Projects Return of the BelAired Wagon

It's been a minute since I posted anything... I've been busy with life. Got divorced in 2013, raised kids, got re-married last year, lived through the s#!tshow that was the pandemic...
But that doesn't mean I've been sitting on my arse this whole time!

I had wanted a wagon for a long time. I had a vision: rollin' around with my family, kids sitting backwards in the "way back", the envy of most any man. So I sold my 64 Olds and started looking. I looked and looked and looked. Long story short, after more than a year of searching, I purchased the BelAired Wagon from 1pickup here on the HAMB. You can see how he brought her back from the grave in his build thread. I absolutely love her and drive her every chance I get until the salt comes. But, like you, I can't leave well enough alone



This is how she looked when she left Wisconsin. 1pickup did a lot of work on her and I still marvel at the custom interior he made. I can't tell you how much I love having a headliner that's 12 feet of leopard print! All I did for the first year was put a different set of wheels on her. I got some 14" GM steelies to help get me closer to the ground, filled it full of kids, and had some fun.



Originally a nine passenger wagon, the third row seat had long since been poached. The back cargo area was covered with a piece of plywood and I got tired of it so I bought a cargo door off a guy. I figured I'd go find a third row seat in a junkyard sometime soon.

I can hear some of you laughing right now. Turns out, they go for three grand if you can even find one! I looked and looked (so manny scammers out there) and the best I could do was a clapped out blue seat. Even that was painfully expensive, but at least now I had one.

 

Not bad. Let’s see vehicle of choice, check, successful build plan, check, color of choice, check, accessories of choice, check. All you need now is a bellflower exhaust and you’re set.

 

Yesssss! Bellflowers are in the future for sure.

 

So now I have a seat. Sort of. Enough of a seat. But now there's another problem. The air tank and valves occupy the space where the seat goes.

 

I pulled out the airbag setup and the cargo door and got the seat in. Fortunately the cargo door supplied a couple of parts that didn't come with the seat. All of the little rubber stops were gone so I made some with hood stops. Off a 70s Nova or something. I can't remember.

Finally I had my tail gunner seat! Now, where do I put the air tank and valves? Hmmmm. I measured the area under the seat and made a cardboard mockup of it so I could play around with parts on the bench to see if I could get them to fit. I found a low profile tank that juuuuuuust fit under the seat bottom.

 

I figured I could fit 'em if I could lay it out flat. I took the whole setup apart and played around with the valves to see if I could get it all to fit. I wanted to upgrade to a two compressor setup because it seemed like the compressor was constantly running, and, because it was bolted to the floor, it was loud as hell.

Well, I came up with an insanely complicated way to get the valves compact enough. My idea was to make the whole thing modular so I could work on it on the bench. It took me a couple of months of picking away at it over the winter.

 

I got a dual-compressor wiring kit (4ga welding wire!) and re-routed some of the wiring. I added a coupling so I could take the cradle out without unhooking all of the wires. S-m-r-t. That also enabled me to plug other controls into it! So I did! For Halloween I had a skeleton driving it and I had it wired up to a handheld controller that also controlled the headlights. I ran a long hose to my garage compressor. When people walked by, I would throw on the headlights and raise and lower the front end like it was a possessed car!

I may be growing old, but I refuse to grow up

 

Well look at you all fancy. Hehe. Looks good.

 

Nice, good to see you around again!

 

I like it so far. And also, now I'm going to be on the lookout for those back seats. I had no idea they brought that kind of coin.

 

Yeah, it's insane. If you find one, I'm interesrted! I believe that 61-64 pontiacs are the same.

 

I made some electrical updates when I put the new compressors in. I added a Ford style solenoid to the firewall to serve as a master connection point for power. You can see the red 4ga wire that goes back to the compressors. When you do this, you have to put a "jump link" on your starter that connects the starter-mounted solenoid directly to the positive power cable.

 

I also took the opportunity to upgrade my headlights to use relays. Because of the way GM designed the wiring in these cars (and really a lot of cars of the era are like this) allows a lot of voltage to be lost on its way from the battery to the headlights. I chose to buy a wiring kit from MAD Engineering to make it easy on myself.

To keep it looking stock, I hollowed out the voltage regulator (I don't use it, I run a one wire alternator) and shoehorned the relays in it. I was pretty stoked with how it turned out. I still have to clean up the wiring, wrap it up and such.

Headlights are noticeably brighter!

 

Hey! Nice work on my old car. I wanted the 3rd row seat too - until I priced them. I did just enough work on that thing to make it reliable and fun. Well, other than my amateur upholstery work, dual 1bbs, the smallest glass packs ever, etc. I knew that was as far as I was taking her. It's good to see the progress. I might have enough material left to recover that back seat...

 

That's a clever solution.

 

@1pickup It's ridiculous what they go for, but I guess that's what the market will bear as they say. But yeah, I love this car and I'm so glad you sold it to me. I drive it almost daily as long as there's not snow on the road.
I'm so impressed at the work you did on the interior. That's a realm I've never entered. It's like voodoo or something LOL. You really brought her back from the dead, honestly.
DM me and let me know what you want for that material!!

 

I do love a straight six, but I happened have a built 350 sitting in the garage and it was time to upgrade. The stovebolt went home with straight six guru Steve Langdon, and the BelAired Wagon got a new powerplant. It bolted right up to the powerglide. I'm eternally indebted to my club brothers for helping me get it in. PBFL!
I had to get a whole new exhaust which was more of an adventure (and an expense) than I bargained for. Those X frames are tricky. The guy at the exhaust shop was perplexed I drove her over there with open headers which was honestly a blast.

 

I got some nice powdercoated headers, and updated the brake master to a drum/drum from a later model Bel Air... like 65 or 6 or 7. Worked great and bolted right up.

 

I wasn't totally happy with my new airbag setup though. There were so many connections with all those sections of pipe (so more places for it to possibly leak) and the car would leak down overnight. I decided to go for one of the fancy new manifold style valve setups. The car had 1/2" valved and lines which made it fun to drop, but tricky (for me anyway) to adjust to the right stance.

I also updated the cradle with a better layout, and faster disconnect, and the best thing of all... HANDLES! That setup must weigh 70 lbs!

I had to re-route the air lines because the stock exhaust setup hugs the X frame and that's where the lines to the front ran. A nice protected spot for sure, but I had to move them now. My club brother Mark (who is a verrrry talented builder and artist BTW) knows airbags inside and out and he came over to give me a hand. He recommended that we run the air line through the frame rails so the connections to the front bags were hidden. The new manifold has 3/8" valves and I liked how they worked.

 

When I got the air manifold it came with a 7 switch control, so I had to run that from the front seat back to the manifold. To get it through the hole in the rear compartment wall I had to cut the plug off and re-solder and shrink wrap the plug back on after I fed the wire through the hole.


Image my dismay when I went to plug it in and found out I'd wired it Adam and Steve instead of Adam and Eve. <smacks forehead> I'm getting really good at soldering.

 

Reverse lights, like seat belts and hazard flashers, were optional upgrades in 63 I scored an NOS reverse light package and upgraded! Since this was originally an automatic, the reverse light switch was already there, and the wiring harness too. All I had to was hijack the inner running light wire and solder a connector on it to plug them into the reverse light tab on the harness (this was per instructions in the kit).




I had to pull the rear glass, so while I was in there I decided to bump out this huge dent. I did some hammer and dolly, but it was still pretty buckled where the relief was for the trim. So, I made a tool from some angle iron and attached it to a slide hammer, I fed the bolt out through a trim hole. It fit right in the relief and allowed me to (gently) slide hammer it out flush.

It was tough to get in there with all the tailgate bracing.

 

@stickylifter As long as you have the rear glass out, replace the safety switch for the glass, as I bypassed it.

 

Hey didn’t I find the car and the wheels for you….

Good to see ya on here…cruisin weather will be here soon…

 

I had no idea there was a safety switch! Googling...

 

It's to not let you use the power window when the gate is open, so you don't raise the window & then try to close the gate. Disastrous results. Memory is fuzzy at my age. Don't remember if it's in the gate or the body.

 

OK I'll look for that, it makes sense because if you were able to push the glass out (accidentally) while the tailgate was down it would be disasterous.

 

I did some more work on the wagon the last couple weeks. The radiator was still the one from the straight six, and now that she has a V8, it had a tendency to overheat on the highway. I got a three core cheap from a guy on a wagons forum who said it was from his '64 Impala. So, I thought, "it should bolt right up!" But no. No it did not. Had to drill some new holes and hog them out, and trim the fan shroud a little but I got it in Stays at 180 all day long!

But what I was really stoked on is working on the third row seat base. They are hard to find, and pricey as we've noted. I got mine in pretty rough shape. Some of these wagons sit in a junkyard or back yard with the back window busted out or rolled down and the seat base gets soaked and retains water and rusts out. But you can get those ones cheaper I had located a cargo cover for a decent price, which i'd installed, and when I got the effed up third row seat I finally had enough parts between the two to make a good seat. I think. We'll see. The real wild card is all the hinges and hardware. Between the two I had (mostly) what I needed. Except for the seat base springs. Not sure what I'll do about that right now.



Sure, that skin is a little gnarly, but it's better that what's there now. It looks smaller in this pic, but it's the same size. So, first task is to get the skin off the frame of the cargo cover. I thought that it was just crimped on to the frame of the seat, but as I tried to remove it I found that it had been spot welded as well. Like, a lot.

So I went around the edge first drilling out the spot welds and trying not to drill through the skin Yes I know there are specialty bits for this task, but I was in the heat of the moment so I just went for it.



I did pretty good and didn't pierce the skin - but I did come close a couple times :0
I used an air chisel to pry it up, and vice grips to open it up a little more. I kept doing a combo until i got the perimeter free. Then I realized that the middle part was ALSO spot welded. Whoever did these welds was getting paid by the weld, because there are more than three dozen of them.



I used part of a leaf spring from my old 50 Chevy as a tool. I would tap it into the gap, and drill out the welds. The pressure that the spring introduced would pop the weld before I drilled all the way through.





The entire process took less than 15 minutes. Psyche! It took FOREVER! Now... to get the skin off of the seat base. The seat base is in rough shape.

 

Some of those metal pieces that were in the back were "iffy" at best. I just painted them black & screwed 'em back in. It was one of those "I'll replace those later" things & later has a way of never showing up. Glad you are upgrading the car & fixing some areas that needed attention. Got a little seller's remorse, but you can't keep 'em all.

 

Yeah man, everytime I see a 53-54 chevy I wish I still had my 54 :'(
I haven't noticed anything other than the inside metal panel on the tailgate that got any swiss cheese. Yeah, I figure I'll just keep chipping away at stuff and one of these days maybe I'll blow it all apart and give her a proper paint job... one of these days
Hey, did you see my message about the fabric?

 

I got a ton of work done this weekend, and I bought myself a new toy! A shrinker/stretcher combo. The reason I needed it was to re-create this piece of the seat that had rotted away completely. It's a flange that runs across the front of the seat and is the attachment point for the seat fabric.

Up until now, I'd never intended on restoring this. I had a piece of plywood cut to fit inside the area where the seat cushion used to be, and had some Mexican blankets on top of that, and I figured that would be good enough. But when @1pickup mentioned the fabric, I thought that would look so good that it would be worth all the work.



I went to the hardware store and bought a 48" piece of 1" square tubing, and a 48" piece of 3/16" rod. I had to cut the "L" I wanted out of the square tubing. Then I used the shrinker to add a radius to the end of the flange.



I had cut the flange in half to make working on it easier. Once I had the two ends done I cut them to the right length and welded them together. Then I did the same thing with the rod. The rod is my solution to the lip on the original flange.

Then I turned my attention to the rust-through on the seat base. I cut patch pieces out of the donor panel from the cargo cover.



Now I need to have it dipped and I'll weld it all back together. And after that, I'll have to figure out how to finagle some sort of spring setup - probably get something out of a junkyard and cut it down to fit. I'm really happy with how it all turned out though.