really important stuff

"The Devil is in the details."  This common phrase is often used to express the idea that overlooking some relatively minor thing can often compromise what might have otherwise been a successful plan.

Personally, I like details.  In my case, there could be an alternate interpretation, taken to mean that I am often sidetracked from what's important when I get distracted by some minor detail.

For example:  rocker covers.  I have been working on getting a set of rocker covers painted, even though I have a lot of other, more important things to do before I'm ready for rocker covers.

I wanted to re-use the stamped steel rocker covers that were on Bertha's engine.  I just like the look of the simple, stamped steel covers, and I don't know that I've ever seen aftermarket rocker covers that I was excited enough about them to make me want to shell out the money for them.

But, as long as I was blasting them clean and painting them, I wanted to do something a little bit special with the paint job.  In the early 1960s, it was standard practice for stock cars to have their engine's horsepower rating painted down each side of the hood.  I think that "410 HP" was a common number at the time.  Who knows how accurate these numbers actually were, but that was the practice at the time.  These were the days before sponsorships became sufficiently lucrative for a company to pay to have its name and logo across the whole hood.

By the mid-'60s, the power rating had been replaced by engine displacement.  NASCAR had imposed a limit of 430 cubic inches for Grand National cars, which is the series that grew into the modern Sprint Cup series.  Common displacements were the Dodge/Plymouth 426, the Ford/Mercury 427, or the Chevrolet 427.  I have seen photos of some Chevys that were labelled as 396s, some of the other GM makes ran some other displacements, and I think Ford qualified either their 428 or their 429 for competition for at least a little while, but most cars were 426s or 427s.

The displacement might be written as "427 C.I.D.," or "427 CU. IN.," and there may have been other variants, but those are the two that show up most commonly in photos I've seen.  Anyway, I just always thought it looked cool, and I had even considered several options for getting Matilda's displacement painted on her hood.  In the end, I decided that it would probably attract more attention than I would prefer, so I decided not to do that.

But, when I started thinking about how to paint the rocker covers, I had the idea that I could mimick the old hood lettering on the rocker covers.  In Matilda's case, her engine displacement is 414 cubic inches.  That comes from the original 402 cubic inches, plus a 0.060" overbore.

I had already blasted and cleaned the rocker covers, and painted them Chevy engine orange, so the next thing was to start going through all the MicroSoft Word fonts, to try out different letters and numbers, and different combinations of italics, bold, shadow, and so on.  In the end, I settled on "Impact" for the lettering, in italics, with a shadow.  The periods for "Impact" are square, though, and I wanted circles, so I used "Tw Cen MT Condensed Extra Bold" for the periods.  I mixed and matched font sizes to get everything in the proportions I wanted.  Then I printed out four copies, two for each rocker cover.  When I had the four copies, I carefully stacked them on top of each other with the edges aligned, and then cut all four of them at the same time with a razor blade:

 

The purpose was to cut them down to a size closer to the size of the rocker covers, but to keep all the edges aligned with each other, so that later I could line up the lettering with the shadow.

 

Next, I taped off the rocker cover in the area where I was going to be painting:

Then I took one printout and taped it in place, over the masking tape:

 

You can't see it very well in that photo, but once I had a printout taped in place, I took a pen and traced its four corners on to the masking tape.  These marks would allow me to line up the next printout, when I was ready to do the lettering.

 

My original idea was to trace over the lettering with a ballpoint pen.  I thought if I pressed hard enough, it would leave an impression in the tape, and I could go back and cut through the impression with a razor blade.  As it turned out, I couldn't see the impression well enough, so I ended up using the razor blade to cut the tape right through the paper.  Then I removed what was left of the paper and peeled up the unwanted sections of masking tape:

 

That looked like a pretty good setup, so next I masked off the rest of the rocker cover with paper.  I usually like to use junkmail advertisements for that, but I had just taken the recycling out, so I used some packing paper from a shipment of parts that I'd received:

After paint, I waited several days before removing the masking to check the result:

It came out pretty good.  Notice that I was careful not to remove the tape that had my alignment marks for the next printout.

The color of the shadow is called "cast iron," from VHT's high temperature engine paints.  My original plan was to have black lettering with a cast iron shadow, but when I saw how dark the cast iron color came out, I was afraid that black lettering would just blend into the shadow.  The more I thought about it, I realized there would already be a lot of black in the engine bay, so I decided that maybe white lettering would stand out better, anyway.

Another printout was taped in place, using those marks to place it correctly, then the lettering and numbers were cut out with a razor, and the whole cover got masked again:

I wanted to make sure not to leave orange gaps between the lettering and the shadow, so I tried to trim back slivers of tape until I could just barely see the edge of the shadow.  Then, I sprayed the lettering in white.

Several days later, I removed the masking:

All in all, I think it came out pretty good.  It took me a little while to adjust to the look of the white lettering, but it's really grown on me.

So, this has been a little bit of a distraction from other jobs that need attention, but on the other hand, sooner or later I will need rocker covers, and now that they are painted, they will be ready.

Although, just for the record ... I haven't actually checked that the stock rocker covers will fit over the modified valvetrain.  But, if they don't ... I don't know ... wall art?

KILLVAIR

So, I'm falling behind again, and in more ways than one.  Instead of getting work done and not writing about it, this time I'm not even getting work done.  Instead, I've been sidetracked by the Corvair, which tried to kill me a couple months ago when the steering failed on the way to work.  Hence the name of this post.  A lot of people, when a car tries to kill them, will call it "Christine," ripping off the old Steven King story.  But I thought, hey, I'm a special shining star, and an original-thinker; I will rip off someone else.  So I named this post after the one and only, the great KILLDOZER.

So the steering failed on the way to work, just a couple blocks from my house.  It was a very, very, very lucky thing that I was just accelerating away from a stoplight, and not out on the interstate, and that I was already in the right lane, and that the car drifted to the right as I applied the brakes.  I got it stopped, got my phone out, and then thought, "Wait ... who am I going to call?"  So I got out, got down under the front of the car, and discovered that a cotter pin must have broken and allowed the castle nut that holds the centerlink to the pitman arm to back off, so that the pitman arm came loose and I lost steering.  To get it out of the street, I took a coat hanger from the trunk, cut off a section, and stuck it through the cotter pin hole to hold the steering linkage together well enough to get me home.

In the short term, I made the minimum repairs necessary to make the car driveable.  But the steering felt really sloppy, and according to the Corvair shop manual, cranking the steering wheel all the way to the stop while the pitman arm is disconnected can damage the steering box.  Recalling my panicked efforts to steer a car with no steering, it occurred to me that this might be the case.  So I replaced the steering box.  That made things better, but the steering still felt a little loose and wiggly.

So eventually, I decided that I should put in new bushings and ball joints in the front suspension.  I've been thinking for a while that this needed to be done, and I decided to just do it before something else came apart on me.  Seemed like the easiest way to get this done in one weekend (so that I could drive to work on Monday) would be to buy rebuilt control arms with new bushings and ball joints already installed.

I ordered those parts, they showed up, and a couple weeks ago I set aside the weekend to do the job.  The first three control arms went relatively easily, and I was in great shape to finish the job on time, but then I got to the driver side upper control arm, and everything went south.

It was Saturday night when I got to the driver side upper control arm and discovered that neither one of the bolts holding it in place would budge.  It was pretty late, and after cranking on them with various different cheater bars, I decided that in the morning I would walk over to Lowe's and buy a cordless impact driver.  I'd been thinking about getting one for a while, anyway, so it seemed like a good time to get some use out of it.

So, Sunday morning I walked to Lowe's and got an impact driver, impact sockets, an extension, and a few other things.  Brought it all home, charged the batteries for the impact driver, put it on the first bolt, and promptly rounded it off.  Thinking that maybe getting the other bolt loose would open up some other options for me on the first one, I promptly rounded off the other bolt, as well.  During an extended public schooling career, and time spent in the diesel industry, as well as some exposure to the lobster fishing industry, I have learned a few curse words, and some of these may or may not have been deployed in the garage at that time.

When I did the passenger side upper, one of the bolt heads had broken completely off, which worked out great, because it just meant that I didn't need to work the nut all the way off of the bolt, I just drove the broken bolt shank out of the hole.  So, on the driver side I thought, maybe I can cut off the head of one of these bolts with the Dremel, and maybe then I'll be able to figure out a way to get the control arm off the rest of the way.

So, I got the Dremel out, and carefully cut off the head of one bolt.  I couldn't even really tell where the edges of the bolt were, it just looked like a solid piece of metal.  I tried to use a punch and a hammer to drive the bolt out, but it still wouldn't budge.  At this point, I felt like I had basically destroyed the car beyond use, and still hadn't made any progress.  Morale was not high.

I was checking Craigslist for used car opportunities when it occurred to me that, if I were to drop the whole front crossmember out from under the car, then I could get at the back side of the bolt, and maybe then I could get the control arm off.  By that time it was Sunday night, and there is a rental car place down the street from me, so I decided to rent a car for the week, and drop the crossmember later.

It was probably the next Friday night by the time I had time to work on it much again.  So, I dropped the crossmember down Friday night.  I wasn't sure if it would balance on a jack very well, so I took all the bolts loose a little bit (also needed to disconnect steering linkage and front brakelines first), then jacked the car up by the crossmember (with jackstands still under the frame rails, as well), pulled the bolts, lowered the car to the floor, then jacked the car up by the frame rails to lift the body up off of the crossmember, and rolled the crossmember out.

Of course, three out of the six bolts broke off.  Four out of the six are threaded into cage nuts, and one of the broken ones was in a cage nut, so that was just a question of extracting the nut from its cage and replacing it.  The other two broken bolts would need to be extracted, though.

Fortunately YouTube has a couple of educational videos where they show you how easy it is to extract broken bolts that have been purposely broken off for the purpose of creating YouTube videos.  Unfortunately, that situation has no bearing on the real world.  I tried using a torch, I tried using penetrating oil, I tried using a torch and penetrating oil, I tried drilling the bolts and using an "E-Z-Out" extractor (biggest scam ever perpetrated on automotive hobbyists), and none of it worked.

Of course, there was also still the issue of actually removing the upper control arm from the crossmember.  With the crossmember off of the car, I could get at the nut on the backside of the bolt, but I still couldn't get anything to budge.  It was like the crossmember, control arm shaft, bolts, nuts and everything had just fused into one solid piece of steel.  I cut the nuts off, and I still couldn't move the control arm shaft.  I tried all sizes and types of pry bars, I tried a hammer and chisel, but I still couldn't move it.

Finally I just took an angle grinder with a cutoff wheel, and I cut the ends off of the control arm shaft so that I could remove the control arm itself, and then I cut right through the middle of the control arm shaft.  Then I took a hammer and started banging away on the cut ends in the middle of the shaft, to use them as levers to try to turn the bolts and loosen them up.  Finally the bolts loosened up and turned a little bit, and I was able to remove the cut off control arm shaft halves, and drive the remains of the bolts out with a punch and a hammer.

After bolting up the new control arm to the crossmember, there was still the issue of what to do about the broken bolts in the frame.  In the end, I decided to just drill them out and put in Heli-Coil inserts to create holes for new bolts. That was also easier said than done, but once I bought a set of cobalt coated drill bits, it went much better. Titanium isn't good enough, get cobalt.  I decided to order a Heli-Coil set online, because I've never had good luck with the ones they carry on the shelf at the parts store.  I try to get the actual Heli-Coil brand, which the packaging says is manufactured by Stanley.

By this time the second weekend was about over, and I had reserved another rental car.  The Heli-Coil set arrived halfway through last week, and I installed the inserts using Permatex red threadlocker.  I let them set up over night, and then I chased each one with a tap, to clean out any excess threadlocker.

That left me ready to reassemble.  So Friday night (of weekend number three on this project) I bolted the crossmember back up under the car.  It turns out that the crossmember balances well enough on a jack, so I lined it up as best I could and pushed it up under there.  Saturday was a question of putting the shock absorbers back up in there, reconnecting brake lines, greasing ball joints, etc., etc.  Sunday my buddy Allen came down from Austin to help me bleed the brakes and attempt a rough alignment.  It drove OK after the alignment, but felt a little squirrely, so I ended up calling Pep Boys to see if they could do a proper alignment.  They said bring it on over, and later that afternoon I was driving it home.

So ... job done.  I think it will take some time to get used to the feel of the new steering.  Everything is stiffer because of all the new bushings.  When I got the car, everything was nice and worn in, but not yet worn out.  But the car does drive a lot better than it did before I started the project.  Maybe Cordelia was just getting jealous of all the attention that Matilda gets and decided to throw a fit so I'd have to spend some time with her.  Or maybe it's an inanimate assembly of steel and plastic, subject to the laws of physics.  Tough call on that one.

Matilda's runout on me

Matilda's engine is Bertha's old engine, and since Bertha had an automatic transmission, that means I don't have a bellhousing for the Muncie 4-speed that I got for Matilda.  Apparently, if you can trust the internet, bellhousings were bored when the block was line-bored at the factory, so a bellhousing ends up being matched to the block that it left the factory with.  That means that if you use a bellhousing that didn't come with your block, or if you use an aftermarket bellhousing (which is what I'm doing), then you need to check the runout of your block/bellhousing combo.

If a bellhousing is matched to a block, then the centerpoint of the bellhousing bore should be perfectly in line with the centerpoint of the block's line bore, i.e. perfectly in line with the rotating axis of the crankshaft.  If a bellhousing is not matched to the block, then there will be some offset between the centerpoint of the bellhousing bore and the centerpoint of the line bore.  Runout is a measurement of that offset, i.e. the distance between those centerpoints.

Last weekend I installed the crankshaft in my engine block.  This took a bit longer that expected, due to the time to plastigage the main bearings, and the confusing directions I had on torquing the mains.  In the end, I ignored most of the directions in favor of doing something that made some sense, instead.

You can see that I decided to go with studs for the mains, instead of bolts.  The advantage of studs is that they provide more accurate and predictable torquing.  There is less torque lost to friction, which means that more torque goes into stretching the bolt, which is what provides the clamping force to hold the parts together.  Also, because friction forces can vary from bolt to bolt, reducing the amount of torque lost to friction also reduces variation in clamp load from stud to stud.  This is all probably overkill for my application, but that's just kind of how I'm approaching this project, because it makes me feel good to know this stuff is in there, I guess.

So, once I had the crankshaft installed, that meant that I could measure my bellhousing's runout.  Wednesday night, I took the engine off the stand and put it on the floor (upside down) so that I could install the bellhousing.  Then I took a magnetic base, stuck it on the end of the crankshaft, and mounted a dial indicator to it so that its tip was resting on the inside diameter of the bellhousing bore.

The dial indicator does not need to be centered in the bore, as long as it is perpendicular to the wall of the bore, i.e. as long as it lies on the bore's diameter.  I didn't notice until I looked at the picture above that I did not have the dial indicator perfectly perpendicular, but the good news is that this will only make the readings look worse than they actually are, not better.  In other words, I might possibly get a reading that says I have a problem when I don't, but I can't get a reading that says everything's OK without everything being OK.

So, I turned the crank until I got a minimum reading, then I zeroed the dial indicator, then I turned the crank until I got a maximum.  The maximum was 0.009", which gets divided in half to give a runout of 0.0045".  You can see in the picture above where I marked the "0" point, and the ".009" point on the bellhousing.

Technically this reading is within the spec of 0.005", but only just barely.  Also, the stock dowels are not really long enough to fully engage the aftermarket bellhousing, so I would have wanted to order some longer ones, anyway.  I tapped the stock dowels halfway out so they would engage the bellhousing for this measurement, but I felt like I'd rather just have longer dowels for the final assembly.  As long as I was ordering dowels, I decided to get 0.007" offset dowels, to try to improve the runout measurement.

Lakewood has some pretty slick offset dowels, which I ordered through Summit.

 

You can see in the photo below that one end is slotted, and the other end has a flat machined on each side of it.  The slotted end is installed in the engine block, and the end with the flats is the dowel that locates the bellhousing.

 

If you look really, really, really, really, reeeeeally close, you can also see that the side with the flats is just ever so slightly shifted up in the picture, relative to the side with the slot.  This is the offset that allows these dowels to shift the position of the bellhousing.

 

The slot on the end that gets installed in the block is there to allow some flex in that end. This allows you to very easily insert the dowel into the block, and clock the dowel to the correct orientation.  Once the dowel is positioned correctly, there is a set screw that is tightened down, and this makes the slotted end solid so that it becomes a tight fit in the block that will not allow the dowel to rotate or slide out.

The picture above shows the set screw.  The picture below is an end view of the set screw in the dowel.  The four hash marks on the top side of the dowel indicate that that is the "high side," i.e. the bellhousing will be shifted towards that side of the dowel.

Below you can see the stock dowel, in place.

The dowels are pressed into through-holes, so they can be tapped out from the back side.  Below, the block with the dowel removed.

The machined flats allow you to easily clock the dowels using a wrench, as shown below.  Another advantage of the flats is that it gives you a place to rest an angle finder.  I used one to measure the angle formed by the "0" and ".009" marks that I'd made on the bellhousing when I measured initial runout.  Then I used the angle finder on the dowels' flats to set the dowels to that same angle.

Below is an end-on view of a dowel with the hash marks pointing down towards the "0" mark on the bellhousing.  Shifting the bellhousing .007" in that direction should make the .009" reading into a .002" reading, and change the 0 to a 0.007" reading.  So when the 0.002" reading is set as the new zero, then that makes the 0.007" reading into a 0.005" reading for the maximum, which gets divided by two to give a runout of 0.0025".

In actuality, the readings ended up being 0 at the old +.009" position, and only 0.002" at the old 0 position, for a runout of 0.001".  This is even tighter than expected.  I'm not sure why this is, but it may be in part due to the dial indicator not being perfectly perpendicular in the original measurement.  You can see in the photos above and below that it is not perfectly perpendicular for these readings, either.  Today I was careful to try to orient it along the bellhousing bore diameter, but I think it was actually leaning out somewhat, towards the camera, and the misalignment in these photos is partly a trick of the camera, due to the angle of the photo.

Anyway, regardless of these details, I feel good now that runout is as good as it is going to get, and well within the allowable tolerance.

Manure

Well, the owner of the body shop continues to at least feign amazement at what a piece of junk I brought him, saying that he would not have guessed from first inspection that the car would need so much work.  I am disappointed by how much damage was discovered after the body was blasted and cleaned up, but one advantage of always expecting the worst is that you are rarely unpleasantly surprised.  I appreciate his comments, though, in the sense that at least he doesn't make me feel like I should have been able avoid all of this if I'd known what to look for.  On the other hand, I saw some things once I had the car in my garage that were starting to get me concerned, and I feel like if I ever do buy another old car, I will have a better idea of what to look for, and where to look.  Anyway, I think we have at least turned a corner now where there shouldn't be much more in the way of surprises and they at least know what needs to be fixed.

Here is a picture of the trunk floor:

All the little white specks are holes that are rusted through.  You can also see the front edge of the drip trough around the trunk is jagged and holed with rust.

 

The passenger footwell looks similar: 

There was really only about one quarter of the floorpan that was useable, and even that got about a three-by-four-inch patch put in.

This picture shows the passenger side rear quarter panel, just behind the rear wheel opening:

The patch that is welded in here was in place when I bought the car.  You can see how crude it looks, but with bondo over it, I had no idea it was even there.  You can also see rust damage below it, and running up the lip of the wheel opening.  There's rust like this in various places all over the body.

 

In most cases, it is cheaper to buy a reproduction panel, cut out the rust, and weld in a new piece than it is to repair a damaged piece or make a patch panel from scratch.  If I'd bought a Chevelle or a Camaro, then pretty much every part of the car would be available as a reproduction, because those cars are very popular.  Of course, those cars also tend to be more expensive to buy because they are so popular, so I guess it's a trade-off.  But, I bought a 1965 Impala, so there are a lot of parts that are not available, and that means that the stuff has to be repaired.  I am just lucky that Dale Earnhardt made me a Chevy fan at an early age, because if nature had run its course and I'd developed into a Plymouth guy, then things would have gotten even more expensive.

 

One area on the car that required extensive repair was the part of the body that the door hinges bolt to.  What should have been a column of formed steel, sturdy enough to support the cantilevered weight of one of these big doors, was revealed to in fact be pretty much a big open hole with rusty, jagged edges.  For some reason I don't think I got any "before" or "after" pictures of that, but it has already been rebuilt by the guy at the body shop, just patched up and reconstructed, piece by piece, from bits of sheet metal.  I would have liked to see more about how he did that, and get some pictures of the repair in progress, but all I saw was that one week it was a big, gaping hole, and the next week it looked like it had just rolled off the assembly line in 1965.  Pretty impressive.

 

Another problem area was the leading edge of the dashboard, at the base of the windshield.  I noticed after I'd bought the car that it was rusted through at the corners, but after removing the windshield and blasting the body, it was revealed that the leading edge of the dash was basically perforated by rust holes all across the width of the car, to where it looked like you could almost just just tear the whole top of the dash off without a whole a lot of effort.  That was all reconstructed, also, using pieces of sheetmetal.  The picture below shows the repair before it was primered. 

I think there is some light filler on top of the repair there, which is what makes it look whitish, but it is new steel underneath.

 

When I was looking for a 1965 Impala, around the same time that I found Matilda listed on Craigslist, there was a guy advertising a pair of 1965s up in Austin.  One of them was a "parts car," and the other was an empty shell which had already had all the bodywork done on it.  He wanted to sell them together, and I didn't really want two Impalas, but I also felt like he was asking too much for the one with the bodywork done on it.  Well, I've already spent more on bodywork than what he was asking for that car, but on the other hand, I will have the peace of mind of knowing exactly what's under my paint, instead of taking someone's word that the car is solid.

 

I think another factor in my decision-making may be some feeling of guilt about letting Bertha rust away to nothing.  I get some satisfaction from knowing that I am getting a rough car restored to its "former glory," putting a car back on the road, as opposed to just sustaining a survivor.

 

Lastly, according to the liner notes of Rhino Records' "Ray Charles Anthology," Ray Charles once said, "I don't know how many times I've been asked to do 'The Star Spangled Banner.'  I've refused.  Never sang that song once.  I just don't hear myself doing it.  When I do a song, I must be able to make it stink in my own way; I want to foul it up so it reeks of my manure and no else's."  I've always remembered the gist of that quote, and I always think of it when I'm shopping for an old car.  If I see a car that's "finished," even if I like the way it's done, it doesn't hold much appeal for me as a buyer.  I know that I'm going to want to make a car my own, and I don't want to un-do someone else's work to make it what I want.  I'd always rather start with something that looks like Matilda, rather than something that looks like a finished showcar.

 

So for those reasons, I don't regret buying Matilda, even though she's turned out to need a lot more work than what I initially thought.  Of course, there's also the fact that regretting it wouldn't change anything.  We've got what we've got, and we're pushing ahead.

 

Speaking of pushing ahead, right now the body shop is waiting for parts that they've ordered.  New quarter panels are the major items, but some other pieces, too.  I am doing a poor job of making progress on my end, but I am getting some small things done.  I finished painting most of the bumper mounting brackets with POR-15.  Because of the number of coats of paint that they recommend, and the waiting time between coats, it actually requires a pretty sizeable block of time to get painting done.  There are still a lot more parts that need to be painted, and I think maybe some time this week I will try to get the crank installed in the block.  If I can at least verify that the bearing clearances are good, then maybe next weekend I will try to spend some time putting the whole bottom end together.

 

I have also been spending some time trying to figure out how I can customize the dashboard to look the way I want it to, and also make it easy to assemble and disassemble.  When I actually sat down and looked at the parts, it turned out that the dashboard will probably be a little harder to do than I first thought, but I think I'm starting to get some ideas figured out for it.

Historical Context

I like to look at race cars.  Especially old race cars, but also just race cars in general.

I have books full of pictures of old race cars, I search for videos of old race cars on YouTube, and I peruse Google Image searches of old race cars.  And pretty much any time that something with wheels and an engine is on a racetrack, on my television, I am going to watch that.

This all began, as best as I can tell, on Sunday, April 13th, 1986, my earliest memory of seeing a race on TV.

I'm not sure what it says about me as a person that I saw a man jump out of a car on to the ground, being burned by invisible fire and gesturing for his crew to put it out, and it made me think, "This is great.  I want to see more of this," but for better or for worse, a seed had been planted.

Literally the only thing that I remember about the race is the guy laying on his stomach in the pit stall and slapping the backs of his legs to indicate to his crew that the alcohol fuel was still burning him.  But, I also remember spending the rest of the afternoon riding my bike around the block while wearing my Chicago Bears football helmet, and imagining that I was a race car driver.  And I remember that in first grade we were supposed to practice writing by writing down what we did over the weekend, and I remember writing about the race and riding my bike.  So, through the modern miracle of the internet, I found that someone has actually uploaded dozens and dozens of old CART races from the 1980s, and I actually only had to watch three races from the Fall 1985-to-Spring 1986 time frame before I found the pit fire that I remembered.

As kind of a strange coincidence, the driver who was on fire was Dale Coyne, who is from Minooka, Illinois.  He now owns a race team which is based in Joliet, and when I was in college I drove down there one summer and dropped off a resume to see if they had any need for summer interns.  Not surprisingly, I didn't hear back from them.  But in an effort to illustrate my love of racing, and to put a personal touch on the cover letter, I briefly described riding my bike around the block in my Bears helmet, pretending to be a race car driver when I was in the first grade.  I didn't realize at that time that the guy who I was applying to for a job was the same guy who I had watched on TV on that afternoon in 1986.

One other thing that I think I can vaguely recall from that afternoon is my dad commenting to a neighbor, "Well, Arden discovered a new sport today," and then telling him that we had watched the race on TV.  That same neighbor's wife was a smoker, and I guess Winston cigarettes sent her a VHS video of highlights from the NASCAR Winston Cup Series (later known as the Nextel Cup Series, now known as the Sprint Cup Series), which she gave to me.  I think maybe she sent in UPC codes to get it.

I think I had seen stock car races on TV here and there before that, but almost all the NASCAR races were still on ESPN back then, and we didn't have cable.  But stock cars appealed to me quite a bit, and I loved that VHS tape.  Actually, I still have it.  That was where I first started learning about Richard Petty and David Pearson, Cale Yarbrough and Darrell Waltrip, and of course:  Dale Earnhardt.

Another name that I learned from that tape was Bobby Allison.  Bobby Allison was a great stock car driver, but he would later become significant to me because I found out that we have the same birthday, and because he drove for Junior Johnson when Johnson started running first generation Monte Carlos in the early '70s.  That was significant to me because Bertha was a first generation Monte Carlo.  And now I also recently found out that Bobby Allison was one of the drivers who drove one of the 1965 Impala stock cars that Smokey Yunick built, which strikes me as another small coincidence.  I even once found a photo of a Corvair race car that Bobby Allison raced.  This either illustrates that Bobby Allison and I share a common taste in cars, as well as a birthday, or else maybe just that Bobby Allison has raced a whole lot of different race cars.

I guess if you spend as much time as I do looking through old racing photos, stories and records, you are bound to happen on to a few coincidences here and there, but here's one more:  one of the most successful drivers to compete in a 1965 Impala was J.T. Putney, whose hometown is Arden, NC.

And all of this and a dollar-fifty might buy you a cup of coffee.  I don't really know, though, I don't drink coffee.

Body (Re-)Building

"This thing doesn't look that bad!"

Those were the first words of the body shop owner as he looked Matilda over when she arrived at his shop.  I was glad to hear that, because the more I'd looked at her after getting her home, the worse and worse I thought she looked.  Lots of evidence of bondo, and lots of rust that I hadn't noticed at first.

I dropped her off and talked to the guy about what I wanted done, but it sounded like he probably wouldn't be able to get to it for a couple weeks, at least, maybe longer.  I dropped her off on a Friday, and then the following Monday afternoon I got a text:  "Stop by the shop when you can."  This immediately set me to worrying that something had gone wrong.  My best guess was that they had found out that the car was stolen, then they had accidentally dropped a helicopter on it, and they also wanted to know if I knew anything about the ten pounds of heroin they'd found in the frame rails.  But then, you know me:  I'm an optimist.

So I drove up there Tuesday morning before work, and it turned out that they had just had some floor space open up sooner than expected, so they were starting to disassemble the car, and the guy wanted to show me all the rust they were finding as it came apart.  It turns out that his first impression wasn't quite right, but it at least made me feel better that I wasn't the only person who couldn't tell it was a rust bucket at first glance.

So far, though, he says it can all be fixed, and he and his guys are already hard at work on that.  I went in this morning before work to see how it's coming along, and they've already got the body off of the frame and on a rotisserie.  The hood and trunk lid and fenders and doors have already been blasted and primed, and the front fenders have already been worked over.  There was a guy working on block sanding the doors when I was there, and they are already lining up replacement parts for other items.  They are actually moving along on it so fast, I'm starting to worry that I won't be able to keep up on my end, and I may end up paying them storage fees or something.  I don't think the guy makes a habit of charging storage fees, but I guess we'll see how it goes.

Today when I was there the body was up on the rotisserie, and the guy was pointing out all the rust areas to me again.  It's pretty bad around the base of the windshield, sides of the windshield, around the back window, around the trunk, etc., etc.

 

Next to the rotisserie was the frame and suspension.  Looks like they haven't stripped that down yet.  A guy was supposed to be coming today to blast the body, not sure if they were planning to have him do the frame at the same time.

 

And here is one of the front fenders that they have already made good progress on.  I asked them to go ahead and fill most of the holes for mounting badges.  I'm planning to keep the emblem on the front of the car, and the one on the rear of the trunk lid, but I decided to just get rid of the side badges.  Getting rid of the hood spear, too.

So, things are moving along, actually much more quickly than I expected.  I think things will slow down when they start getting into repairing the rust on the body, but then again, they are already moving along faster than I expected, so maybe they will continue to do so...?  I guess we'll see how it goes.

It would be time to start building my engine, but right now the Corvair is keeping me busy with its own problems.  Hopefully I'll get those squared away this weekend, and I guess I probably ought to start that engine assembly in the mean time while I'm waiting for Corvair parts.

Better get to work....

If the engine block, bellhousing and transmission assembly fits....

So, a couple weeks ago I received my M22z transmission, and the plan was to do my powertrain test fit the following weekend.  John was busy on that day, so I took the operation international when a sort-of-co-worker car guy, in town from our UK office, offered to help.  Which was a good thing, too, as he had some good ideas about how to maneuver the block/bellhousing/trans assembly into the car without the hernia that I probably would have acquired otherwise.

The main reason for this exercise was because I had some trouble finding engine mounts, and a bellhousing, and a transmission mount that were advertised as being appropriate for this engine in this car.  That was a little bit strange to me, because this engine and trans were available in this car from the factory, so it seems like there should be parts available, but for whatever reason Summit Racing does not list any motor mounts for a Mark IV big block in a 1965 Impala.  Eventually I found that they do list motor mounts for a Mark IV big block in a 1965 Bel Air, and I thought, "Well, that should be exactly the same, for all intents and purposes."  But, I wasn't 100% sure, so I wanted to test fit everything to make sure that the mounting holes would line up, because if we needed to make any new holes, I wanted that done before the frame was powdercoated.

So anyway, we started by putting the transmission on the edge of the bench and bolting the bellhousing to it.  Then we put the chain on the engine block, hooked it on to the hoist, unbolted it from the engine stand, and wheeled the hoist over to the bench, where we could line it up with the bellhousing and bolt the bellhousing to the block.

The hood was already off the car, but the front fenders, radiator support, etc., were all still in place, so we had to come in at a pretty steep angle. I didn't get any pictures of the assembly hanging at that angle, because I was always nervous to see it hanging with all its weight on one half of the chain that we used to hoist it.

But, after we verified that the chain could hold it at that angle, I grabbed the tail of the transmission and lifted it up to level the load.  Then we rolled the whole deal over to the car and maneuvered the assembly over the engine bay.  From there, we lowered the tail of the trans down into the engine bay until we could support it on a jack.  At that point, we had the engine block hanging from the hoist, and the tail of the trans resting on the jack.  As we moved the assembly towards horizontal, we maneuvered the jack under the transmission case, so that we could continue to support the trans as we moved its tail over the crossmember.

It was a bit of hassle to lift the tail of the trans, lower the engine block, repeat, shift the whole deal back towards the crossmember, repeat again, etc., until we could work the tail of the trans up over the crossmember and rest the trans mount on the crossmember.  At the same time, we had to be lining the engine mounts up and bringing them down into place.

But, finally we had the whole deal in place, with bolts in place in the engine mounts, and the studs threaded into the transmission mount on the crossmember.  The photos below show the views from below and above.

 

You can see the shiny gold-colored ends of the transmission mount studs sticking down through the cross member just right of center in the picture above, and you can see one bolt sticking through the motor mount assembly just below-ish center in the picture below.  Full success.



 

I was worried that removal was going to be just as much of a hassle as installation had been, but the whole deal actually came right out, quite a bit easier than it had gone in.  Or maybe it just seemed easy, relative to my expectations.  Either way, we got it out, disassembled everything, put the block back on the stand, put the bellhousing back in its box, and left the transmission on the work bench.

My tentative plan as of now is to take the car to the body shop, have them blast and powdercoat the frame, then I'll bring the frame back home where I can start installing the suspension, fuel lines, etc., and eventually I will drop the engine, bellhousing, clutch, transmission, etc., into place without the body on the frame.  That will make the job much easier and remove the risk of damaging the paint on the body in the process.  Then the whole frame and powertrain will go back to the body shop for the body to be dropped on top of it.

At least ... that's the plan.  We'll see how it goes.

Next task:  get the car to the body shop.

Transmission Received

All right, so, what's going on here....  A few weekends ago, I went up to Austin to look at a 1933 Chevy 5-window coupe that a guy was selling up there.  Do I need a 1933 Chevy 5-window coupe?  No.  But about a year ago, I was looking for one and couldn't find anything that looked suitable.  Then I stumbled on to this one on Craigslist, and it looked like a great starting point for a hot rod project, perfect for my purposes.  I thought the price looked fair, so I decided I should at least go look at it.

The guy hadn't given any contact information, other than e-mailing him through Craigslist's anonymous e-mail system.  So, I tried that, and got no response.

So I tried again the next day, got no response.  At this point I figured that he must have sold the car already, but been too lazy to take the ad down.  Still, I tried again the next day.

Still no response.  By now it was the weekend, and I gave up.  On Monday, I saw that the guy had re-listed the car, and knocked $500 off the price.  Now I'm thinking that apparently none of this guy's messages are getting through to him, and, man, how do I get a hold of this idiot and take advantage of him before someone else does?

I tried to e-mail Craigslist, explain the situation, and see if they could help put me in touch with the guy.  Predictably, I never heard back from them.  At the same time, my buddy John was in the UK on a business trip.  I told him by e-mail what was going on, and he decided to try and e-mail the guy through Craigslist, also.  Somehow, his message got through, the guy gave John his phone number, and John sent it to me.  So then I texted the guy, and decided to go up and look at the car after work on Friday.

By the time I finally got up there and saw the car, I had had a week to think about all the practical aspects of such an acquisition, and most of them were more towards the "impractical" end of the scale.  I didn't really have a good place to put it, and while several people offered to let me keep it in various places, I figured that it might take a couple years or more before I was ready to work on it, and I didn't want to leave it somewhere for that long, or have to move it around as I wore out my welcome at various locations.

But, I still went up there to look at it, anyway, because it just seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up.  There was a lot of good stuff there, original frame, original engine, original trans, most of the original sheetmetal, except for the fenders and running boards, which I didn't want, anyway.  I also had no use for the engine and trans, as my plan was to get a 409 Chevy from a guy at work who knows someone who's trying to sell one, and maybe another Muncie M22Z for the transmission.

I stood there talking with the guy for a while, he turned out to be a very nice guy.  I was looking at the car, and trying to talk myself into or out of it, but I couldn't make my mind up either way.  He said that he had bought it in Iowa, took it to Montana, then brought it down to Texas as he moved around, but never had a chance to get started on it.  Now he and his wife were getting ready to start a home renovation project that would block in the back yard, so the Chevy had to be moved before the project started.  The project was supposed to start in a couple days, so if I didn't buy the Chevy, he was going to show the car to a couple other potential buyers on Saturday, and if they didn't buy it, then his dad was going to buy it from him, just to get it out of the way.

Well, I still couldn't decide if I wanted it, so I told him to text me on Saturday if the other guys didn't want it.  I was kind of hoping that someone else would buy it, and I wouldn't have to worry about it.  I got dinner with a friend in Austin, then headed back to San Antonio.  By the time I was driving home, I was really starting to think that I wanted that '33 after all....

Sure enough, Saturday afternoon I got a text from the guy in Austin, the other buyers had low-balled him and he had declined their offers.  Last chance to get the car.  I wandered around the house for an hour or so, trying to figure out where I could put the '33, whether or not I even wanted it, etc.  But, for whatever reason, I just couldn't get excited about it, and every time I tried to picture an exciting hot rod project in my head, I kept picturing 1937 Chevy coupes, instead of '33's.  In the end, I decided that I just didn't want it right now, so I told the guy, sorry, thanks, but no thanks.  I guess if all else fails, if I decide I should have bought it, I can always try to contact the guy and see if his dad still has it.

Since then, there's been a couple of relatively unproductive weekends.  The Corvair got an oil change somewhere along the line.  Last weekend, on Friday, my transmission was delivered.  So, the plan for this weekend is to do the powertrain test fit, and then the car will be just about ready to send off to the body shop.  At that point, I'll be able to get back to painting parts, and start building up the engine.  So that will be exciting.

Slowly moving along....

another weekend blowout

There are two things I want to do before sending Matilda to the body shop.  One is to test fit the engine, bellhousing and transmission together, to make sure the mounts all line up.  If they don't line up, then I might have to make some new mounting holes somewhere, so I want to do that before the frame gets powdercoated.  The other thing I want to do is to put in some mounting points for blowout straps over the back window.  I ordered my transmission a couple weeks ago, but it hasn't shown up yet, so it seemed like it must be time to work on the blowout strap mounts.

Well, I didn't feel like I got enough done last weekend, so I went out to the garage and did a little work each night this week.

So, the basic idea for the blowout straps is, I want to run two straps down the length of the back window.

Like I said in an earlier post, blowout straps are a common feature of race cars that are based on production cars.  When the car is at high speed with the side windows down, it is possible to generate a pressure difference across the back window that can be sufficient to suck the window out.  My car won't really need them (I hope?), but I thought it would be a cool design cue to play up the race car angle.

But, how to mount them?  From what I've seen/heard, on the old race cars they'd typically be mounted with rivets or sheet metal screws.  That's fine for a race car, because they don't have to worry about aesthetics or rain water leaking into the car or anything like that.  I wanted to work out a better way to do it, though.  Something that would look nicer, and most importantly not leak.

The idea I came up with was to use a threaded standoff.  I ordered four zinc-plated standoffs from McMaster-Carr.

The standoff is threaded all the way through, but my plan was to weld one end shut, so that it would be blind.  I figure that with the end welded shut, and with a thread locker and/or thread sealer on the fastener, there should be no way for water to leak through.

McMaster-Carr has a very searchable/sortable website, which made it easy to find what I was looking for.  In picking the standoff, the main thing I wanted was a 3/8-16 thread, and it turned out that the hex-shaped, zinc-plated standoffs were the best option available for that. They also had stainless steel, but I didn't want to be trying to weld stainless to regular steel.

So, for starters, my buddy Allen helped me mark Matilda's centerline last weekend.  You can see a couple of the marks in this picture (a long one on the trunk lid, and a very small one at the rear window molding).

We made one mark on the trunk lid, one mark at the base of the rear window, one mark at the top of the rear window, and then checked with a straight edge to verify that all three marks lined up with each other, and with the hole for the lock in the trunk lid.

Next I picked a spot that looked like a good place to put the blowout strap.  I just did this by eye.  After years and years of looking at photos of old race cars, I felt like I had a pretty good feel for where it should go.

So, I measured the distance from the centerline to the spot I'd picked, rounded it off to the nearest inch to make it easy, and then marked it, and marked a corresponding point on the other side of the car.  I spaced the marks an inch and a half off of the inner edge of the rear window molding, and fourteen inches from the centerline of the car.  Then I centered a standoff on each mark and traced around it, to show the hex shape that I would need to create.

To start making the holes, I took a Phillips head screwdriver to use as a punch, and a hammer, and made a small punch mark at the center of each mounting point.  Then I drilled it out, stepping up the drill bit sizes until I didn't have any larger drill bit.

From there, I took my Dremel and started milling the hole out to match the hex shape that I'd traced on to the car.  I went slowly and kept checking size of the hex hole compared to the size of the standoff.

When it felt like the standoff was almost ready to fit into the hole, with just the slightest interference, I took a hammer and tapped it in.  My idea was that I wanted it to fit tightly enough that it would stay where I put it, because I didn't really have any good ideas for how to position its depth for welding.

Unfortunately, once it was in the hole, and once I moved it around any little bit at all, it already fit loosely enough that it wouldn't stay where I put it, it would just drop right through the hole.  Part of the problem with that is that, the way the body is built, there is another panel just underneath the outer body, so there's no way to put a hand or a tool or anything on the standoff from the other side of the body panel.  And if the standoff dropped in, it would be very difficult to get it out without cutting a hole in something.

Because of the inner body panel, the depth of the holes at the base of the rear window were just a little bit too shallow for the standoff to drop in.  So those standoffs would need to be cut shorter, but for the time being, it allowed me to at least set the standoffs in the holes to see how they'd look.  I decided that for aerodynamic purposes (by which I mean to say, "to look cool"), the best fastener to use would be a button head cap screw.  I ordered these from McMaster-Carr, also.

Here's a picture of the two standoffs at the base of the rear window, with cap screws in them.  Each one also has a washer on it in this picture, because even though I was pretty sure they couldn't drop in, I wanted to make sure they wouldn't.

So next, I cut the standoffs short.  I had to cut the two at the base of the window so that they could fit, but I cut the upper ones, too, just because I wanted to minimize the dead space between the end of the cap screw and the bottom of the standoff.  To cut them off, I just clamped each one in a bench vise and cut it with a cutoff wheel on an angle grinder.  Crude, but effective.  And the cut didn't need to look pretty, because it would be completely concealed after installation.

So, I did all those steps over the course of the week, spaced out over a few weeknights.  The plan all along was for my buddy John to do the welding, because he has a welder, and (much more importantly) a good amount of practice using it.  It looked like we were going to be ready for Saturday, so the plan was to go ahead and weld the standoffs in after breakfast.  The weather, just for the record, was beautiful, so we rolled the garage door up and went to work.  The picture below is looking up the street behind my house, at the end of my driveway.

To do the final preparation for welding, I used a sandpaper wheel on the Dremel to remove the paint around each hole, and I used the wire wheel on the bench grinder to remove the zinc plating around the surfaces of the standoff that would be welded.  Then, John put each standoff in the bench vise and welded the end of each one shut.

Next, we went to place the first standoff in the body and weld it.  My idea had been to make a small clip, shaped like the letter "Omega" from the Greek alphabet.  The idea was that one of the cap screws would fit through the circle of the "Omega clip," and hold it to the stand off, and then the "legs" of the "Omega clip" would keep it from dropping through the hole.  That would hold the standoff in place for John to tack weld a couple places, then the clip could be removed and the weld completed.

Well, it turned out that the whole arrangement was pretty clunky and didn't look like it would work very well.  Fortunately, John had a much better idea, which was to use a magnet to hold one side of the standoff flush with the body while John tacked the other side.  This sounded like a much better idea, so we went ahead to put the first standoff in place, and ... damned if it didn't drop right through the hole and into the small cavity inside the body.

I had almost kind of assumed that at some point we were going to lose one of the standoffs into the body, but I had figured that we'd mess around for a little while, and eventually fish it out of there.  What I never would have imagined was how difficult it was just to find the standoff after it fell in.  The space it fell into is so small, it seemed like it couldn't have gone far, but with extremely limited access into that space, it turned out to be seemingly impossible to even locate the standoff.  We fished around with wire, magnets, and a mirror.  We thought maybe it had bounced over and fallen out of one of the holes at the bottom of the cavity and fallen in to the trunk, so we emptied everything out of the trunk, and still didn't find it.  We took turns laying on our backs in the trunk, fishing around and trying to find it.  We must have looked for it for about an hour, and actually, we never knew where it was until finally I had just tried fishing a length of wire around in there again, and pulled it out, and then I bent down to look in there, and suddenly I saw the standoff just sitting there, in plain view, where I could just reach in and pick it up.  Crazy.

So, then we decided to try the Omega clip.  But, it turned out to be every bit as clunky and ineffective as it had looked like it would be.  Fortunately, John had another better idea, which was to just thread a long bolt into the standoff, which would allow him to hold it where he wanted it with one hand while he tacked it in place with the other hand.  He also left the bolt in place while he finished the weld, to keep slag and weld splatter from fouling the threads.  That worked really well after a little practice on the first standoff, and from that point John was off and running, welding all four standoffs into the body.

After welding, John went around with a grinder and ground all the weld beads down.

Then he went back, welded over each one again, to try to make sure there was good weld penetration all the way around each one, then he went back with the grinder again.  After that, each one looked something like the picture below.

The body shop should be able to clean up what's left, smooth out and/or fill in any imperfections, and it should be good to go.  I'm a little bit worried that the body shop will present me with a list of all the reasons why this was a stupid idea and tell me I've ruined the car, but I really think it should be good to go.

The last thing I did was to wipe some used motor oil over the exposed sheet metal to prevent rust, and then put a cap screw in each one, just to see how it would look.  The next thing will be to make the straps that will run across the window.

I'm not going to make the straps, though, until the car is back from the body shop.  That's because I'm also a little worried that the body shop might want to, or need to, replace the panel at the base of the rear window, which would mean removing the panel with the two standoffs in it. If that's the case, we can always repeat this whole process again, but hopefully they'll be able to just repair any rust damage on that panel and use it as-is. We'll see how it goes.

Anyway, I did get some material to use for the straps.  Lowe's had some strips of aluminum that are perfect for the job.  They are six feet long, one inch wide, and a sixteenth of an inch thick.  I should be able to cut these to length, bend them to match the contour of the window, and put holes in them for the cap screw to go through.

 

I think I will also try to put a thin gasket under each end of the strap, to protect the paint under it, and maybe some kind of weatherstrip-type padding under the strap, to cushion it from slapping against the rear window if airflow ever gets under it or anything like that.

 

Anyway, me and John had finished all this before lunch on Saturday morning, and I already felt like I'd accomplished so much, I basically goofed off the rest of the weekend.

Hopefully my transmission will show up this week, then maybe I can do the drivetrain test fit next weekend.