breathe easy

When I bought my Corvair, it was not a running and driving car.  I was looking around on EBay, not really looking to buy, but just trying to get a feel for what kind of prices Corvairs were going for at the time.  I happened onto a listing for a '66 two-door hardtop with the four-carb 140hp engine and the four-speed manual transmission.  It seemed to have everything I wanted in a Corvair, and the price was dirt cheap.  They even said they could deliver it for a reasonable price, so I decided to make a low-ball offer.  I figured that I probably wouldn't get it, and if I did, I'd feel like I got a deal.  Well, the next thing I knew, they were delivering it.  With the clarity of hindsight, however, I don't know if I'd still say that I got a deal.  But that's another story.

So, I knew that it wasn't running and driving when I bought it, but when it showed up I think it was even a little further from running and driving than I'd thought.  Still, I looked it over, and I thought, well, this doesn't look like a whole lot of work, I can probably have this thing buttoned up and ready to go in a month, maybe a month-and-a-half.  Then somehow several months later, I noticed that it was neither buttoned up, nor ready to go.  The Monte Carlo was a fully functional mode of transportation when I bought it, and I never really got into much more than minor maintenance and repairs on it.  So I hadn't really thought about it much, but the Corvair was really my first "project" car.  It sounds stupid, but when I noticed that four or five months had gone by and the car still wasn't driveable, it was kind of an eye-opener that, if you do nothing, nothing gets done.

If you do nothing, nothing gets done.  This has become a sort of a mantra for me, when it comes to projects.  The more you turn the phrase over in your head, the more wisdom falls out of it.

Don't get me wrong, though, I'm not claiming to be any great dynamo.  I have a preternatural gift for doing nothing, and very often nothing is exactly what gets done by me.  But the fact remains that, if you want to finish a project, you have to force yourself to make time to work on it.  And then when that time is made, you have to actually do the work.

However, another side to the same coin (or another face of the same dodecahedron, maybe), is that if you do something, even if it's just a little something, then you are closer to being done.  Even a little progress is still progress.  And that can be very encouraging.  These are the meditative thoughts of solitary nights in the garage, I suppose.

So, what's the point of all this?  Well, the point is that, as it turns out, these principles apply to blogs, too.  And that's how we get from last Novengineber to this Fenginebruary without any posts or updates.  I will mention that, as I write this, the project has reached a very exciting point, and I hope that it's about to turn a significant corner towards completion.  But for now, I will focus on another small piece of the work that's been completed so far, and make another effort at getting the backlog of posts for this blog caught up to date.

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When I was in college, I got a subscription to Car Craft Magazine, and they had an issue with a big list of aftermarket parts catalogs.  Some of the catalogs might cost two or three dollars, a lot of them were free, and you could check off all the catalogs you wanted, send in that form with a check for whatever amount of money your choices added up to, and then the catalogs would start showing up.  This was still sort of the early days of the internet, so this seemed like a great way to get information on aftermarket car parts.  So, I mailed off for some catalogs, maybe half a dozen or so, I don't remember.  However many I got, I actually still have two of them.  One of them is an Edelbrock catalog, and the other one is a big Holley catalog, almost 600 pages long.

Out of those 600 pages, there is one item that I always remember, which was part number 20-112, "Billet Aluminum Throttle Cable Bracket."  It's an aluminum bracket, carved out of billet, finished with a red anodized coating, and it mounts to the carburetor and gives you a place to mount the end of the throttle cable, and connect a throttle return spring.  A fancy part to do a simple job.  The only reason I still remember it, though, is because of the item description.  The item description was two paragraphs long, which seems kind of ridiculous for a throttle cable bracket, and one of the paragraphs included the line, "Let's face it, the throttle cable/return spring bracket is one of the first things your eyes focus on when you lift the hood of any car."  I thought that was hilarious, because I've looked at a lot of engine bays, and I don't think I've ever made any special note of a throttle cable bracket.  I still wonder if someone wrote that line as a joke and it accidentally made it into the catalog.  If that's the case, then it appears that the mistake hasn't been corrected, as Holley apparently still makes the bracket, and still uses the same description.  Looks like the only thing that has changed is that the anodized coating is black now, instead of red.  You can see from the price that they are very proud of it.  I still don't know why anyone would pay that much money for a throttle cable bracket.

I don't know what would actually be the first thing my eyes would focus on when I lift the hood of a car.  I guess I normally look at the rocker covers, because that's how I recognize a lot of different engines, and it's a good way to figure out what I'm looking at.  But the thing that might be most noticeable in a typical engine bay is probably the air cleaner.  It's big, and it's on top of the engine, so it's hard to miss.  So, for that reason, I put some thought into what kind of air cleaner I should get for the Impala.

A typical air cleaner on a stock street car draws air from inside the engine bay.  This air is typically hotter than the air outside the car, because it is being heated by the engine.  Hotter air is less dense, which means that you get fewer air molecules for a given volume of air, which means that the engine gets less air for combustion, which means less power.  Modern NASCAR stock cars use a cowl induction arrangement, with an air box on top of the carburetor plumbed to an opening outside the car, at the base of the windshield.  When the car is moving, the flow of air over the car forms a higher-pressure pocket at the base of the windshield.  This effect, in combination with the fact that air is being drawn from outside the car instead of from inside the engine bay, increases the flow of cold air to the engine, which is better for making power.

By 1965, the top teams in NASCAR were already using an early version of this cowl induction arrangement, with an air cleaner on top of the carburetor being plumbed to a large hole in the firewall, which then opened into the area behind the firewall where the windshield wiper mechanism linkage would be mounted on a street car.  This area was vented to the air at the base of the windshield, so the arrangement formed an effective cowl induction arrangement.  I didn't want to get into the details of finding a place to cut a large hole in my firewall, cutting a large hole in my firewall, and then figuring out a way to fabricate an air cleaner that would somehow connect to that large hole in the firewall, so I wrote off the cowl induction idea.

I think I've mentioned before that there is a guy in California who bought an actual 1965 NASCAR survivor Impala, restored it, and entered it into some vintage racing events, and that he had a blog which covered the restoration process.  That has been a terrific resource for examining details of a real 1965 NASCAR Impala, and I noticed that his car did not have a cowl induction arrangement.  I don't know if this was because his car was campaigned by an independent team without official factory support, and maybe they didn't have the means to fabricate a cowl induction arrangement?  Or maybe those parts were lost before he acquired the car and he just found a suitable stock air cleaner?  Anyway, his car had a large, dual snorkel air cleaner on it, which looked to be what a stock 1965 Impala probably would have had.

I'd never been a big fan of the look of a factory air cleaner with snorkels, so I was considering exercising my artistic license to just fit a round air cleaner with an open element and no snorkels.  But the longer I looked at the dual-snorkel air cleaner, the more it grew on me.  There was something about it that just looked ... right.  So, I shopped around and eventually found a reproduction of a factory-style dual-snorkel air cleaner.

Because of the fact that the air cleaner holds such a prominent position in the engine bay, and because it has a large, flat surface on top, I thought it would be a good place to put some artwork.  I ended up deciding to put a Checkered Performance logo on it, as shown below.

I applied the Checkered Performance logo by masking the air cleaner lid and spraying the red parts of the logo, then re-masking the lid and spraying the white lettering.  Essentially the same process I used to paint the "414 CU. IN." lettering on the rocker covers.

I ended up making a couple of modifications to the base of the air cleaner, too.  Looking around online--I can't even remember now where or how I found them--I found some more photos of the California guy's restored NASCAR Impala.  Those photos showed the dual-snorkel air cleaner in place on the engine, but with extra "windows" cut in the sides of the air cleaner base, presumably to increase air flow capacity by not forcing all of the air to flow through the two snorkels.  Around that time I also got a book about Chevrolet's history in NASCAR, and the book appeared to show that this type of air cleaner modification was common in NASCAR in the 1950s.  So, it seemed reasonable that it might still be used by independent teams in the 1960s.  When the California guy first had his car restored, he had all the work done in only 30 days and then immediately rushed the car to the Monterrey Historics vintage racing event, so maybe there wasn't time to modify the air cleaner before that event, and maybe that's why the modified air cleaner wasn't shown on his blog.  Anyway, while this type of modification would be less effective than cowl induction, it would still be effective at improving air flow into the engine, and it seemed like something I could do relatively easily, so this became the plan.

As an aside, I've always wondered what the purpose of snorkels was on stock air cleaners from the 1960s.  I looked around online, and I couldn't find anyone who really seemed to know for sure.  The only story I read that made any sense was that the snorkels were supposed to help quiet the sound of air flow into the engine and make the car a little quieter.  But, as the lyric says in Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Call Me the Breeze," "I ain't hidin' from nobody, nobody's hidin' from me," so what do I care if the car makes a little more noise?  Let the cutting commence.

The photo below shows the air cleaner base after I had prepared it for cutting.  I applied masking tape, to try to limit the damage to the paint, and then I used a template to trace the oval-shaped windows I wanted to cut into the sides of the base.  I made the template by tracing the shape and size of the snorkel openings onto a light piece of cardboard and cutting that shape out.

You can also see in that photo, there is a little silver mesh dome built into the base of the air cleaner, with a pipe extending down underneath it.  This is called a "flame arrester," and I'm not sure which flame it is supposed to arrest, traveling in what direction, but I believe it is part of the PCV system.  But I had my PCV system plumbed the same way as it was on the Monte Carlo, directly into the base of the carburetor, instead of into the air cleaner, so I didn't need this feature.  Therefore, at the same time that I cut the windows, I also removed the flame arrester and the pipe.  This left a small hole in the base of the air cleaner, which can be seen in the photo below.

That hole needed to be closed up, or else it would provide a path for unfiltered air to get into the engine.  I talked to a technician at work who happens to have a 1969 Impala project, and he said that if I brought the base in, he could weld a cover over the hole.  The hole is in a place where it is not at all visible, so I really just wanted a functional cover, and I didn't care if it was very obviously just a piece of sheet metal welded over the hole.  But the technician wanted to make it look like the hole was never there, so he very carefully tried to weld a piece of metal in place and then blend it into the surrounding metal.  I felt bad that he was putting so much effort into it, but then I got caught up in his vision, I guess, so when he was done welding, I told him I'd take it home and do some more grinding to finish blending it into the surrounding metal.

Well, after working on it for a while, I felt like I had it blended in pretty well, but then I noticed a problem ... there was a spot that had turned colors that the surrounding metal hadn't.  It was getting very hot, and looked like it was probably a thin spot in the metal.  You can see it in the photo below, it's the dark spot around the "nine o'clock" position in the silver area where the paint has been ground off.

I took it back to work and the technician verified that it was a thin spot.  It was so thin that there was a chance that it would eventually crack and break through.  So, at that point we agreed to just give up on the dream of an invisible, seamless repair, and he just welded a piece of metal over the hole to seal it up.  I still took it home and tried to grind the high spots down to blend the patch in a bit, but it's pretty obvious that it's there.  Which is 100% fine with me.

After grinding, I painted the base black again, and that is pretty much the story of the air cleaner modifications.  The photo below shows the modified air cleaner in place on the engine.  When you do air cleaner modifications, air cleaner modifications get done.

More updates to come soon ... I hope....