righting wrongs

Three entries ago I recounted the thrill of the first engine start, right up to the agony of the first discovery of a coolant leak.  Two entries ago, I detailed the coolant leak, up through the decision to pull the engine and disassemble it in order to repair a stripped head bolt hole and balance the bottom end.  In my last entry, I started to try to cover all the work that got done between pulling the engine and getting the car back to the body shop, but instead I got side-tracked onto just all the work I did to make the headlights, taillights, and turn signals work.

The reason why the last entry got side-tracked onto exterior lighting was because I started talking about the fact that before I pulled the engine, I decided to install the taillight assemblies. As I said in that entry, I consider the taillights to be the most distinctive feature of the 1965 Impala, and seeing them in place helped motivate me to get on with the real work of pulling the engine. So anyway, let's pick up the story there.

Pulling the engine means draining the coolant from it, pulling the radiator, disconnecting the fuel line, disconnecting the throttle linkage and removing the carburetor, unbolting the exhaust manifolds, disconnecting the hydraulic lines to the throwout bearing, unbolting the bellhousing and removing the transmission and driveshaft, disconnecting any sensors on the engine, disconnecting the alternator wiring, removing the alternator and power steering pump and water pump, and eventually pulling the through-bolts from the engine mounts and lifting the engine out of the car. Disassembly of the engine means pulling the rocker covers, removing the rockers and pushrods, removing the intake manifold, removing the cylinder heads, removing the lifters, pulling the oil pan, removing all of the piston/rod assemblies, removing the flywheel and harmonic balancer, and pulling the crankshaft. Someone who was practiced and motivated could maybe do all of this in a long day, certainly in a couple of days. I split it all up into jobs that I could do in an hour or two after work, or maybe three or four hours on a weekend. I don't remember how long it took me, but probably a week or two.

Add the time it took for me to find time to drive everything out to the machine shop I'd been using, for the machine shop to Heli-coil the head bolt holes in the block and send the bottom end out for balancing (and get it back), and then for me to find time to drive out there to pick everything up, it was probably another month before I had everything back in my hands. That time wasn't a complete loss, as I did have some other things I could work on while I was waiting.

One thing was a small modification to the parking brake cable. The parking brake cable runs from the parking brake pedal inside the car, down through the firewall, then back through a hole in the frame, and then connects to the cables that run back to the rear brakes.

Between the firewall and the frame, the cable passes through a sheath. The sheath is clipped in place at each end, and it essentially serves to guide the the cable around the curve that it has to make to go from passing diagonally forward and down through the firewall, to pointed horizontally towards the back of the car. The clip that secures the end of the sheath at the firewall is integrated into the sheath, and works pretty well. The clip where the sheath passes through the frame is a separate piece that is supposed to snap into place, but the one I had seemed to keep popping out of its groove. I tried modifying the clip a little bit, and it seemed to work better, but after setting and releasing the brake a few times, it would still pop out of place. Eventually, I decided to start from scratch with an all-new design.

Part of the problem with these types of spring clips (which I also saw on reproduction parking brake cables for the Charlie-10) is that the clip is made from wire, so it has a circular cross-section.  So, if part of the clip gets high enough up out of the groove, then the edge of the groove gets under the side of the clip enough to just pop the clip out of place.  So, I wanted to make something that would fit tightly in the groove, and not have a circular cross-section, and not deform enough to pop out of the groove.

After thinking about it a little while, I eventually decided to make a two-piece clip, cut from sheet metal, and made so that the two pieces would engage each other and everything would be held together by the tension on the cable sheath.  I cut out two small (roughly one square-inch, maybe) pieces of sheet metal, and left one with a little extra length in one dimension.  I cut U-shaped openings in them, and bent that small amount of extra length on the one, in order to create small flanges.  Then I used a MAPP gas torch to heat each piece up, and dunked it in cold water to harden the pieces so that they wouldn't bend and deform so easily (I call this, "the ol' shadetree heat-treat").

In the photo below, the piece with the small flanges is on the right.  The next photo below that shows the parts at a bit of an angle, to make the small flanges more noticeable.

When the two pieces are overlapped and engaged, the small flanges should keep the pieces from sliding apart, or from rotating relative to each other.

With the parking brake cable installed, just slip the flanged piece in place, with its back against the frame...

...then slide the other piece into place, over the flanged piece, until it engages the groove in the cable sheath and drops into place past the flanges:

Unfortunately, there was one thing that I didn't think through well enough.  I had thought that when the parking brake was applied, it would put more tension on the sheath, which would further secure the clip in place.  Actually, though, it makes sense that when there is tension on the cable, the cable tries to pull the sheath closer to the firewall, and this actually relieves tension on the clip.  I installed the clip pieces with the parking brake released, and when I tried applying the parking brake, everything got loose enough that the clip pieces fell out.  That was a little bit discouraging, but I decided to just smear some silicone adhesive over the pieces, and that seems to have been working to hold everything together.  The silicone has enough flex that it will move with the assembly when the parking brake is applied, but it is also secure enough to keep the two halves of the clip from falling out of place.  So, that's pretty much that.

Another thing that needed some attention was the radiator.  While shopping around online for aluminum radiators, I found one site which suggested that if you were going to get an aluminum radiator, then you should also get a zinc sacrificial anode to prevent galvanic corrosion in your cooling system.  I was familiar with sacrificial anodes as a general concept from days doing installation checks on marine diesel engines.  I had not heard anyone suggest using a zinc with an aluminum radiator in an automotive application before, but the cost of a zinc was not prohibitively expensive, so I decided to get one and see if it was actually consumed or not.  At first I just installed the zinc in place of the petcock used for draining the radiator.  But when it came time to drain the radiator so I could pull it out in preparation for removing the engine, I found that using the zinc in place of a petcock made a huge mess.  I decided that as long as I had the radiator out of the car, I might as well get a radiator shop to weld a second bung in.  That way I'd be able to install the zinc and still keep a petcock for easier draining.  That ended up being significantly more expensive than I'd anticipated, but probably worth the cost in the long run.

While the engine was apart, I decided to replace the intake manifold, too, but the reason why requires a little bit of a detour.  When I was shopping for a pickup truck, I specifically wanted one with a straight-six in it.  I didn't feel a need for something with a whole lot of power, and working in the "heavy duty" segment of the diesel industry for a little while had exposed me to a whole bunch of straight-six diesels.  A straight-six engine is naturally balanced, and if you are designing an engine starting with a blank sheet of paper, and with no other packaging concerns or customer desires, there are a lot of reasons why a straight-six makes the most sense.  The American hot-rodding culture has been fixated on V8s for decades now, but the workhorse of American industry has long been the straight-six.  For a nice little work truck, a reasonably-sized straight six seemed like the perfect engine.  So I hunted around for some time, and eventually tracked down an attractive 1965 C10 with a 230 straight six.  And after some extensive work to get the truck roadworthy, I was happy with that.

But then ... one day I was coming out of the grocery store and walking out to my truck, and as I looked at the truck from across the parking lot, it just popped into my head ... wouldn't it be great if the whole nose of that truck was stuffed full with a good old Chevrolet Mark IV big block V8?  I thought about it all the way home, and I was still thinking about it the next day.  Then I started to think about all the parts I still had left over from Bertha's big block, which I could use on a big block for the truck, and it started to seem like a better and better idea.  Then I realized that I still had the TH400 transmission from Bertha, which I could rebuild and put in the truck, behind a big block.  On top of all that, the 230 straight six that's in the truck is old and tired, and seems to be losing oil pressure.  The idea of building a new engine for the truck and swapping it in seemed like a good solution.  I think within a month or so I had bought a 396 block off of Craigslist.

As I started to mentally plan out how I could finish the big block for the Charlie-10, I decided that I would probably like to use the same type of intake manifold as the one I had used on the Impala. That manifold was the same one that had come off of Bertha's engine, and the more I thought about it, I decided that as long as the Impala engine was coming apart to be balanced, I might as well set aside Bertha's intake manifold (which still looked like a used manifold even though I had cleaned it up quite a bit) for the truck motor, and buy a new manifold for the Impala. The general thinking was that the Impala has a whole bunch of new parts on it, and the truck will have a whole bunch of used parts on it, so if I was going to be buying a new manifold at some point, it might as well go on the vehicle where it would look at home.Once I'd decided that I would be buying a new intake manifold for the Impala, however, then I started to reconsider my original choice of manifold. When I built the engine the first time around, I had looked through all of Edelbrock's manifolds for the Mark IV big block Chevy, and after careful deliberation, I chose the most basic dual-plane intake that Edelbrock offers. It seemed like the right manifold for the engine I was trying to build. Then I realized that it was the same manifold that had been on Bertha's engine. That meant that I could just use the manifold I already had, which saved me money.

That manifold is supposed to be designed for optimal operation between idle speed and 5500rpm, which is the range where I plan to operate the car, for the most part. I don't really rev my vehicles very high very much, and I wanted the car to be very driveable around town, with good throttle response, so it didn't seem to make sense to select a high-rpm manifold. But, the heads were supposed to be optimized for 1500-6500rpm, or something like that, and had slightly enlarged ports and runners. Edelbrock doesn't have a suitable head for the idle-5500rpm range, so the 1500-6500rpm heads were the best and most reasonable match I could come up with from their catalog. But the ports on the intake manifold matched the size of the stock Chevrolet cast iron heads, and the Edelbrock heads had slightly larger ports, so there was a step change in the cross-sectional area of the port where the manifold bolted to the head.

I started thinking about all this, and I started wondering if maybe I should buy a manifold with a port size that matched the ports in the heads? That would probably improve airflow a bit, and improve top-end power, but then would that sacrifice throttle response and off-idle driveability? Would the effect even be noticeable? I didn't really have any firm answers to those questions, so for a while I just thought about it ... a lot.

In the end, I decided on a compromised approach: I would get the same manifold I already had, but I would put a small amount of effort into smoothing the transition from the smaller manifold runners to the larger cylinder head ports. My understanding of the basics of air flow is that pretty much anything other than a step change in cross section is preferable, so I decided to just open up the very end of each manifold runner, to create a somewhat smoother transition to the cylinder head port. This would leave most of the intake runner cross section untouched, though, which I hoped would maintain the same good throttle response characteristics at low speed that I wanted.

The picture below shows the ends of two intake runners in one of the cylinder heads, with the intake manifold gasket laid on top for reference. You can see that the holes in the gasket match the size of the runners pretty closely.

The next photo below shows the same gasket laid on top of the intake manifold. You can see that the ends of the runners in the manifold are significantly smaller than the holes in the gasket, mostly at the top of the hole, and also at the bottom.

This is the difference in cross-sectional area that creates a step-change where the intake manifold meets the cylinder head.  The picture below attempts to illustrate the issue.  The lighter gray part on the left is the intake manifold, the darker gray part on the right is the cylinder head.  The white space between them represents a cross-sectional view of the intake runner.  Airflow is in the direction of the arrow.  The smaller intake port creates a step in the areas circled in red.

As the air flows past that step, it creates a dead space on the downstream side of the step where there is turbulence.  Optimal airflow is laminar, without turbulence.

The picture below shows the ideal case for airflow, where the openings of the intake manifold and the cylinder head match each other perfectly, and the transition from one part to the other is smooth.

There are people who spend hours and hours working on cylinder heads and intake manifolds to try to get to this "ideal case" for optimized air flow and maximum power output.  The people who are good at it can make a lot of money at it.  Like a lot of these automotive skills, it is as much an art as it is science.

I'm not ambitious enough to try to make a perfect match from the heads to the manifold, and it wasn't really what I wanted to do, anyway.  I wanted to keep the intake manifold runners relatively small, to maintain higher air velocity and better throttle response.  I was OK with a change in cross-sectional area at the head/manifold joint, I just didn't want it to be such a severe step change.

With all that in mind, I decided to just open up the very end of the intake manifold runners a little bit, almost just rounding them off a bit.  The picture below shows what I was trying to create.

There is still some turbulence created in the areas circled in red, but some turbulence can be desirable in carbureted applications, because it helps to mix the air-fuel mixture.  So that's always a convenient excuse for doing a poor job on port-matching.

To make the changes to the manifold, I started by laying the intake manifold gasket on the manifold, and using a Sharpie to mark where I wanted to remove material.  I didn't mark the manifold all the way up to the edge of the hole in the gasket, because making the hole too big would result in a step down in runner area at the cylinder head, which would be less desirable for flow than a step up in runner area.

Next, I used a carbide burr porting tool to remove that material.  The tool is shown below, and works with an electric drill.  I hadn't bought a tool like this before, and there was some debate online about whether or not it was suitable for use on aluminum parts.  A few people said that it would load up with aluminum and quickly become useless.  A few other people said that if you sprayed it regularly with WD-40 as you worked, it would not load up with aluminum and it would work fine.  I decided to try the WD-40 method, and I was happy with the results.

Of course, you want to be careful not to remove too much material, because you can't put back what's been removed, but I was actually pretty happy with the result I got.  The photo below shows how the intake manifold runners looked, relative to the gasket, after I was done.

I was kind of surprised just how much aluminum was removed in the process.  The photo below shows the pile that I swept up on the garage floor when I was done.  The quarter is there for size reference.  The horse on the quarter represents all the horsepower I just added to my engine.

Of course, not all of the material that was removed ended up on the floor.  I had to figure out a way to clean out the junk that was trapped in the manifold.  I tried cleaning it with Brakleen and paper towels, but I could tell that wasn't working very well.  I ended up taking the manifold to a car wash and using their high-pressure wand to blow the manifold out with water.  That actually seemed to work really well.  I found out later that car wash owners don't like it when you do stuff like that in their car wash, but ... well, it worked really well.

A final note on the port work on the manifold:  in reality, the work I did here shouldn't be taken real seriously.  The principles I've outlined here are correct, but the work probably doesn't really amount to much.  I got hung up on the principles and decided to try this approach, but I've made a lot of choices on this project that have robbed the car of way more horsepower than this particular work would add.  Still, it was fun to play around with modifying an intake manifold, and the whole point a project car is to have fun.

There were a few other changes that came with the new intake manifold.  The vacuum fittings were stuck in the old manifold pretty well, so I decided to get new fittings for the new manifold.  These probably ended up being a little nicer than what was stuck in the old manifold.  The electric choke conversion on the carburetor, for example, has a very small diameter hose that gets connected to manifold vacuum, and when I got new fittings for the new manifold I was able to find a sort of modular arrangement that allowed me to connect that hose directly, instead of having to adapt it to a different hose size like what I had done to make it work with the old manifold.  The photo below shows the new vacuum fittings.  You can see the large hex fitting that screws into the manifold, and then the two smaller hose barb fittings that screw into that large hex.

I picked a small barb for the hose from the electric choke, and a larger one that is a more typical size for vacuum gauge hoses.  That one is normally capped, unless I want to connect a vacuum gauge for diagnostic purposes.

I also re-painted the lettering on the front of the intake manifold, to re-create what I'd done on the old manifold, as shown in the two photos below.

One other side effect of the manifold swap was that I ended up needing another alternator bracket.  The alternator bracket that I ordered originally was supposed to mount to a hole on the intake manifold, but its other mounting hole didn't line up right, so I had to cut off part of the bracket and make a new hole.  The new intake manifold had the mounting hole in a different location, and now my modified bracket wouldn't fit.  So I had to order another new bracket, which fit pretty well.  I would guess that at some point Edelbrock got enough complaints about alternator brackets not fitting that they corrected the location of the mounting hole, and that must have been some time between when my old manifold was made and when the new one was made.

While I had the engine out of the car, I decided to also try to take care of an interference between the frame and the front sway bar.  Part of my suspension modifications included the addition of a rear sway bar, and replacement of the stock front sway bar with a larger aftermarket sway bar.  The front sway bar passes through a couple of holes in the frame, and when I put everything together, the new front sway bar was rubbing the frame in a couple of spots.  Knowing that the part was designed for this car, I thought that maybe when I got everything assembled, and the full weight of the front end on the suspension, maybe things would settle into place and the bar would stop rubbing, but that wasn't the case.  So, while I had the engine out of the car, I used the same carbide burr tool that I had used on my intake manifold, and I opened up the holes a little bit to create some clearance for the sway bar.

I took a yellow paint marker and marked the frame around the area where the sway bar was touching, then I took the sway bar loose to get it out of the way so I could get the grinding tool in there to remove material.  The two photos below show the passenger-side hole (top) and the driver-side hole (bottom), with the sway bar loose and out of the way, with the yellow paint showing the material to be removed, but before I had started grinding.  After removing the material, I painted the exposed metal with POR-15, to try to prevent rust.

While all of this was going on, the bottom end of my engine was at the machine shop for balancing.  When I took all the bottom end parts in, I also took my cylinder heads in.  This was because I had read somewhere, someone was saying that you shouldn't buy fully assembled cylinder heads and just bolt them onto your engine right out of the box.  Supposedly, a lot of them have bad valve jobs, and the valves are so leaky that you will lose a significant amount of compression (and power), as well as being in danger of burning a valve, etc., etc.  The whole thing is eloquently explained by this very enthusiastic gentleman, who entertains the heck out of me.  He is certainly the most entertaining guy on the subject, but he is not the only person telling this story.

So I heard all that, and I'm an idiot, so I freaked out, because I had bolted my cylinder heads on right out of the box, like how they say you shouldn't do.  In fact, the whole reason I bought fully-assembled heads was so that I could bolt them on right out of the box, so that was kind of frustrating.

Anyway, after I got the engine all apart, I decided to check my heads for leaky valves.  The guy in the video I linked to sits the head on its side, fills the port with carburetor cleaner, and checks to see if it leaks through to the combustion chamber side of the valve.  I checked my heads the way we did in my college engines class, which is to set the head on the table upside-down, fill the combustion chamber with a fluid (I think we used water in class, but I used mineral spirits or something like that for my check), and see if it leaks through to the port side of the valve.  In this way, you can check the intake and exhaust valves at the same time.  I found fluid dribbling past a few valves, so I decided to take the heads to the machine shop when I took the bottom end parts in for balancing, so that they could re-do the valve job for me.

Before I took the parts in, I was talking to a guy from the client for the project I was working on at the time, and he used to work for Ford, specifically on their NASCAR programs.  He told me that one of the biggest struggles that Ford had with the NASCAR teams running their engines was that the teams all wanted to re-work the cylinder heads, and that even those high-level race teams could never re-create a decent valve job.  That certainly gave me pause, but I already had everything ready to go to the machine shop, so I took the heads in, anyway.  I told the guy at the machine shop what I was worried about, and what I had seen when I checked the heads, and he immediately said that if the fluid is just dribbling through, it's nothing to worry about.  He said that the valves will seal up better after a few hours of running, and as long as the fluid isn't pouring through a leak, the valve job is fine.  So, that was reassuring, as the stories of the people I trusted had aligned, and also I didn't have to pay for extra work.

The guy at the machine shop did, however, say that he would check the valve springs and make sure they were good heavy enough for the camshaft I was using.  I told him I had already checked that with the cam manufacturer, but he said, "Ah, they don't know!"  I still trusted the cam manufacturer, but I thought, well, if this guy wants to double-check it, then fine.  He ended up coming back and saying that the springs were heavier than they needed to be, and did I want him to change them out for lighter springs.  I'm no expert on valve springs, and I've already forgotten what the numbers that he told me were, but it sounded like they were just a little heavier than they needed to be.  Like maybe the cam called for ~130lbs, and the springs that the head came with were ~150lbs, or something like that.

The valve spring force is important because it takes work to open the valves.  The springs are trying to hold the valves closed, so the heavier the spring, the harder it is to open the valve.  That translates into lost power, so people who are building high-performance engines typically want to run the lightest springs they can get away with.

On the other hand, the valve doesn't really just open and close the way that people usually imagine it does.  There is a lot of bounce and rebound in the valve motion, also due to the spring.  If you ever see slow-motion video, taken with a high-speed camera, of a valvetrain in operation, you might be surprised how much extra motion there is in the system, aside from just "valve opens, valve closes."  In my (extremely limited) experience in valvetrain design in diesel engines, we were usually more worried about accurate control of valve position than whether or not we might lose some small amount of power to opening the valves.

The guy from the machine shop seemed to think that either spring would be OK, but I think he was checking if I wanted to go to a lighter spring in order to decrease parasitic losses.  But I felt like I'd rather have a heavier spring for accurate valve position control, and to raise the speed at which I'd have to worry about valve float, so I told him to just stick with the springs that were on the heads.  That was cheaper and easier for everyone involved, anyway, so win-win.

So anyway, at some point I got everything back from the machine shop, and started re-assembling the engine.  Re-assembling is kind of nice, compared to assembling, because for the most part you can just put stuff together.  You don't have to file piston rings, or check valvetrain geometry and measure pushrod length, or degree the cam, or any of that other stuff, because it was already done the first time around.

After all the talk about valve jobs and spring weight, and deciding that nothing needed to be done with any of that, there was still one modification I did want to make to the cylinder heads, though.  The first time I mounted the accessories, I was disappointed to have the threads pull out of some of the mounting holes in one of the cylinder heads when I installed the idler pulley for the heavy-duty cooling arrangement.  At the time, I drilled out the threads and installed Heli-coil inserts, and everything seemed to be OK.

Still, I was bothered by the fact that the threads had pulled out so easily, because I really hadn't gotten anywhere close to having the bolts tight when I felt the threads go soft.  At the time, the engine was sitting on the frame, but with no bodywork in place.  So, it was relatively easy to get access to drill and tap the holes for the Heli-coil insert, but it was a challenge to try to make sure that the new threads were square to the face of the head.  Because those threads had pulled out so easily, I was worried about having other threads pull out in the future, if I had to remove and replace any of the accessory brackets for any reason.  I decided, as a result, that as long as I had the engine out of the car and on a stand, maybe it would be a good time to go ahead and pre-emptively Heli-coil the rest of the accessory mounting holes in the cylinder heads.

I wanted to do all of the accessory mounting holes, front and back.  Only the holes on the front side are used for mounting accessories, but I knew I was planning to use at least one hole on the back of each head as a ground connection for the O2 sensor wiring, so I decided to just go ahead and do all of the holes, front and back.  Even with the engine easily accessible on the engine stand, though, there was the question of how to best try and keep the Heli-coil fixes square with the surface of the heads.

I was searching online for something else, and stumbled onto these "V-Drill Guide" blocks from a company called "Big Gator Tools."  Each one is essentially a block of metal with a series of holes drilled through it.  Each hole is sized for a different size drill bit, and they are all square in the block, so that if you place the block on the surface you are drilling into, and use the appropriate-sized hole as a guide for your drill bit, then the hole you drill should be square.  The bottom of the block is cut with a "V"-shaped channel, so that if the surface you're drilling into is rounded, the block should still sit with its holes perpendicular to a tangent to that surface.  It seemed like a handy thing to have, so I ordered a few of those blocks (two that covered two different ranges of drill sizes, and one that is sized for common tap sizes).  The two photos below show the top and bottom of one of the blocks.

To set up the block to drill a hole, I started by putting a bolt through the hole I needed to use, and threading that bolt into the hole I wanted to drill out in the cylinder head:

This would make sure the hole in the guide block was centered up on the hole in the cylinder head.

Then I took a large clamp that I got from Lowe's, and used the clamp to hold the block to the cylinder head:

With the clamp in place, then I could remove the bolt and drill the hole:

After drilling the hole out, then I could clamp the tapping block in place and tap the hole for its Heli-coil thread insert.  To do this for nine holes ends up being a little more time-consuming than it sounds like it should be, but all in all, it worked out pretty well.  Job done.

If you're looking for it, you can see that there is an orange oil pan on the engine in those pictures.  I talked in an earlier entry about how I spent a whole lot of time and effort on that oil pan, making it fit the Impala.  When I put the engine back together after it had come apart to be balanced, I put this oil pan back in place.  But, there was something bothering me about it....

In the process of modifying the pan, I had cut it up, and then had it welded back together.  I was a little nervous about that, because you hear stories about parts that are cut or sand-blasted or something like that, and the process leaves debris in the part, which then makes its way out and into the engine once the engine is running.  I had tried to be careful to clean the oil pan out as best as I could, but then you hear these stories about how the debris gets trapped in cracks and crevices between flanges and baffles, and it isn't until the engine is running and everything is vibrating that all this stuff starts to shake loose, which sends it running through the lube oil system, and wrecking everything it touches.

I am constantly worrying and trying to anticipate how this project is going to be destroyed by something I screwed up, so at this point it was eating at me, wondering about debris trapped in the pan.  Furthermore, after the first engine start, and the camshaft break-in, I cut open the oil filter to check for abnormal quantities of wear metal.  I didn't find any metal, but I did find what looked like some kind of fibers, which I could imagine having come from the fiberglass cut-off wheel that I used when I cut up the oil pan.  Also, in the photo below, if you look closely in the area around the glare of reflected light, you can see evidence of gritty debris.

At first I just washed the pan out as best as I could again, hoped/decided it was probably OK and put the oil pan back on.  But ultimately, I re-considered and figured, hey, the engine is out of the car and hasn't yet destroyed itself, I might as well just replace this oil pan now, and then I won't have to worry about it.

Of course, if I ordered another oil pan, and it also didn't fit in the Impala, then I would have to modify that pan, and I'd be right back where I started.  Fortunately, I found a reference on the pan to where I thought maybe I could tell which ones would fit and which ones wouldn't, and Summit.com, which I love, has enough pictures of (most of) their parts that I could examine the pictures and see which pans would fit.  I ended up picking a Moroso pan that was similar in design to the first one I'd gotten, but had a sump that would clear the Impala's steering linkage.  It was silver instead of orange, but it also said "MOROSO" on the side of it, and that counts for a lot, in my book.  I ordered that pan and swapped out the orange one.

So then the engine was pretty much ready to go back in the car.  On some weekend at some point in time, I rolled the car back until its rear wheels were at the edge of the garage door, put it up on jackstands to get some space to bring the transmission in from underneath, hung the engine on a hoist, and dropped it back into place.

So, at that point, the stripped threads in the block had been repaired, the coolant leaks had been fixed, the bottom end had been balanced, a new intake manifold had been modified and installed, a new oil pan had been installed, and a few other issues had been addressed.  The engine and transmission were back in the car

There were still a few more jobs to do before the engine was ready to fire again, and before the car was ready to drive back to the body shop, but this entry is already pretty long, so I think I'll just leave it here, for now.

More to come.

rumination on illumination

My last post documented a series of crushing setbacks, which ultimately combined to delay the project by something like five or six months.  I think that, even at that time, I realized that it would be for the best to pull the engine out of the car and re-do some things, in addition to fixing what needed to be fixed.  Or maybe I was just telling myself that, to make things seem better.  Either way, whether it was for the best or not, I was not happy about it.

Maybe an advantage of a really huge project is that if you get discouraged with one part of it, there is always something else to work on.  I am so far behind on keeping this blog up to date, I don't really remember now the exact order in which things got done, but I remember very definitely that I knew the engine was going to have to come out of the car, and I had not yet started on removing it, when I decided to install the rear taillights.  Logically, maybe it's a little dumb to install taillights on a car with a fundamentally flawed engine that needs to come out of the car to be repaired.  But at that point, I just didn't want to even think about the engine.  Also, before I discovered the coolant leaks I had been thinking that I needed to install the taillights soon.  I had thought that I was almost ready to drive the car to the body shop, and if I was going to drive the car on public roads, then I would need brake lights, i.e. the taillights needed to be installed.  It was something that I had been thinking about doing soon, it was something that needed to be done, and it was a distraction from the issues that I didn't want to think about, so it made sense at the time.

The taillight assemblies were made up of reproduction parts, and went together pretty easily.  In my opinion the taillights on the '65 Impala are maybe it's single most distinguishing detail, and seeing them installed made the mass of metal in the garage start to look significantly more like a '65 Impala.  As a consequence, that helped to reinvigorate me, and I was inspired and motivated to keep pushing forwards.  I pulled the engine out, disassembled it, and took everything to the machine shop, and things progressed from there.

But, as long as I've started talking about the taillights, I think I am going to use the remainder of this post to cover the work that I did on the rest of the exterior lighting.  This included the front turn signals, the headlights, and the headlight wiring.  These were a little bit more complicated than the taillight assemblies, for different reasons.  This work all got done in parallel with other, more important work, but it seems relatively tidy to just group all the exterior lighting into one post.

When I got the car and started disassembling it, I found that the front turn signal assemblies were in pretty bad shape.  One of the wiring harnesses was broken off, and the other one seemed pretty crusty and rotten.  I don't think either one had a plastic lens in place.  I assumed it would be easy to replace the complete assemblies with reproduction parts, but that turned out to be wrong.  I wasn't able to find anyone selling reproduction turn signal assemblies for the 1965 Impala.  Fortunately, I hadn't thrown out the ones that were on the car when I got it yet, so I went back to see if I could clean those up and salvage them.

When I took a closer look, I discovered that the left and right assemblies didn't even match each other.  Evidently someone else had struggled to find a front turn signal assembly for a 1965 Impala, and ended up replacing one of them with a piece off of some other car.  I would guess it came off of an Impala from a different year, but it may have come off of some other General Motors product, or who-knows-where.  That gave me the idea to broaden my search for reproduction parts.  I made several more searches for reproduction parts, trying any supplier I could think of, and any combination of GM make, model and year that I thought might have something I could use.  But, I never found anything that looked like it would bolt up.  So, I re-committed to trying to refurbish what I had.

Each assembly consists of a housing, a lens, a gasket between the lens and the housing, and a bulb socket with a wiring harness extending off the back of it.  The lens is the only thing that is really visible when everything is installed on the car, and I could get reproductions of the lens and the gasket.  Those parts commonly deteriorate with time, so I guess there is more demand for reproductions of those.  But the housing and the wiring harness were nowhere to be found.

The two housings could both be installed on the 1965 Impala, but they were noticeably different from each other, and did not install exactly the same as each other.  They were roughly the same size, and looked pretty much the same at a glance, but closer examination revealed that one of them had three mounting holes, and the other seemed to only have one.  Each one had two holes for securing a lens, but then one of them only had a mounting hole at the top, whereas the other one had three mounting holes:  one at the top, and then a hole on each side, as well.  This second arrangement seemed to be the correct one, as all three mounting holes lined up with corresponding holes in the '65 sheet metal.

Furthermore, the mounting holes were in different planes.  Each housing has a flange that extends forward and sort of frames the plastic lens.  On the housing with three mounting holes, the holes are in the plane of the base of the lens, where it meets the housing, and the flange runs around the outside of the mounting holes, as well as the lens.  On the housing with a single mounting hole, the hole is in a small flange that extends off the top of the front edge of the flange that runs around the lens, so it is further forward relative to the base of the lens.  I wanted to modify the housing to mount more similarly to the "correct" housing, if for no other reason, then because three mounting screws seem more secure than one.

I came up with a relatively simple plan to add side mounting holes to the "incorrect" housing.  I cut a flange out of a piece of sheet metal, which was designed to run the entire width of the turn signal housing, with extensions at each side for the additional mounting holes.  Because I wanted those holes to be in the plane of the base of the turn signal lens, like on the "correct" housing, I then cut slots in the sides of the flange that ran around the outside perimeter of the housing, and put the slots in that plane.  In this way, the flange could be slipped into the front of the housing, such that the extensions on each side passed through those slots.  This effectively located the flange in the housing by mechanical means, and screwing the plastic lens in place would clamp everything together.  To make the assembly watertight, I applied a liberal smear of RTV when I slipped the flange in place, which further helped to secure it.  Like most of the best examples of custom items that I've made, it looks like garbage, but I think it will do the job.  This created an assembly with mounting holes on the sides that would install on the 1965 sheet metal just like the "correct" housing, and a mounting hole at the top that would work just fine with the addition of a small spacer sleeve around the screw, to take up the gap between that flange and the mounting surface.

The picture below shows the two housings after I had knocked some of the rust off, and the flange that I made (top left) in order to add the two extra mounting holes.

Cleaning up the housings and repainting them was relatively easy, but the wiring harness and the bulb socket would be the difficult part to refurbish.  The harness is integrated into the bulb socket, and the bulb socket is installed into the housing with no intention of it ever being removed from the housing.  The turn signal housing is steel, and the body of the bulb socket is copper.  It appears that the two pieces are assembled by slipping the end of the bulb socket into a hole in the housing until a lip on the outside of the bulb socket butts up against the back of the housing, then folding back the extra length of the bulb socket inside the housing to form a lip that prevents the socket from pulling out of the housing.  In other words, the two parts are joined by permanently deforming the socket such that the two pieces cannot come apart.

It was relatively easy to remove the old sockets from the housings.  Because they wouldn't be re-used, there were any number of ways they could be destroyed in order to remove them.  But what to replace them with?  In the process of searching for reproduction 1965 Impala turn signal assemblies, I found that Year One does offer reproduction 1968 Impala turn signal assemblies.  They are a different size and shape from the 1965 assemblies, but they use the same type of bulb socket and wiring harness as the 1965 part.  So, if I could remove that socket and install it in the housings I already had, I could probably make do.

When I received the reproduction 1968 assemblies, I saw that the inside of each housing was painted white, presumably to reflect the light from the bulb, so I painted the inside of my housings white, also.

I cut up the housings for the 1968 assemblies, in order to give myself better access to the area where the socket was joined to the housing.  Fortunately, because the socket is made of copper, it was relatively easy then to take a small flat-blade screwdriver and carefully pry up the lip that held the socket in place.  Then I could slip the socket out of the housing, slip it into my refurbished housings for the '65, and use a hammer and punch to flatten the lip back into place, effectively joining the reproduction sockets and harnesses with my refurbished turn signal housings.  The lip certainly didn't look as nice as it did before I bent it up and folded it back down, but it's not visible once everything is assembled, and the reproduction socket and harness is certainly a huge upgrade over what I had.

At that point I had two refurbished turn signal housing assemblies that I felt pretty sure would work well for me.

The last detail to work out was that the 1968 harnesses used a different style of plug than the 1965 did.  The harness needs to pass through a hole in the inner fender and then connect to the main wiring harness in the engine bay.  On the 1965 design, the body of the plug is a piece of rubber large enough to also seal the hole in the inner fender, like a grommet.  In other words, the electrical connection and the grommet are integrated into one piece of rubber.  On the 1968 design, there is a rubber grommet to seal the hole in the inner fender, which is molded around the wires, and then there is a separate electrical connector on the end of the wires, where they connect to the main wiring harness.  Fortunately, the size of the hole in the inner fender seemed to be the same between '65 and '66, so the grommet would still work, but the plug on the end of the 1968 turn signal harness did not match the plugs on the 1965 main wiring harnesses.  This was easy enough to fix, however, by just cutting off the plugs on both turn signal harnesses and the main harness, and installing a couple of two-pin connectors that I had ordered online.

Whenever possible, I tend to order reproduction parts for stuff like this, because it's quicker, they are usually easier to install, and I like things that look like original equipment.  It is, however, somewhat satisfying to puzzle through and figure out a way to make things work with what's available when reproduction parts are not an option.  But thank goodness that reproduction parts often are available, because if I had to go to these lengths for every detail on the car, I might never finish it.

Ah, wait, though, I almost forgot:  there was one more detail to the turn signals.  After I had everything installed, front and rear, I went to test whether the turn signals worked.  As it turned out, they would light up, but they would not flash.  I had used LED replacement bulbs for all the brake lights and turn signals, and because LEDs draw less power, they don't generate the heat required to make the stock-style flasher work.  After looking around online for longer than I expected it to take, I eventually found Ron Francis part number EL40 on Summit.com.  This is a set of two flashers designed for use with LEDs, and they plug in exactly like the stock units would.  So all you have to do is pop the stock ones out, and pop these ones in, and you're all set.  I had seen people talking online about different ways of making other stuff work, but it all required additional wiring.  These are maybe ten dollars more per flasher unit, which I decided was worth it to me just for the simplicity and ease of installation.

So, that takes care of the taillights and the front turn signals.  I still had a couple of projects relating to the headlights, though.  The first one was just to install a couple of relays for the the high and low beams.  With the stock wiring harnesses, the power to the headlights goes from the battery, through a long, thin wire, to the headlight switch on the dashboard, through that switch, through another long, thin wire, back into the engine bay, and eventually to the headlights.  All that long, thin wire has a resistance to it, and it is possible to end up with sufficient resistance that the headlights will actually be noticeably dimmer.  One solution is to mount relays in the engine bay, so that a small current draw will go from the battery to the headlight switch and back to the relays, and the relays will then carry the higher current draw from the battery to the headlights.  Putting the relays in the engine bay makes a shorter path for the wiring to the headlights, and wiring all of this yourself allows you to use larger gauge wire, with less resistance.

I installed headlight relays in the Monte Carlo, once upon a time, and I was pleasantly surprised by the results.  I put the relays in at the same time that I did some other project, so when I finished that project and had the car running again, I wasn't even thinking about the relays the first time I turned the headlights on.  But I turned them on and thought, huh, the headlights seem brighter ... oh, yeah, I installed those relays.  So that made me a believer in headlight relays.  I suspect that part of the reason for the noticeable improvement on the Monte Carlo was probably because the wiring harness was old and crusty and deteriorated, so when I put in new wiring for the headlights, the improvement was significant.  The benefit of putting relays in the Impala, which has all new reproduction wiring harnesses, may not be as significant, but I put the relays in, anyway.

The wiring for the relays is very straightforward.  If you have any question about it, you can look up any wiring diagram for a typical automotive relay, and it should be pretty clear.  But there was also the question of how to mount the relays.  In the Monte Carlo, I had just drilled a couple holes in the crappy old plastic inner fender, and bolted the relays to the inner fender there.  But the Impala has nice, freshly-painted, steel inner fenders, which I felt less-inclined to casually drill holes in.  I also wanted to do something to try to isolate the relays from vibration.  I don't remember if it was the Monte Carlo, or maybe some other project, but I think I remember a plastic relay fatiguing and breaking off, due to vibration, so I wanted to try to avoid that.

The steel inner fender had a conveniently-placed dimple in it, in the general area where I wanted to mount the relays.  It looked like it was probably intended as a guide for a hole to be drilled, in order to mount some optional equipment there.  Maybe the windshield washer fluid bottle?  Anyway, I decided to drill a hole there, and to use that hole to mount a bracket, and to use that bracket to mount my two relays.  I drilled the hole, and painted the edge of it with POR-15 to try to prevent rust from starting there.

For the bracket, I just wanted two 90-degree bends, so that the relays would be mounted parallel to the inner fender surface, but raised up off of it.  Sort of a "Z" shape made with two opposite 90-degree bends.  I had a piece of aluminum angle in the garage, which already had one 90-degree bend in it.  I figured it I could cut away everything that wasn't a bracket, put another 90-degree bend in it, and drill a few holes in it for mounting, I'd be all set.  To make the bend, I put the piece of angle in the bench vise so that the vise was grabbing it right where I wanted the bend to be, then I kind of tucked a piece of scrap steel up into the "armpit" of the bend that was already in the piece, and hammered on the end of that steel to bend the aluminum over the edge of the jaws of the vise.  I hammered it flat to make the bend as crisp as I could, and in the end it came out pretty good.

The upper bend is the bend that was already in the aluminum angle when I started, which is why it looks relatively nice and crisp.  The lower bend is the one that I made, and I think it looks OK, too.  When I went to drill the holes, the drill bit skipped across the surface of the bracket and chewed it up a bit, so I used a combination of a file, sandpaper, and maybe the wire wheel on the bench grinder to remove those marks.  That's why it has a little bit of a "brushed" look.

I mounted the bracket rigidly to the inner fender.  To try to isolate the relays from vibration, I mounted the relays to the bracket using long bolts run through rubber grommets.  The grommets were sandwiched between the relays and the bracket, to try to create some little shadetree vibration isolators.  I just kind of snugged the nuts down to put a little compression on the rubber grommets, but not so tight as to take all the flex out of the rubber.  I used nylon lock nuts, so that the nuts wouldn't back off when everything was just kind of snugged together.  This was probably over-thinking things, and probably won't be effective, but, hey ... what the heck, worth a shot.  Lastly, I used a label maker to label the relays and the plugs "HI" and "LO," to keep the high-beam and low-beam circuits straight if everything ever gets unplugged at the same time.  Actually, though, it occurs to me now that it wouldn't matter if the plugs got switched around, as the relays are identical and interchangeable, but ... oh, well, it's fun to use the label maker, and it makes stuff look official.

That pretty much took care of the headlight relays.  The other project on the headlights was much less functional, and mostly just for aesthetics.

In the '60s, in racing series where the race cars were based on production street cars, the headlights were typically either removed and blanked off, or at least covered with an "X" of tape.  I guess the idea was to keep broken glass off of the track in the event of a wreck.  I've always wondered how effective the taped "X" was at keeping glass off the track, since the tape did not completely cover the glass light bulb.  But, it looks cool, and maybe that's the most important thing.

In the SCCA Trans Am series, in the mid-'60s, it was more common to cover the headlights with an "X" of tape.  In NASCAR at that time, the headlights were removed and replaced with a metal blanking plate.  In some cases, the car's number might be painted on those blanking plates, usually on the passenger side, although some minimal research seems to indicate that this didn't really become common practice until the late '60s.

Anyway, I've always liked the look of the blanked-off or otherwise protected headlights, and I especially like the detail of putting the car number on the headlight area.  I wanted to do something to try to recreate that look on the Impala, but without sacrificing the functionality of the headlights.

I don't remember exactly where I got the idea from, but somehow I became aware that maybe someone was selling metal grilles designed to cover motorcycle headlights.  I suspect maybe I saw something in a photo of a custom motorcycle, or maybe a race motorcycle.  Anyway, I looked around on eBay and I found someone who was selling these circular metal grilles designed to cover motorcycle headlights, and I thought maybe I could do something with that.

It's a bit of a tangent, but it's kind of interesting to note that for a long time there was pretty much just one or two standard sizes of headlight.  Even into the 1980s, there were still only four options for headlights:  big circles, little circles, big rectangles, and little rectangles.  Because of that lack of variety, I felt pretty sure that I could probably find one of these motorcycle headlight grilles that would fit the headlights on the Impala.  Indeed, I was able to, and I ordered four of them.

It would be relatively simple to install the grilles, just slip them in between the headlight bulb and the retaining ring that holds the bulb in place, and sandwich it all together.  The retaining rings were old and crusty, and it would be no big deal to clean them up a bit and paint them black, to match the grilles.  Each headlight had three small "nipples" on the front of it, and I would have to put notches in the grilles to clear those nipples, but this would also serve the purpose of making sure that the grilles were always clocked to the same orientation.

The photo below shows one of the grilles, as received.

And the next photo shows one of the grilles, after adding the three notches to clear the nipples on the headlight bulb.

That was all easy enough, so naturally I had to make it more difficult.

As I mentioned above, in the late '60s (around 1969, I think) it started to become common in NASCAR to paint the car's number on the passenger-side headlight covers.  That was always a detail that I liked when looking at race cars, so I decided to try to figure out a way to put a number on my passenger-side headlight grilles.  My first idea was just to paint the number on, but my concern was that pattern of the grille wires would break up the outline of the numbers, so that they wouldn't show up well enough to be easily read.  I thought it would be good to put a wire outline of the numbers on top of the grilles, but I wasn't sure how to attach the wire outlines.  The most obvious idea was to weld them on, but I don't have welding equipment.

Eventually, I decided that maybe I could braze the wire outlines on.  I had some experience with brazing from the welding class I took in high school, and I found this video, which was good for refreshing my memory.  Also, the guy recommended some specific products for the job, which gave me a starting point for shopping.  I decided to give it a try.

First, however, I had to pick a number.  This was a bit of a challenge, because I'm indecisive and I really like numbers.  The first and most obvious choice would be 53, because I came to realize while I was in high school that 53 is my lucky number.  But I also really like numbers that are divisible by 11, specifically 11 and 22, but also 44, and all the other numbers between 0 and 100 that are divisible by 11.  I put number 11 on the trophy-winning pinewood derby car that I built when I was in fifth grade (although the number that was assigned to it for tracking during the tournament was 53).  Number 11 also holds the distinction of being the winningest car number in the history of NASCAR, thanks to victories accumulated by Ned Jarrett, Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip, and others.  So I was tempted to put number 11 on the headlights, in hopes that some of that NASCAR success might rub off on my car.  Then again, the paint scheme that inspired the stripe on my car came from a car driven by Jim Paschal, which was numbered 41.  I have, for some reason, sort of a subconscious thing where I associate a color with each of the numbers 0-9, so part of the reason why I might like or dislike a two-digit number is because of how its colors look together.  Number 4 looks red to me, and number 1 looks white (or maybe a little yellow-ish), so number 41 looks great, to me, on a black car with a white stripe and red rims.  For those reasons, I was also tempted to use number 41.  In the end, though, I decided that the smart thing would be to not tempt fate by picking some number other than my lucky number, and I settled on 53.

Next, I looked through the available fonts in Microsoft Word to find one that I liked for the numerals "5" and "3," and then I played with the size of that font until I had something that fit the size of the headlight grilles pretty well.  I printed out a copy of "53" in that size.

I had some old wire coat hangers that seemed to be about the right thickness of wire for what I wanted.  I took a couple of those, stripped the paint off of them with the wire wheel on the bench grinder, and straightened out the bends in them so that they were just straight pieces of wire.

I got my printed copy of "53," my pieces of straightened coat hanger wire, and a pair of pliers, and I carefully bent the wire into shape, to follow the outline of the "5" and the "3."  One thing to note:  with the results that I was able to get, I could really only pick one sharp corner on each number.  That would be where the loose ends of the wire met up.  All the other corners would be more rounded off.  So there was a little bit of forethought to put into that.  On the "5," I put the sharpest corner at the top right, and on the "3" I put it at the center right, where the top and bottom curves of the "3" come together.

When I was done bending up the wire number forms, they were essentially flat.  The grilles have a curvature to them, like a headlight, so I placed each number where I wanted it on a grille, and kind of bent the sides down to match the curvature of the grilles.

I was a little worried at that point that maybe the pattern of the grilles was still breaking up the shapes of the numbers too much, but for the time being I just kept working on them.

Before brazing the wire number forms onto the grilles, I wanted to remove the paint from the grilles.  I thought I could just remove it with the wire wheel on the bench grinder, like I had done with the coat hanger wire.  But, it turned out that the paint on the grilles was a lot more stubborn than what was on the coat hangers.  I started to wonder if maybe the grilles were actually powdercoated.

I had discovered earlier that powdercoat will not deteriorate when you spill brake fluid on it, but every kind of paint that I've encountered will.  So I tried soaking a grille in brake fluid.  That seemed to soften up the paint to where I could scrape it off with a wire brush, but even then I had to soak each grille in brake fluid overnight, brush off most of the paint, then soak it overnight again, and brush off the rest of the paint.  I did this for all four grilles, even though I was only putting numbers on two of them.  I wanted them all to look the same, just in case the paint I used had a different level of gloss compared to the paint that was on the grilles when I got them, or something like that.

At that point I was ready to braze the wire number forms onto the grilles.  I took a few little wire twist-ties, like the ones you'll sometimes get on a bagged loaf of bread, and I stripped off the flat plastic cover so that I just had a short length of small-diameter wire.  I used those to twist-tie the wire number forms to the grilles in a few places.  My original plan was to try to braze each number at every place where it crossed a wire from the headlight grille.  Part of the reason for that was because I was thinking that maybe I would cut out the grille pattern on the inside of each number, to make the numbers clearer, and I didn't want any loose ends of grille wires hanging out in the middle of the headlight.  That certainly would have been secure, but as I started to get into the process, I decided that the brazing was going to be enough of a hassle that I would just try to tack each number in half a dozen places or so, and hope that that was secure enough.  And that also meant that I would not be cutting out the grille pattern in the middle of the numbers.  Anyway, I brazed the numbers in place, with maybe half a dozen brazed joints for each number, and after finishing that, I cut away what was left of the wire twist-ties.

The last thing was to paint the grilles.  I primered each one, then painted them all gloss black.  At the same time I also primered and painted the headlight retaining rings.  These are chromed on a stock '65 Impala, but I had decided to paint them to match the grilles.

I was still trying to figure out how to make the shapes of the numbers stand out a little bit more, and in the end I decided to use a white automotive paint touch-up pen to paint the areas inside the wire number outlines.  The touch-up pen includes a small paint brush which is pretty good for painting details, but I masked the outlines of the numbers just to make it easier to keep the white paint off of the number outlines.

At that point, the grilles were ready to mount on the headlights, which was a relatively simple process of fitting each grille into a headlight retaining ring, then mounting that retaining ring as it normally would be, which captures the grille between the ring and the headlight.

Eventually, there was one more modification.  After finally driving the car up to the body shop, I found that there was a spot where the paint on one of the grilles had already cracked and flaked, or maybe been chipped by a pebble or something during the drive.  So after getting the car back from the body shop, I removed the grilles again, touched up any areas where the paint had cracked or chipped, and then painted the grilles and retaining rings (as assemblies) with a couple coats of clear POR-15.  The POR-15 is a thick, heavy paint that will help to hold the grilles and retaining rings together, and will probably also help to reinforce the brazed joints.  Then I reinstalled everything and adjusted the angles of the headlights, and called it "done."

In the end, I was pretty happy with the result.  I think I ended up with the perfect level of subtlety for what I was looking for.  The white paint and the wire outline makes the numbers clear enough that you can read them, but when you're looking at the whole car, they don't jump right out at you.  When I finally got the car back to the body shop again, the owner of the shop told me that the car had been there a full week before he noticed the numbers on the headlights.

Speaking of looking at the whole car, I guess I'll end this post with a gratuitous picture of the car, in progress:

I had planned to make this one big entry with all of the activity that took place between the engine coolant leak and getting the car to the body shop, but it's already so long after just discussing the lighting features, I guess I will cut it off here.  More to come on the other activities later....