Projects "Saving" a Studebaker

Carter made several performance 500's.

Jon

 

Yup, I had two on my '59 Silver Hawk and they worked flawlessly!

 

As nice as the grille cleaned up, I decided to "tone it down" a notch; "De-twinkle" it, if you will... so it won't look out of place so to speak.

Ahh... that's better. I want to do the same treatment on the turn signal/parking light fixtures when the time comes.

 

Ah man, I liked the twinkle. The grille was a big statement piece, and had such a great shine to it after all that polishing you did.

I may not like what you did (that doesn't matter, of course), but you did a really good job of it! Nice lines, very clean. It's your car, so make it your own. I'm enjoying the process.

 

Hey thanks, pvfjr, The border & crossbars are still "twinkly", I wanted to make it a little more subtle. I think it's a good compromise considering the appearance of everything else on the car.


By the way, I bought a house in Lyons about 3-4 years ago. One day before final inspection fire swept through and toasted the entire neighborhood. Very sad... I really like that Detroit Lake area!

 

I was buying an old Studebaker dealer & garage in Oklahoma and a freshly fueled semi crashed into the building and burned everything. Tons of NOS parts and some rebuilt engines. Fire can be a bad thing when it gets a mind of its own!

 

Well... dang it... I cleaned up the floors on the organ donor and they're mighty pitted. No holes, but the pits are too deep... the floor flexes when I push from the bottom. Both sides. Aint gonna use 'em.
So I hit up a buddy in the Stude club and located a brand new set for a Champ truck which is basically the same floor... gonna cost a lunch to get 'em!
Sweet deal... time to saddle up!

 

I went & picked up the panels... the Champ panels aren't even close to the Lark's. What ever, I'll figure it out.
I did make a little progress on the engine assembly though.

 

There are some strange 'this panel fits this and this' applications, but a truck floor and a coupe floor just didn't sound right. Shame the White floor is pitted, but you will find something.

 

The Champ truck is based on the Lark car... I'm not sure what these panels are for, but it's just metal. I'll make it work.

 

Is there enough of the original floor to patch? In the long run that be easier than replace large sections. Lucky for us my son's Conestoga only had a few rusted spots.

 

I feel your pain with the Lark rust. I had a ‘62 with substantial floor rust that I stuffed a 327 sbc and a th350 into. Painted it with Rustoleum royal over a weekend with a buddy. This was my daily driver for years…

 

Yeah, it's not horrible. I'm going to use the "new" panels as a base, cut 'em to suit and move on. Here's the passenger side:

 

She's a beauty!

 

Rust Mort the crap out of it!

 

Huh? Is that a rust treatment? Never heard of it...

 

Yes, One of the oldest that I know of. Easy to use and can get into hard to reach spots. A Studebaker owner's friend.
https://semproducts.com/product/rust-morttm/morttm

 

Picked some up today... further developments on that to follow.

In the mean time I took the trans & drive shaft back to the drive shaft shop due to the fact that the slip yolk wouldn't go far enough into the trans. The output shaft is funky, so I took the trans to a shop for evaluation... yeah, I won't be using that one. Grrr! Plan B to follow.

 

One step forward and ............

 

Well, once again my buddy Shawn proves that he's a man of his word and just a stand up guy;
I was talking on the phone with him and mentioned my discovery of the bad condition the 4-speed I got from him was in. He assured me he wasn't aware of the trans being in bad shape as it is. He provided me with another and said to hang on to the original one in case I needed any parts. I can live with that.
In the mean time I'm fixin' to do an up-grade @ the shop as well as a bit of re-arranging of plunder there-in.

 

A standup guy, not enough of them around anymore.

 

Trans Plan B:
New gasket & juice for the trans, prep the clutch parts and see how it works.

 

I've been doing everything possible to avoid the dreaded floor replacement...
The flywheel's been glass beaded & re-surfaced, painted and is ready to go.
The trans is cleaned and ready to go... well, I don't know about the wacky shifter, but... meh, bigger fish are present.
I needed floor space for an off topic project so I rolled the Lark outside. Little bugger looks good out in the sun!

 

Everything looks great! That shifter looks like it will be in the back seat.

 

Well, my supervisors were getting fed up with the lack of progress...
So I got off my keister and and got to work on the engine bay;

 

Ha... y'know, I didn't know what that post meant, or who the mug was... then I saw an ad on the M.T. channel and thought "Why does that dude look familiar?".
So I watched an episode of the show on demand... Now I get it! That Derek is a hoot! Good to know I'm not the only knucklehead pullin' crap outta the fields and bringin' 'em back to life!

 

I've watched that guy do some crazy stuff. It's just fun.

 

How's it going?

 

Thanx for asking;
Out of town guests for Turkey day set me back for a few days, plus I've been working on prepping the building for a modification that required a mechanical engineer and dealing with the town officers... ugh, major pain in the tookuss.
In the mean time I've managed to get the driver's side engine bay cleaned up a bit, but still need to repair the area on the inner fender where the battery mounts before final prep & paint.
Then the Transtar blew an axle seal on the rear... I should be able to knock that out tomorrow. It's always something, right?