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....

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.