermarket steering column from a company called "ididit," which is a popular choice for aftermarket steering columns.  But it means that the factory steering wheel doesn't fit the aftermarket column perfectly, so they have a little adapter kit to make the wheel look better on their column.  It consists mainly of a little chrome ring that you essentially glue to the back of your steering wheel, and it takes up the difference in diameter between the wheel and the column.  It's a dress-up ring, in essence, as its only function is to make things look nicer.


The arrow in the photo below indicates the trim ring from the adapter kit.

The text from the other entry continues:

Well, I got the ring stuck on the back of the steering wheel, and put everything together and torqued the wheel down and ... the dress-up ring was clamped between the edge of the column and the horn ring so tightly that it was difficult to turn the steering wheel.

When I wrote that, I wondered if anyone would be able to follow my attempt at describing the problem.  Well, the arrow in the photo below indicates what I was calling "the edge of the column"...

...and the next photo below this indicates the edge of the horn ring that was clamping down on the trim ring from the other side.

Back to the text from the other entry:

So, I took everything apart, and I started trying to grind a couple of reliefs into the dress-up ring, where it contacts the steering wheel, in order to lift it away from the edge of the steering column.

The arrow in the photo below points out where the reliefs were ground in the trim ring, in order to move the trim ring away from the edge of the steering column.

I started out cutting the reliefs with a cutoff wheel on a Dremel.  That removed material pretty quickly, but it really didn't look very good.  I tried a test fit, though, as described in the other entry:

I finished that and went to put everything back together, but I realized before I even had it assembled that the back edge of the horn ring was still going to interfere with the dress-up ring, and the interference would actually be worse now, since I was essentially moving the dress-up ring forward.  So I assembled everything without the horn ring, just to check the clearance with the edge of the column.  It was improved, but still had some interference.  So, I pulled everything part again, took some more material out of the reliefs I'd made on the dress-up ring, and cut something like an eighth of an inch off of the back of the horn ring.

It was actually two or three iterations before everything fit, but at some point I decided to use a file on the reliefs in the trim ring, and that really improved their appearance.  The file made it easier to keep the relief surface flat, which gives a better appearance from the side.  I used a digital caliper to check the thickness of each relief in three places to make sure they were a uniform thickness across, and also equal in thickness to each other.

The arrow in the photo below indicates the edge of the horn ring where I cut about an eighth of an inch off to create clearance for the trim ring.

After all that, the pieces all fit together pretty well, with no interference.

One more photo below, to show what the end result looks like now.

getting heated

I talked a little bit in my first entry about how I came to be a Chevrolet guy.  And I've been so enthusiastic about Chevrolet, for so long, it seems like an inevitability, an inescapable truth.  But things could have easily turned out differently.  My dad had a 1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass when I was a kid, which I think made a strong imprint on my young psyche.  Auto manufacturers automatically become cooler when they go out of business, and sometimes I'll think that it would be cool to be an Oldsmobile guy.  I am a big fan of Cadillac's recent attempts to build a more performance-oriented image, and I think it also sort of hearkens back to the 1950s and earlier when Fords and Chevys would just get you around, and if you wanted real power under the hood you had to get a luxury brand, like Cadillac or Lincoln or Packard or Duesenberg.  Sometimes I'll think about how cool it would be to build an old high performance Cadillac project.  Also, I feel like if I hadn't picked a brand until later in life, I probably would have been a Plymouth guy.  Plymouth guys are kind of weird, and I really like the styling on a lot of the late-'60s/early-'70s Plymouths.  The 1971 Roadrunner might be my pick for the best-looking car body ever.  Plymouth also now has the bonus style points for being out of business.  AMC Javelins are cool, and so is the Rebel Machine, and I recently fell into love at first sight when I saw a 1968 AMC Ambassador SST for the first time.  Heck, on top of all that, I'll even admit that I really like the styling on Ford Galaxies and Falcons from the early '60s.  The 1971 Mercury Cyclone looks great.  There are cool old BMWs, cool old Datsuns, cool old Lamborghinis, the list goes on and on.

The point is, things could easily have turned out differently.  There are a lot of cool cars in the world, and if any one of them had grabbed my attention at the right time, maybe I wouldn't be a Chevy guy.  So, I consider myself fortunate that things turned out the way they did when I think about the advantages of being a Chevy guy.  I don't know if there's any such a thing as a cheap project car, but it would be very difficult to argue that any other make is cheaper than Chevrolet when it comes to getting parts for old models.  On top of that, it's equally difficult to argue that any other make has more parts available for old models than Chevrolet.  The aftermarket has developed so much support for the most popular Chevrolet models, it is supposedly possible to build a completely brand-new 1967-69 Camaro or 1955-57 Chevrolet, without any original frame or sheet metal to start with.  Chevelles are also very well-supported by the aftermarket.  Other Chevrolet models may not be quite as well-supported, but it is still much easier to get parts for an old Chevrolet than it is for a huge number of other old cars.  So I consider myself lucky to have become a Chevy guy at an early age.

This is all a long-winded way of arriving at the point that it is relatively easy to get reproduction parts for almost any component on an old Chevrolet.  But, when you're building a whole car from what was virtually an empty shell, eventually you're bound to find the limits of that key word, "almost."  One example of a couple parts that are not available as reproduction parts are the "bumperettes" that hang down off the front bumper.  The ones that were on my car when I got it were badly rusted, including a one-inch by three-inch hole rusted completely through one of them.  When I told the guy at the body shop that I couldn't find replacements, he recommended that I just try harder to find a used pair, because repairing the ones I had would be very expensive.  In the end, my sister somehow found a pair that someone was selling on Facebook for a fair price.

Another example ended up being the heater controls.  It's easy to find reproductions of the control head for a car with a heater and air conditioning, but I wasn't able to find any place that offered the control head for a car without air conditioning.  One of the control levers for my control head was broken, but after looking around online and not finding any easy replacements, I decided to try to fix it rather than replace it.

In the photo below, if you look carefully at the lever that is farthest down, you might be able to make out where the break is, right above the point where the control cable connects to the lever:

In the next photo below, I bent that lever at the break, to accentuate where the break is:

I think the lever may have actually been OK when I got it, and I may have broken it when I tried to test the heater controls.  In addition to moving the control cable, the lever is also connected to a switch on the top side of the control head, and I think that switch had seized up so that when I tried to force the lever through its motion, the 50-year-old pot metal lever actually broke before the switch broke loose.  I was able to find a reproduction switch to replace the seized one, but couldn't find a replacement control head.

If you can't tell what you're looking at in those close-ups, here's a shot that shows the whole control head, looking at it from the bottom:

And here's a shot that shows some of the top of it, including the switch that mounts on the top of it:

To repair the broken pot metal, I decided to try to make a small "splint" for it.  I started by cutting out a small piece of 22ga steel:

Then I drilled a hole in it and cut some reliefs on the sides, and scored it along a couple of fold lines:

The hole is there to allow the splint to fit over the pin on the top of the lever, which engages the switch.  This also serves as a locating feature to keep the splint in its proper position.

Next I slipped the splint into place, so that it fit in between the lever and the control head body, and so that it engaged that pin on top of the lever:

Next, I folded up the sides of the splint so that they ran along the sides of the lever and would keep it from bending at the break:

Then I folded the sides over the top of the lever, for more rigidity.  This is why I cut the reliefs into the sides of the splint in the first place, in order to accommodate the shape of the boss around the pin where the control cable is attached:

At that point the splint was pretty functional, but as one last step to help hold everything together and eliminate any slop in the assembly, I poured a small amount of JB Weld along the top of the lever so that it would flow down into the cracks between the lever and the splint and help to hold everything rigid.  Once the JB Weld had cured, everything seemed to work pretty well.

The last couple photos show the lever in its two most extreme positions, and the actuation of the switch as a result.  The cable attached to the lever opens a vent to allow air flow, and the switch turns on the blower fan.

At the same time that I was working on the lever, I removed the face plate and cleaned it up, polished the bezel around the faceplate, cleaned up the ends of the levers that are visible and painted them black.  The pot metal bezel is a little bit pitted with age, but it looks a lot better than it did when I got it, and good enough for my purposes.

So ... there's another thing.