The first major project that I started thinking through would have been my plans for Bertha, my 1972 Monte Carlo. Those plans evolved over the course of the fourteen years that I owned that car. In the beginning, when I was in college, I just wanted to make it a fast car for drag racing. Car Craft Magazine was a big influence on me at that time, and most of Car Craft's emphasis was on do-it-yourself drag cars. But, by the time I got out of college, I had realized that the only way to make a street car really fast for drag racing was to make it wholly impractical as a street car. And I didn't want to give up the ability to drive the car regularly, so my plans for the car changed.
Around ten years ago, during my first job after college, I was still thinking that someday I'd fix Bertha up. The 1970-72 Monte Carlo body was raced in NASCAR, and I started to daydream about fixing up Bertha to look like a NASCAR Monte Carlo, but still street legal. But there were some complications if I really wanted to capture an "authentic" NASCAR appearance. For example, why would a NASCAR Monte Carlo have headlights, taillights, windshield wipers, and so on?
Well, one of my favorite stories from motorsports history is the story of Hershel McGriff's Oly Charger. In the early 1970s, in the midst of the global oil crisis, the Automobile Club de l'Oueste, (which sanctions the 24 Hours of LeMans endurance race in LeMans, France) put into place some new rules limiting fuel consumption. Racing teams balked at the gesture and started withdrawing from the race in sufficient numbers that the ACO began to worry that the field of cars would dwindle, and that spectators would lose interest as a result. To try to ensure a full field, the ACO started looking for other places from which to attract competitors. This is how the "NASCAR GT" class was formed for LeMans. Why they thought NASCAR stock cars with massive V8 engines would be more inclined to participate in a race which limited fuel consumption is, perhaps, questionable, but it's not really the point here.
As far as I know, the NASCAR GT class no longer exists for LeMans. Even when it did, I think only a few teams ever actually attempted to compete in it. But Hershel McGriff's Olympia beer-sponsored Dodge Charger is probably the most famous entry in the class. Unfortunately, the engine builder had built and tuned the engine to run on race gas in the US, not realizing that they wouldn't be able to get the same octane gasoline in France. When they arrived in LeMans, it wasn't long before the team realized the problem. They considered stacking multiple cylinder head gaskets to try to drop compression ratio, but in the end decided to retard the ignition timing and hope for the best. Unfortunately the Charger didn't last long before its engine self-destructed. But, the beast of a car had already made an imprint on the French psyche; the huge, roaring Charger found a place in the hearts and memories of more than one impressionable Frenchperson, and has actually now been recreated and races regularly in historic endurance racing events around Europe.
So I started to think ... what if another NASCAR team went to LeMans in the early '70s? What if they raced a 1972 Monte Carlo? Well, the race is run through the night, and through rain or shine, so they'd need headlights, taillights and windshield wipers. And so my NASCAR GT Monte Carlo LeMans racer started to take shape in my mind.
Sadly, of course, that project never got off the ground. Bertha was so rusted away by the time I got ready to start a project, I decided it would be smarter to just buy another car. Of course, we know now that that car also turned out to be badly rusted, but I do think that, in spite of the rough condition of Matilda's body, her frame is in much better shape than Bertha's was.
Before the Matilda project got underway, I also daydreamed about a 1968-72 Nova project. One of my all-time favorite historical racing series was the SCCA Trans Am series that ran from the mid-'60s into the early-'70s. At the peak of its popularity, it pitted all the major American manufacturers' pony car platforms against each other on road courses around North America. The pony cars included Chevrolet's Camaro, Pontiac's Firebird, Ford's Mustang, Mercury's Cougar, Dodge's Challenger, Plymouth's Barracuda, and AMC's Javelin. In the early days of the series, though, there were other small sedans that competed in the series, including Chevrolet Corvairs and Chevrolet Novas. So for my hypothetical Nova project, I asked myself: what if a team was still racing a Nova in the Trans Am series in 1970?
But, the rules of the Trans Am series limited engine displacement to a maximum of 305cu.in. (5.0L), which would put Bertha's big block well over the limit. I was already mentally committed to using the big block in my project. Of course, it wasn't too big of a stretch to ask, "What if the Trans Am series had expanded to include a big block class?," but it just wouldn't really make sense to put a big block in such a small car for the purpose of road racing. The weight distribution would be much worse than the small blocks they actually ran, and there wouldn't be much (if any) improvement in power or power-to-weight ratio. Anyway, another thing I considered was that the Trans Am look circa 1970 included flared fenders around the wheel wells as a signature feature, and I figured that flared fenders would cost me more money. I didn't think the car would look right without flared fenders, and I didn't think I wanted to find out how much they would cost.
So, I abandoned the idea of a Nova project, and tried to focus on cars of the era that would have run big block engines. My favorite race cars that ran big blocks around the '60s and '70s were NASCAR and Can Am. The Can Am cars were 100% purpose-built race cars with radical bodywork, and wouldn't be practical to try to build, or to drive on the street. That pretty much left me with NASCAR.
So, I abandoned the idea of a Nova project, and tried to focus on cars of the era that would have run big block engines. My favorite race cars that ran big blocks around the '60s and '70s were NASCAR and Can Am. The Can Am cars were 100% purpose-built race cars with radical bodywork, and wouldn't be practical to try to build, or to drive on the street. That pretty much left me with NASCAR.
NASCAR was also allowing extensive body modifications around the wheel wells by 1970, so I started looking at NASCAR bodies from the mid-'60s, when the bodies really were still "stock." I used to really like the look of the 1967 Impala SS, and I had once tried to do some research to see if anyone had ever raced one in NASCAR. But it was right around 1965-66 that NASCAR teams were switching from full-size cars, like the Impala, to midsize cars, like the Chevelle, so by 1967 no one was running full-size cars in NASCAR competition, and I found no evidence of any 1967 NASCAR Impalas. But, while looking, I stumbled onto a 1965 NASCAR Impala which had been restored. I really liked the look of it quite a bit, and so as I was finally ready to start my project and I was trying to decide on what kind of car to build, I came back to the 1965 Impala as a possibility. But still ... in 1965, NASCAR did require elimination of headlights and taillights, windshield wipers were removed, full roll cages were installed ... so there was still somewhat more extensive modification from "stock" than what I had in mind for my project. Those changes are subtle enough that I could probably file them under "artistic license," and that was essentially my intention when I started this project. But then again....
Looking at the Trans Am series, especially in its first year or two of competition (1966-67), the cars being raced were actually much closer to stock than NASCAR's so-called "stock cars." Trans Am allowed no bodywork modifications in the early days, and many cars raced with essentially full interiors, and little more safety equipment than a four-point roll bar. I have a book which even shows photos of one car that was raced with a full backseat in it. The driver would drive his wife and kids to the track in the car, they would watch him race it, and then he would drive them all home. Somewhat surprisingly, according to the book, the main reason why the race teams started using full roll cages, instead of the simple four-point roll bar, was because the full cage would serve to stiffen the chassis and provide a better handling car than the four-point bar would. So the roll cages were actually implemented in the pursuit of performance before they were ever mandated for safety.
Anyway, the Trans Am series' low level of modification to the stock production sedans that were being raced was very much in line with what I had planned for my project. This brought me around to another "what if" scenario: What if there was a big block class in Trans Am, and what if that class specified use of full-size production sedans? As it was, the Trans Am had two classes, which were called U-2 and O-2. The names indicate two different limits on engine displacement: one is Under 2 Liters, and the other is Over 2 Liters. The O-2 class, however, was also limited to being under 5 Liters. So it's really not that much of a stretch to imagine a third class, which could have been called O-5, or U-7, or whatever you like, which could have allowed displacements up to 7 Liters. A limit of 7 Liters would allow almost all of the engines used in NASCAR to compete. The Trans Am Series would have allowed manufacturers to show off their full-size sedans and big block engines in markets that NASCAR didn't typically reach, since NASCAR was still primarily confined to the Southeast in the mid-'60s.
So if there were an O-5/U-7 class for full size production sedans in the Trans Am series in 1966, and if someone entered a 1965 Impala SS in that class, what would that car look like? That is essentially the question-that-nobody-asked which I am attempting to answer with my project.
Most people don't impose all these rules on their projects, they just build whatever they want. And it would be easy to argue that I'm breaking my own rules in several details of the project, anyway. So, why bother? Well, I don't really have an answer for that question, other than to say I can't help it. Maybe it's because I spend so much time looking at pictures of old race cars, it makes me want my project to look "right" in the context of the motorsports history I've studied. Maybe at heart I'm still an eight-year-old playing pretend, and wanting to imagine I'm driving a race car in the 1960s. Regardless of the reasoning, though, it's just the way I've always tended to approach these hypothetical projects. I do, however, know of one other person who approaches his projects in a similar way.
There is a guy named Steve Strope, who has a custom car shop called Pure Vision Design. It's a high-end shop that has done many magazine-feature-quality cars. Here is a video profiling one of Strope's projects, a Martini Mustang.
Anyway, the Trans Am series' low level of modification to the stock production sedans that were being raced was very much in line with what I had planned for my project. This brought me around to another "what if" scenario: What if there was a big block class in Trans Am, and what if that class specified use of full-size production sedans? As it was, the Trans Am had two classes, which were called U-2 and O-2. The names indicate two different limits on engine displacement: one is Under 2 Liters, and the other is Over 2 Liters. The O-2 class, however, was also limited to being under 5 Liters. So it's really not that much of a stretch to imagine a third class, which could have been called O-5, or U-7, or whatever you like, which could have allowed displacements up to 7 Liters. A limit of 7 Liters would allow almost all of the engines used in NASCAR to compete. The Trans Am Series would have allowed manufacturers to show off their full-size sedans and big block engines in markets that NASCAR didn't typically reach, since NASCAR was still primarily confined to the Southeast in the mid-'60s.
So if there were an O-5/U-7 class for full size production sedans in the Trans Am series in 1966, and if someone entered a 1965 Impala SS in that class, what would that car look like? That is essentially the question-that-nobody-asked which I am attempting to answer with my project.
Most people don't impose all these rules on their projects, they just build whatever they want. And it would be easy to argue that I'm breaking my own rules in several details of the project, anyway. So, why bother? Well, I don't really have an answer for that question, other than to say I can't help it. Maybe it's because I spend so much time looking at pictures of old race cars, it makes me want my project to look "right" in the context of the motorsports history I've studied. Maybe at heart I'm still an eight-year-old playing pretend, and wanting to imagine I'm driving a race car in the 1960s. Regardless of the reasoning, though, it's just the way I've always tended to approach these hypothetical projects. I do, however, know of one other person who approaches his projects in a similar way.
There is a guy named Steve Strope, who has a custom car shop called Pure Vision Design. It's a high-end shop that has done many magazine-feature-quality cars. Here is a video profiling one of Strope's projects, a Martini Mustang.
There are three main things I like about Strope. One is that he builds a lot of really cool cars which tend to come close to my idea of how I would build them. I think anyone who likes customized and modified cars will never be completely satisfied with someone else's build. No matter how skilled the builder, it's just a matter of personal taste, any other person who looks at it is likely to pick out some details and say, "I would have done that differently." But there isn't usually much I'd change about Strope's cars.
The second thing I like about Strope is, he shares my habit of framing his projects in these "what if" scenarios, to try to explain how the car he's building might have come to exist within the motorsports landscape of its era. In the video at the link above, he asks: What if Ford wanted to do some additional performance testing of the V8 engine they'd developed for the Indy 500? What if they decided to put it in a road-racing Mustang? What if they worked with the famous racing team, Martini, to make it happen? On his website, you can even see that he actually built a third-generation Nova with a Trans Am twist, similar to what I'd imagined.
One of Strope's most recent projects, however, really caught my eye. It's a 1967 Ford Fairlane built with a heavy NASCAR influence. In a lot of ways, it feels like a (Ford) version of my own project. Of course, Strope has a lot more talent and resources than I have, and his project is absolutely gorgeous. Some people may think it would pain me to recommend a video of a Ford project, but it actually pains me much more to recommend a video with Jay Leno in it. Still, if you can tolerate Leno's blustering ignorance for half an hour, this video walks extensively through the details of the beautiful build. I strongly recommend you check it out.
The third thing I like about Strope is all the details he builds into his cars. In the video about his Martini Mustang, he says that his favorite compliment is when people tell him they keep coming back to look at one of his cars and finding things they hadn't noticed before. Again, I wouldn't presume to put myself on the same level as Strope, but I also really like trying to incorporate certain small details into my project, within my resources and abilities. There's been a lot of progress on some critical items for the project lately, which I'll try to summarize soon in another post, but the rest of this post is about one particular detail of the custom dashboard.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I had plans to modify the stock dashboard, and I described the gigantic vacuum gauge that was positioned closer to the passenger side of the car than it was to the driver, for some reason. A vacuum gauge can give some useful information on how hard the engine is working. It can potentially be a handy tuning tool, as well, although I don't think the one mounted in the dash was really sensitive enough for that.
I love carburetors, but I'm not really experienced enough with them to be very skilled at tuning them. As a cheat, I decided to fit oxygen sensors in the exhaust. These will tell me how well the carburetor is doing its job, and under what circumstances, and help me make more informed decisions on how to tune the carburetor. I decided that the pod in the dashboard where the vacuum gauge was mounted would make a good place to show off a custom display for the O2 sensors.
I looked around online a little bit to see what was available for O2 sensor kits, and I settled on a unit from Edelbrock. I thought it looked like I could repackage it for my custom dash, and I like Edelbrock. I ordered two, so that I could put an O2 sensor in each header collector, one for each bank. This is what the display looks like, as received in the kit:
The numbers indicate the air/fuel ratio, with 12 being a rich mixture (less air per quantity of fuel), and 15 being lean (more air per quantity of fuel). You run more risk of damaging your engine when you run too lean, which is why the LED at the lean end of the scale is red, whereas the LEDs at the rich end of the scale are just yellow.
If you open up the box and slide the circuit board out a little bit, you can see the LEDs for the display hanging off of the circuit board.
If you look closely in that picture, you can see that I marked one lead of each LED with a black Sharpie. The acronym "LED" stands for "light emitting diode," and a diode is an electronic device that will allow electrical current to flow in only one direction through it. I was planning to cut the LEDs off the circuit board and wire in extension wires so that I could then mount the LEDs in a different display. So I marked one lead on each LED black so that I could make sure to wire the LEDs back exactly how they were connected originally.
To be honest, I didn't really remember for sure if LEDs had to be wired only one way, but it sounded reasonable, and if you're not sure about something you're taking apart, it's usually best to do everything you can to put it back EXACTLY the way it was when it goes back together, or at least as close as possible. I have developed a habit of going to great pains to put things back exactly where they came from whenever I disassemble something. I won't claim to be perfect about doing this, but I recommend it.
So, after marking the LEDs, I cut each one off, one at a time, and soldered a pair of wires to it. I had a bundle of twelve twisted pairs of 22ga wire, each pair being a unique combination of two colors. So, I used a different combination of colors for each LED, and in each case I put whatever the "hotter" color was on the lead that I hadn't marked black, and the "cooler" color on the lead that I had marked black. For example, if the wires were red and blue, the blue wire would go on the black LED lead. If the wires were orange and black, the black wire would go on the black LED lead. And so on. One pair was red and yellow, both of which are "hot" colors, so I put the red wire on the unmarked LED lead, put the yellow wire on the black LED lead, and then used a Sharpie to put a few black stripes on the end of the yellow wire, so I wouldn't forget. The project could be done without going to these lengths, but I wanted to be as orderly as I could, to make it easier to retrace my steps, in case I had to troubleshoot something in the future.
Before starting all this, I'd made a face plate for the custom display. I planned to use the housing of the vacuum gauge as a housing for my O2 sensor display, so I disassembled the vacuum gauge and removed its guts. Then I traced around its face plate and cut out a piece of sheet metal in the same shape. I drilled mounting holes for all the O2 sensor display LEDs, and then I painted it. I painted it silver, and then I masked it and painted on a "CP" logo.
"CP" stands for "Checkered Performance," which is the name I've chosen for my fictitious shop/business. Of course checkered flags are essentially synonymous with racing, but Merriam-Webster's definition of "checkered" as "marked by many problems or failures" also seemed supremely appropriate for most things I do. The photo above was taken after I'd already masked and sprayed the "CP" letters, and the part has been masked to spray a checkered flag graphic in a different color.
Anyway, as I worked through soldering wires to the LEDs, I punched holes in a piece of paper and I put the wires for each LED through a hole in the paper. This was just to create a holder to keep the LEDs in the same order that they were on the circuit board. In this way I could make sure that each LED would eventually be connected to the same circuit it was originally connected to on the circuit board. When all of the LEDs for one display were cut and soldered, I put them into the face plate that I'd made for the custom display.
The post in the middle of the face plate is for mounting the face plate to the back plate when the gauge is assembled. It is a piece of threaded rod which is threaded into a coupling nut. There are enough nuts threaded on behind the coupling nut to provide the proper spacing from the back plate to the face plate. The coupling nut and all the spacer washers are held on with thread locker, as they are not intended to be removed. The last nut (uppermost in this picture) is removable and is used to attach the back plate. The face plate is held on by a screw that threads into the coupling nut.
Then I took liquid electrical tape, and slopped it liberally on to the back of the LEDs, on the back of the face plate. This would serve two purposes: first it, coats the bare wires and leads so that they won't short out on each other, and secondly it helps to hold the LEDs into the face plate.
I then repeated that process for the second O2 sensor display. I made sure to mark all of the LEDs black on the same lead that was marked black for the other display, and I made sure to use the same color wires for each LED as what I'd used on the other bank. For example, if the red LED on the first bank had red and blue wires on it, then that's what I used for the other bank. And so on. Again, this is not necessary for functionality, but I wanted to keep things as orderly as possible.
By this time, I now had all fourteen LEDs (seven per bank) installed in the face plate, with a twisted pair soldered to each one. I then started to assemble them into what had originally been the vacuum gauge. I took the back plate of the vacuum gauge and modified it to form the back plate of my O2 sensor display. The vacuum gauge had a copper vacuum line running to the back of it, which required a relatively large hole in the middle of the back plate. I needed a smaller hole, so I cut a small piece of steel to fit in the middle of the back plate, and I put a small hole in the middle of it, then two other small holes, one on each side, in order to attach it to the gauge back plate with small screws.
I drilled the two holes next to each other at the bottom, in order to have holes where I could pass the wires for the LEDs through the back plate. That's why they have rubber grommets in them, to keep the wires from chafing on the edges of the holes. The other two holes, towards the top, were already there, and that's where the light bulbs for the gauge backlighting will be installed.
So, next I assembled the face plate to the back plate and threaded all the wires through the two grommeted holes.
My plan for mounting the circuit boards was to just leave them in their plastic boxes. To provide some support for the wires as they passed out of the boxes, I decided to enlarge the holes in the box face plates, install small grommets, and pass the wires through those holes. So, before I could solder the wires to the circuit boards, I had to thread the wires through those face plates.
That photo shows the back sides of the face plates after they have been threaded onto the wires. The black plastic rectangles are the retaining frames that clip onto the boxes and hold the face plates in place. The black Sharpie marks on the wires show where I planned to cut them and solder them to the circuit boards.
Next step was to solder the wires to the circuit boards.
As I cut each wire pair and stripped its ends to prepare it for soldering, I tested the LED with a battery. I wasn't sure what voltage the LEDs were supposed to see, and I know that some vehicle electronics knock the vehicles twelve-volt power down to five volts, so I decided to tape a couple of 1.5V AA batteries together and wire them in series to create a three volt battery. Every single LED lit up perfectly ... until the last one.
My first assumption was that I hadn't gotten a good connection when I soldered the wires to the LED, but eventually I was able to determine that the LED itself was bad. I find it hard to believe that it would have gotten through Edelbrock's quality control that way, so it seems most likely that I somehow damaged it when I soldered the wires to it. I used a razor blade to cut through the liquid electrical tape around the bad LED, melted the solder off of it to disconnect the wires, and removed it from the face plate.
I needed a red LED to replace the bad one. You can get 100 red LEDs for $4.63 on Amazon, but I only wanted one, and I wanted to have it that same day if at all possible, so I drove to Radioshack and bought one red LED for two dollars, plus tax.
When I got home, I tested the new LED to verify it worked, checked its polarity to determine which lead should be the "black" one, according to how I'd marked all the LEDs with the Sharpie, put it in the face plate, and soldered the wires to it.
In the photo, you can see the new LED on the left, and you can see where I trimmed away the liquid electrical tape to remove the defective one. The defective one had a little black spot inside it, presumably from where something got hot and over heated. I messed around with it for a while, just because I couldn't believe it was really bad right out of the box. Eventually it did light up a little bit, but it made a crackling sound and smelled a bit like burning, so evidently it was bad.
If this all sounds like a tedious process, it's probably safe to say that it was actually at least twenty times more tedious than it sounds. I will say, though, that when it came time to troubleshoot and replace the bad LED, all the steps I took make the assembly orderly did help a great deal.
With all the wires soldered up, I was able to reassemble the circuit board enclosures and assemble the gauge enclosure.
You can see that the Checkered Performance logo looks a little bit crappy. No matter how hard I try to make it look perfect, it always seems to come out with a few flaws, which I suppose is perfect for the Checkered Performance brand, anyway.
I had planned ahead a little bit and drilled some holes in the circuit board enclosures, in order to be able to zip tie them to each other, just to keep them somewhat organized.
I then drilled a couple extra holes in the back plate of the gauge enclosure and ran another zip tie through those two holes, and through one of the zip ties on the circuit board enclosures, thereby effectively hanging the circuit board boxes off the back of the gauge body.
The last thing I wanted to do in order to complete the gauge display was to make a plastic lens to cover it. The vacuum gauge lens had a large feature in the middle of it which hid some of the guts of the gauge from view in the stock dash, so I couldn't re-use that without it hiding some of my "CP" logo. I had planned to cast a new lens, using part of the stock lens, and a curved piece of clear plastic (more on that below). I put an absurd amount of time and money into a first attempt at casting a lens, and it came out so full of bubbles that you couldn't see through it. I'm not going to bother to document that here because I've already spent a ridiculous amount of time writing this entry, and because it's frustrating to think about what a huge waste of effort the whole deal was, and because there are lots of other places on the internet that can tell you how to do it right, if you really want to do something like that. The products I used were from a company called Alumilite. I think they make some cool stuff, if you're serious about casting plastic parts, but I decided it was going to be too big of an investment for just a couple of one-off pieces. If you are planning to try something like that, I'll just say, do everything you can to follow any advice they have on how to get rid of bubbles in the part.
I wanted my lens to have some curvature to it, partly for aesthetics, and partly because I thought it might help to minimize glare if it wasn't just a flat surface. In order to get a curved piece of clear plastic, I searched Amazon for plastic fish bowls. They have some hemispherical fish bowls that are made to hang on the wall, and they are cheap.
After my failed attempt at casting a lens, I thought I'd learned enough that I could make a better product on a second attempt, but there was still no guarantee that it would be satisfactory, and it would cost still more time and money. I figured that I could probably cut a serviceable lens out of a fishbowl and be done with it. This would be a lot cheaper, take a lot less effort, and probably turn out a product which would be wholly satisfactory.
So, I ordered two more fishbowls (there is a pod at the other end of the gauge cluster which will also need a new lens) from Amazon. I accidentally ordered larger ones this time, which worked out better because their curvature is less extreme. I traced the outside shape of the stock lens onto the inside of one of the fishbowls and carefully cut it out with a cutoff wheel on a Dremel.
Doesn't look too bad. Like I said, my initial thought was that a curved surface would show less glare than a flat one. But after looking at this, it seems like while a flat surface might completely obscure the gauge with glare when light hits it at just the right angle, a curved surface might partially obscure the gauge at all times, no matter what angle the light hits it at. So I may eventually end up replacing the curved lenses with flat ones. But I think for now I'll try the curved ones, because I think they look cool.
Here's one last photo, showing the gauge and lens as they'll be installed in the dash.
It's a bit of an awkward photo as I was holding the gauge in place from the back with one hand while taking the picture with my other hand, but I think it shows the general idea. Not too bad. I suppose I can probably get a piece of plexiglass and cut a flat lens and test fit that to see how it compares before I put everything together for the last time. Always something else to do....
There's been a lot of progress on a lot of stuff lately, and I'll try to update some more of those things in another post soon. Until then, progress continues to grind slowly forward....
The second thing I like about Strope is, he shares my habit of framing his projects in these "what if" scenarios, to try to explain how the car he's building might have come to exist within the motorsports landscape of its era. In the video at the link above, he asks: What if Ford wanted to do some additional performance testing of the V8 engine they'd developed for the Indy 500? What if they decided to put it in a road-racing Mustang? What if they worked with the famous racing team, Martini, to make it happen? On his website, you can even see that he actually built a third-generation Nova with a Trans Am twist, similar to what I'd imagined.
One of Strope's most recent projects, however, really caught my eye. It's a 1967 Ford Fairlane built with a heavy NASCAR influence. In a lot of ways, it feels like a (Ford) version of my own project. Of course, Strope has a lot more talent and resources than I have, and his project is absolutely gorgeous. Some people may think it would pain me to recommend a video of a Ford project, but it actually pains me much more to recommend a video with Jay Leno in it. Still, if you can tolerate Leno's blustering ignorance for half an hour, this video walks extensively through the details of the beautiful build. I strongly recommend you check it out.
The third thing I like about Strope is all the details he builds into his cars. In the video about his Martini Mustang, he says that his favorite compliment is when people tell him they keep coming back to look at one of his cars and finding things they hadn't noticed before. Again, I wouldn't presume to put myself on the same level as Strope, but I also really like trying to incorporate certain small details into my project, within my resources and abilities. There's been a lot of progress on some critical items for the project lately, which I'll try to summarize soon in another post, but the rest of this post is about one particular detail of the custom dashboard.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I had plans to modify the stock dashboard, and I described the gigantic vacuum gauge that was positioned closer to the passenger side of the car than it was to the driver, for some reason. A vacuum gauge can give some useful information on how hard the engine is working. It can potentially be a handy tuning tool, as well, although I don't think the one mounted in the dash was really sensitive enough for that.
I love carburetors, but I'm not really experienced enough with them to be very skilled at tuning them. As a cheat, I decided to fit oxygen sensors in the exhaust. These will tell me how well the carburetor is doing its job, and under what circumstances, and help me make more informed decisions on how to tune the carburetor. I decided that the pod in the dashboard where the vacuum gauge was mounted would make a good place to show off a custom display for the O2 sensors.
I looked around online a little bit to see what was available for O2 sensor kits, and I settled on a unit from Edelbrock. I thought it looked like I could repackage it for my custom dash, and I like Edelbrock. I ordered two, so that I could put an O2 sensor in each header collector, one for each bank. This is what the display looks like, as received in the kit:
The numbers indicate the air/fuel ratio, with 12 being a rich mixture (less air per quantity of fuel), and 15 being lean (more air per quantity of fuel). You run more risk of damaging your engine when you run too lean, which is why the LED at the lean end of the scale is red, whereas the LEDs at the rich end of the scale are just yellow.
If you open up the box and slide the circuit board out a little bit, you can see the LEDs for the display hanging off of the circuit board.
If you look closely in that picture, you can see that I marked one lead of each LED with a black Sharpie. The acronym "LED" stands for "light emitting diode," and a diode is an electronic device that will allow electrical current to flow in only one direction through it. I was planning to cut the LEDs off the circuit board and wire in extension wires so that I could then mount the LEDs in a different display. So I marked one lead on each LED black so that I could make sure to wire the LEDs back exactly how they were connected originally.
To be honest, I didn't really remember for sure if LEDs had to be wired only one way, but it sounded reasonable, and if you're not sure about something you're taking apart, it's usually best to do everything you can to put it back EXACTLY the way it was when it goes back together, or at least as close as possible. I have developed a habit of going to great pains to put things back exactly where they came from whenever I disassemble something. I won't claim to be perfect about doing this, but I recommend it.
So, after marking the LEDs, I cut each one off, one at a time, and soldered a pair of wires to it. I had a bundle of twelve twisted pairs of 22ga wire, each pair being a unique combination of two colors. So, I used a different combination of colors for each LED, and in each case I put whatever the "hotter" color was on the lead that I hadn't marked black, and the "cooler" color on the lead that I had marked black. For example, if the wires were red and blue, the blue wire would go on the black LED lead. If the wires were orange and black, the black wire would go on the black LED lead. And so on. One pair was red and yellow, both of which are "hot" colors, so I put the red wire on the unmarked LED lead, put the yellow wire on the black LED lead, and then used a Sharpie to put a few black stripes on the end of the yellow wire, so I wouldn't forget. The project could be done without going to these lengths, but I wanted to be as orderly as I could, to make it easier to retrace my steps, in case I had to troubleshoot something in the future.
Before starting all this, I'd made a face plate for the custom display. I planned to use the housing of the vacuum gauge as a housing for my O2 sensor display, so I disassembled the vacuum gauge and removed its guts. Then I traced around its face plate and cut out a piece of sheet metal in the same shape. I drilled mounting holes for all the O2 sensor display LEDs, and then I painted it. I painted it silver, and then I masked it and painted on a "CP" logo.
"CP" stands for "Checkered Performance," which is the name I've chosen for my fictitious shop/business. Of course checkered flags are essentially synonymous with racing, but Merriam-Webster's definition of "checkered" as "marked by many problems or failures" also seemed supremely appropriate for most things I do. The photo above was taken after I'd already masked and sprayed the "CP" letters, and the part has been masked to spray a checkered flag graphic in a different color.
Anyway, as I worked through soldering wires to the LEDs, I punched holes in a piece of paper and I put the wires for each LED through a hole in the paper. This was just to create a holder to keep the LEDs in the same order that they were on the circuit board. In this way I could make sure that each LED would eventually be connected to the same circuit it was originally connected to on the circuit board. When all of the LEDs for one display were cut and soldered, I put them into the face plate that I'd made for the custom display.
The post in the middle of the face plate is for mounting the face plate to the back plate when the gauge is assembled. It is a piece of threaded rod which is threaded into a coupling nut. There are enough nuts threaded on behind the coupling nut to provide the proper spacing from the back plate to the face plate. The coupling nut and all the spacer washers are held on with thread locker, as they are not intended to be removed. The last nut (uppermost in this picture) is removable and is used to attach the back plate. The face plate is held on by a screw that threads into the coupling nut.
Then I took liquid electrical tape, and slopped it liberally on to the back of the LEDs, on the back of the face plate. This would serve two purposes: first it, coats the bare wires and leads so that they won't short out on each other, and secondly it helps to hold the LEDs into the face plate.
I then repeated that process for the second O2 sensor display. I made sure to mark all of the LEDs black on the same lead that was marked black for the other display, and I made sure to use the same color wires for each LED as what I'd used on the other bank. For example, if the red LED on the first bank had red and blue wires on it, then that's what I used for the other bank. And so on. Again, this is not necessary for functionality, but I wanted to keep things as orderly as possible.
By this time, I now had all fourteen LEDs (seven per bank) installed in the face plate, with a twisted pair soldered to each one. I then started to assemble them into what had originally been the vacuum gauge. I took the back plate of the vacuum gauge and modified it to form the back plate of my O2 sensor display. The vacuum gauge had a copper vacuum line running to the back of it, which required a relatively large hole in the middle of the back plate. I needed a smaller hole, so I cut a small piece of steel to fit in the middle of the back plate, and I put a small hole in the middle of it, then two other small holes, one on each side, in order to attach it to the gauge back plate with small screws.
I drilled the two holes next to each other at the bottom, in order to have holes where I could pass the wires for the LEDs through the back plate. That's why they have rubber grommets in them, to keep the wires from chafing on the edges of the holes. The other two holes, towards the top, were already there, and that's where the light bulbs for the gauge backlighting will be installed.
So, next I assembled the face plate to the back plate and threaded all the wires through the two grommeted holes.
My plan for mounting the circuit boards was to just leave them in their plastic boxes. To provide some support for the wires as they passed out of the boxes, I decided to enlarge the holes in the box face plates, install small grommets, and pass the wires through those holes. So, before I could solder the wires to the circuit boards, I had to thread the wires through those face plates.
That photo shows the back sides of the face plates after they have been threaded onto the wires. The black plastic rectangles are the retaining frames that clip onto the boxes and hold the face plates in place. The black Sharpie marks on the wires show where I planned to cut them and solder them to the circuit boards.
Next step was to solder the wires to the circuit boards.
After soldering the wires to the circuit board, I slopped on some more liquid electrical tape.
As I cut each wire pair and stripped its ends to prepare it for soldering, I tested the LED with a battery. I wasn't sure what voltage the LEDs were supposed to see, and I know that some vehicle electronics knock the vehicles twelve-volt power down to five volts, so I decided to tape a couple of 1.5V AA batteries together and wire them in series to create a three volt battery. Every single LED lit up perfectly ... until the last one.
My first assumption was that I hadn't gotten a good connection when I soldered the wires to the LED, but eventually I was able to determine that the LED itself was bad. I find it hard to believe that it would have gotten through Edelbrock's quality control that way, so it seems most likely that I somehow damaged it when I soldered the wires to it. I used a razor blade to cut through the liquid electrical tape around the bad LED, melted the solder off of it to disconnect the wires, and removed it from the face plate.
I needed a red LED to replace the bad one. You can get 100 red LEDs for $4.63 on Amazon, but I only wanted one, and I wanted to have it that same day if at all possible, so I drove to Radioshack and bought one red LED for two dollars, plus tax.
When I got home, I tested the new LED to verify it worked, checked its polarity to determine which lead should be the "black" one, according to how I'd marked all the LEDs with the Sharpie, put it in the face plate, and soldered the wires to it.
In the photo, you can see the new LED on the left, and you can see where I trimmed away the liquid electrical tape to remove the defective one. The defective one had a little black spot inside it, presumably from where something got hot and over heated. I messed around with it for a while, just because I couldn't believe it was really bad right out of the box. Eventually it did light up a little bit, but it made a crackling sound and smelled a bit like burning, so evidently it was bad.
If this all sounds like a tedious process, it's probably safe to say that it was actually at least twenty times more tedious than it sounds. I will say, though, that when it came time to troubleshoot and replace the bad LED, all the steps I took make the assembly orderly did help a great deal.
With all the wires soldered up, I was able to reassemble the circuit board enclosures and assemble the gauge enclosure.
You can see that the Checkered Performance logo looks a little bit crappy. No matter how hard I try to make it look perfect, it always seems to come out with a few flaws, which I suppose is perfect for the Checkered Performance brand, anyway.
I had planned ahead a little bit and drilled some holes in the circuit board enclosures, in order to be able to zip tie them to each other, just to keep them somewhat organized.
I then drilled a couple extra holes in the back plate of the gauge enclosure and ran another zip tie through those two holes, and through one of the zip ties on the circuit board enclosures, thereby effectively hanging the circuit board boxes off the back of the gauge body.
The last thing I wanted to do in order to complete the gauge display was to make a plastic lens to cover it. The vacuum gauge lens had a large feature in the middle of it which hid some of the guts of the gauge from view in the stock dash, so I couldn't re-use that without it hiding some of my "CP" logo. I had planned to cast a new lens, using part of the stock lens, and a curved piece of clear plastic (more on that below). I put an absurd amount of time and money into a first attempt at casting a lens, and it came out so full of bubbles that you couldn't see through it. I'm not going to bother to document that here because I've already spent a ridiculous amount of time writing this entry, and because it's frustrating to think about what a huge waste of effort the whole deal was, and because there are lots of other places on the internet that can tell you how to do it right, if you really want to do something like that. The products I used were from a company called Alumilite. I think they make some cool stuff, if you're serious about casting plastic parts, but I decided it was going to be too big of an investment for just a couple of one-off pieces. If you are planning to try something like that, I'll just say, do everything you can to follow any advice they have on how to get rid of bubbles in the part.
I wanted my lens to have some curvature to it, partly for aesthetics, and partly because I thought it might help to minimize glare if it wasn't just a flat surface. In order to get a curved piece of clear plastic, I searched Amazon for plastic fish bowls. They have some hemispherical fish bowls that are made to hang on the wall, and they are cheap.
After my failed attempt at casting a lens, I thought I'd learned enough that I could make a better product on a second attempt, but there was still no guarantee that it would be satisfactory, and it would cost still more time and money. I figured that I could probably cut a serviceable lens out of a fishbowl and be done with it. This would be a lot cheaper, take a lot less effort, and probably turn out a product which would be wholly satisfactory.
So, I ordered two more fishbowls (there is a pod at the other end of the gauge cluster which will also need a new lens) from Amazon. I accidentally ordered larger ones this time, which worked out better because their curvature is less extreme. I traced the outside shape of the stock lens onto the inside of one of the fishbowls and carefully cut it out with a cutoff wheel on a Dremel.
Doesn't look too bad. Like I said, my initial thought was that a curved surface would show less glare than a flat one. But after looking at this, it seems like while a flat surface might completely obscure the gauge with glare when light hits it at just the right angle, a curved surface might partially obscure the gauge at all times, no matter what angle the light hits it at. So I may eventually end up replacing the curved lenses with flat ones. But I think for now I'll try the curved ones, because I think they look cool.
Here's one last photo, showing the gauge and lens as they'll be installed in the dash.
It's a bit of an awkward photo as I was holding the gauge in place from the back with one hand while taking the picture with my other hand, but I think it shows the general idea. Not too bad. I suppose I can probably get a piece of plexiglass and cut a flat lens and test fit that to see how it compares before I put everything together for the last time. Always something else to do....
There's been a lot of progress on a lot of stuff lately, and I'll try to update some more of those things in another post soon. Until then, progress continues to grind slowly forward....
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