Projects 53 Chevy Bel Air "Cleetus" mild custom daily driver

The self-drilling screw ends are a nice touch. How many times have you caught your arm on them?

 

Actually haven't because of where they are lol. Don't have a welder so tunnel and floor patches were self tappers and seam sealer for now. Only reason I was able to perform my "amazing" welds on the crossmember was because I could unbolt it and take it to work lol

 

In the process of making the crossmember work with a modern mount I did discover the source of the popping going between drive and reverse. Apparently with the quarter inch plate I was using as an adapter the bolts holding it to the transmission didn't have enough bite to stay torqued and had backed off a couple turns. Basically I was hearing the plate slide up and down the bolts

 

Ouch..

 

ever thought of becoming a professional photographer?....prob shouldn't...

 

Hey now. Yelp even gave me an award for my picture taking ability lol. Actually am skilled at photography. Even blue ribboned at the Missouri state fair in photography as a kid for black and white pictures I took of a turn of the century mini mansion they were going to tear down to build the current O'Reilly. But not much room under my car....even on ramps lol

 

Thinking about trying a flux core welder off Amazon. Hobo freight never seems to have them in stock. And pawn shops want goofy amounts for cheap welders. At the very least I could use it to tack my exhaust together to remove and weld up at work. At a point where some of the welding needs to be done on car

 

And a current small side project from the cheapass file lol. Found a box of stainless wood screws in an old toolbox of my grandpa's in the shed. Some of my garnish moulding screws were missing and the ones left were rough looking. Decided to replace them with the wood screws. Similar thread and size and easy enough to cut down for the short ones. But the larger flat heads looked off. Took one to work and spent a few seconds on a bench grinder to see if feasible to reshape them. While I rushed this one and it's uneven it shows it is. Ill dig out my own bench grinder this weekend and get to reshaping. Then I'll sand and polish

 

Guess I get to repeat my change flex plate with pulling engine or transmission truck lol. Finally figured out the reman starter had a defective starter drive and damaged the good used flex plate I put in. I'm going to fill out a work order on this one

 

And here we are for this weekend. Gotta look up book time to remove a trans and replace flex plate before trans reinstall on a 76 C10 tomorrow. Guessing book is 2-3 for removal and 2-3 to reinstall. So I should get a couple hundred plus parts and materials for my efforts. Just ready for the starter to work correctly again lol

 

Got the starter warranteed tonight. Had to get a bit pushy because it was a machining flaw and not a mechanical one. They still insisted on testing it. Which It did pass.... though gear had a delay in extending. Anyway I noticed when they got me the replacement that the mounting holes weren't quite in the same spots. Not far off enough to indicate wrong application but enough you could see the difference without measuring. Get home and throw it on. There was a tiny bit of grind noise due to the damage from the other starter but it spun over much smoother. I'll get the new flex plate on tomorrow and should be good

 

Got the Amazon welder tonight. Practiced on a couple of scrap pieces and aside from needing to figure out the heat settings on it it will for a fact stick two pieces of metal together. I guess next I'll order a few prebent mandrel bends so I can stick some metal together and ditch the flex pipe

 

Honestly half tempted to just angle cut and weld some pipe lol. I have plenty of exhaust pipe. Would save close to $100 and I could always replace with bent pipe later on. And this won't exactly be a drag car so optimal exhaust flow really isn't important lol

 

Maybe you could gather up some old exhaust pipe at a muffler shop and harvest the bends you need . A friend of mine had a motorcycle shop . He let me gather up pieces with bends for a project I once did .

 

Can also get cheap crinkle bends at the parts store. Nobody’s gonna be looking under it anyhow

 

Problem with crunch and bend is it doesn't turn tight enough. Otherwise I would have already grabbed some. I think regardless on the driver side Im going to do the angle cut and weld thing. Such a short section plus it's only like a 30° bend.

 

Here's what I had to do to clear the steering box lol. One thing that makes this part of the job a pain is I'm tying directly to lakes pipes as sole exhaust. If it just tied into undercarriage exhaust it'd be simpler. But in the longer run it'll make stuff easier down the road. Basically I have to contort it tight around the frame while curving it tight to the actual pipes. On a car not exactly known for exhaust clearance. Lol. As it is I'm cheating a hair and doing 1.75" pipe from the passenger manifold to the first bend to gain a lil breathing room for the starter.

 

Ok I talked myself out of hackery on the passenger side lol. Am sticking with that angle cut and weld on the driver side since it's such a short section and such a mild bend

 

It’s just metal you havnt got to nail it the first time. I would suggest tack and try before you bother making it solid though

 

Got the driver side done. Already sounds better despite what my crappy phone audio says lol. Lot more base to it. Still gotta start on the passenger side

 

May just end up running these grills in the rear.

 

And finished up welding a squiggly pipe for the passenger side. Luckily it didn't have to be as squiggly as the driver side lol

 

Reminds me of the monstrosities that the previous owner had thrown at my ‘51 and my slightly better replacements lol

 

I made a point to use all new pipe lol

 

https://youtube.com/shorts/Utl4ho7BGhY?si=2fEH0lehIQw0MRSY

Crappy audio but it sounds a lot better with all the leaky flex pipe gone

 

Car exhaust on video is nearly impossible to get right on a phone camera and if you did get it we are all listening to it on phone speakers so it doesn’t matter lol

congrats on progress

 

Yeah my phone is progressively crashing slowly. I noticed the clip of the passenger side was lower quality than the earlier one of the drivers side lol

 

And I'm finally getting the hang of the Amazon welder lol. Took me like 15 minutes to weld everything up. And that included filling a quarter inch gap on one side of the pipe

 

So curse of the seasons when it comes to hot rods. Was real focused on putting together the heater while it was still cold. Got as far as finding a potential heater core. Then it got warm. And I went to other stuff completely forgetting the heater lol. Well now it's cold again. This time I for sure have settled on a heater core. This one actually takes advantage of the majority of usable area while still likely being able to fit in the slot(have to order it to actually test fit ....not in stock). And on top of that is less than a third of the cost of the Dodge one I was planning last winter. This one is for a 69 Camaro without ac. Oddly the AC heater core is bigger on those cars.

 

c

cuz those camaros were already hot!