What OT crap are you working on

I detest heater core jobs. The second you smell that aroma and see the haze on the inside of the windshield my sphincter slams shut.

My father told me to go to school, get a good job and pay people to do the stuff I didn't want to do. I am really surprised how many things I don't like doing...like heater cores!

 

Dad, Billy said SPHINCTER!

 

By my memory, I don't recall my 65 ElCamino being so much fun but that was 50 years ago.

 

You know Mark, I know exactly what you mean about this type of so called modern day engineering, its total crap!
It makes me miss the good old days of when I was driving my dads old 65 checker marathon, it was so easy to work on.

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Tons of room under the hood, a good running Chevy 283, with a Borg Warner automatic transmission, and there was no mystery to any of the components on the car.

It really makes a person wonder, just what the fuck happened in Detroit, to allow the bird brain thinking of just how hard it is to make such complicated systems that were once simple, so dammed hard to get to and to work on?

Oh well, all old news at this point!
Just venting, rant is now over!
Thanks from Dennis.

 

As I get older, I'm finding more and more things that I used to be able to do are getting real close to (or past the point of) not being able to do by myself anymore.

When I was a young man, I was an auto mechanic. There were a lot of people that paid me to do things on their car they couldn't or didn't want to do on their cars. I guess its my turn now to pay others to do things on my cars.

When my wife was considering buying her modern vehicle, I opened the hood to take a look. I simply told her I was not going to be able to do much of anything on that car. There are a lot of places on that car my hands don't even fit. We have had that car 20 years now, there isn't much I can actually do on it, and even less then I want to do on it.

The heater core access on all of my vehicles require removal of the entire dash! Its a day long process. I hate dealing with anything involving antifreeze. I can make a mess with that stuff really fast!

 

Made a new throttle link for the 66 KW . Pulled the fuel pump off to get rebuilt and saw things were wore out

 

I had bought my at the time girlfriend a black cream puff hhr with 80k on it, a few thousand miles later I paid to have the timing chain replaced. Little cream puff was once again being a great daily for her, following week at 70mph she runs over a complete retread semi tire laying in the road. It tore the front air damn off, the side molding and ripped shit loose underneath, man I'm glad I don't have to put up with her anymore. Lol

 

Now your thinkin correctly , untainted mind

 

I just wanted to post what FedEx dropped off at my house this afternoon.
They were ordered from Speedhut on April 18 and custom built for me. They told me the gauges would ship from their facility in 15-20 days, but here they are, at my residence 12 days later.
The month of May is going to be a crazy month at our place, so the process of rebuilding the dash so I can get them in, may take a while. Time will tell, maybe I'll get real ambitious.

 

Youngsters getting pretty good at this CAMAROBIRD chrome moly

 

I swapped out the efi harness on my 48 chevy yesterday. This is an oem harness that I deleted unneeded circuits from. It took over 8 hours. Part of that was due to taking an hour to get the 2 bolts back in the crank sensor. There is barely enough room to get a hand in much less with a socket and short extension. With the radiator out, it takes about 1 minute. I haven't driven it enough to know if I cured a problem. The change out required body positions that I don't normally do. I was plenty stiff and sore when I got up this am. This one is wrapped in braided nylon instead of plastic conduit. It sure looks nicer.

 

1970 Firebird, helping a single mom in need, no money, new baby , antifreeze soaked carpet. Interior looked like a street in San Francisco. One whiff, and I hacked that heater core right out of the front. I trimmed the firewall just enough to squeak the core out. None the wiser. Minimal damage to the sphincter.

 

Some cars aren't a huge chore. My 442 on the other hand is a royal PITA! The hood doesn't open on a 68 olds, it's more "ajar" which makes working the carb currently, difficult. But it makes the heater core R&R miserable! Easier to remove the hood completely. Remove the plastic inner fender (which requires removal of the air cleaner ducts), remove the under dash 8 track player, remove the glove box, etc, etc. That smell. The second you sense it. Uhg.

 

I replaced the speakers and stereo in my Dakota over the weekend; nothing fancy, just updated so I can have tunes while driving. Had my 9, 10, and 11 year olds help to teach them basic stuff.

 

I took the sheet metal off of the dash yesterday to do a bit of planning.

1) The back side of the dash cover pieces are all painted white.
2) The old ailing instrument cluster. It shows 68,848 miles.
3) The basic cardboard gauges first draft.
4) The basic plan with card board testing. The details under the dash cover.
5) The bottom, back, and side of the possible new glove box.
6) The tray of screws that held the dash covers together.

I'll be putting it all back together tomorrow. Next weekend the truck is going on a 500 mile weekend trip, and on 5/31, my daughter is getting married, so you know what that week is going to look like.
At this point, it looks like I'll be making an all new dash from scratch. The biggest challenge there is relocating the heat control, and the lever to open & close the cowl vent, both need to move towards the firewall a bit more then an inch, and both have things that are restricting their rear ward movement. I will also need to install the temp sending unit, and the oil pressure sending unit. Both are in really congested areas, and I may need to pull the hood (the center section of the hood is bolted to the nose piece and the firewall and does not move) before I can get to the oil pressure sender port on the 5.2 Mopar motor (its behind the intake manifold).
I hope to begin the real work after the first weekend in June.

 

Cardboard Aided Design.

Love it!

 

Gene, I owned an 89 Shelby Dakota for 11 years. That gauge panel was one of my favorites. I think you will be very happy upon completion.

 

Working on the brakes on my ‘72 Fiat Sport Spider. I really don’t like doing brakes. The previous owner says that he replaced the master cylinder, brake calipers and pads, rotors, lines. So essentially everything is new. His problem (I just recently bought the car) was that he couldn’t get them to bleed. I have tried a couple of times with my compressor bleeder, maybe got 3 tablespoons of brake fluid to come through. He thinks it’s because he didn’t “double flare” the brake lines, but that shouldn’t prevent brake fluid from getting through the system, and it’s not leaking any fluid. My next step will be to double flare the existing lines (that are new), or replace them. Big PIA, as I don’t have a lift, and have to do it laying on my back underneath. This sucks after two major back surgeries…

 

Just so we are clear here, that Dakota instrument cluster is going away. Too many things are failing on it. I will be installing these Speedhut gauges shown in this picture.

 

Is a storage box for my wife's balcony garden too OT?

I could elaborate a complete analysis of that, but I don't think it'd be appropriate even for the OT forum.

Meanwhile, I've been reading up on modern automatic transmissions in order to daydream about rigging some kind of cam arrangement in place of the solenoids ...

 

Boy, Gene, I must be falling asleep at the keyboard. Color me embarrassed for not following better.

 

Kind of figured you were missing the deal. Nothing wrong, I've done that myself a few times before. Takes a good man to admit when he messed up. Carry on!

I discovered years ago its cheaper to cut up cardboard then steel.
Cut it too short or have an odd form? Tape or staple a couple pieces together. You can tape or staple the card board together to create a box or most other forms (even figure out the size and location of the bent flanges), or to modify the size or shape of things. You can bend cardboard on a straight line by marking the line with an ink pin and a straight edge, then folding it (I've used my sheet metal break to bend pieces of cardboard, it gives you a consistent bend line that it will maintain the full length of the bend line). The cardboard provides you with a hands on item you know will fit into the hole, or solve a problem. The cardboard item is ridged enough that you know if something unseen is going to be an issue. If you screw it up, or have finished using it, you can throw it away and start over (larger pieces I just keep, to modify into a different use, some days you don't need a very big piece of cardboard).
For small stuff, I use the cardboard wrap that is around a 12 or 24 pack of beverage. The stuff I used here was the single layer cardboard that came wrapped around sheet steel when I bought a couple pieces of 48" x 96" light gauge sheet metal (20g, 18g & 16g). I usually got two pieces of 4' wide x 8' long thin cardboard, sometimes its nice just to have a larger piece. I stored it in a dry location and would drag another sheet of cardboard out when the last piece was almost used up. I haven't bought sheet steel since 2018, I'm on my last large saved pieces of cardboard now.

 

For the last week or so I have been fixing my mistake from early last summer.
The first picture is the oops that killed my econo car and the next few pictures are me repairing it... I am not finished with it yet hopefully in the next day or two it will be done I am waiting on the radiator (I already bought the radiator but somehow they gave me one for a PT cruiser and because it was almost a year ago I had to buy another radiator errr!).
I took these pictures a couple of days ago since then I sprayed The front end of the car using a few turbo cans of that rustoleum... That paint comes way too fast out of the can it's even faster than they spray gun with a 1.6 or a 1.8 nozzle. I have no idea how big the nozzle is on the rustoleum turbo can but it would probably be good for a hood or the side of a van or maybe a building but I do not recommend it for more curved parts but that's another story... Anyways so I am waiting for the paint to get hard enough for me to give it a little sand and a recoat, I was going to repaint the entire car with Saturn white but I'm not spending $400 a gallon on a $3,000 car so instead I am going to buy some $60 a gallon gloss white tractor paint and then use some clear urethane that I have in my cabinet and I'm going to add a Gold Pearl to it and have a $150 paint job that should look pretty high end but that will probably happen in a few months and I will post pictures when I do that.
Currently I don't have a picture of the fenders and the hood but they are junkyard specials except unlike mine that were on the car they are not broke. The car is a 1999 Saturn SW2 I bought it to be my little parts runner 4 or 5 years ago and needless to say when I ran it into the back of the van I felt like an idiot My very first car accident that was my fault... Lucky for me I only destroyed my own car The van I hit had a golf ball size Ding In the black steel bumper and he never even ended up reporting it. My bumper went underneath the bumper of the van and the van bumper went right into my headlights I was only doing probably 15 miles an hour... Plastic cars just disintegrate when you use the body for the brakes lol
Those of you asking why because after all it is a late 1990s economy car and a Saturn on top of that but I will explain myself. I couldn't bring myself to scrap the car I had just put $400 worth of tires on it then spent another 150 to get it professionally aligned in the front and some special toe kit for the rear Not to mention put a radio in it and probably spent four or five days thoroughly cleaning the interior and putting that adhesive sticky tar sound under in it So needless to say I think I'm married to the car.
Anyways my next post will be more vague I will post the completion pictures in a few days when I get it done.

 

Putting slightly different spec shocks and sway bars on the Vette before the first race of the year in June.

 

Axle flip complete.

c-notch next

 

Simple

 

I bought one of these........................






And now it looks like this, except the hood, that's been scrapped.









Hood is only a buck, needing a whack of metal shaping........













And I got this to power it.

 

I have been busy the past few weeks.

Started by swapping transmission on the '85 F350. 2nd gear synchro was toast.



Picked up a new / different engine for the 1960 C700. Hard to turn down a good mechanical DT466 core.



Ran into oil pan / crossmember interference issues when trying to mount the engine back into the '60 T-Bird. Stupid Crown Vic front suspension. Rear Sump 4-wheel drive pan is on the way.



And the chassis for the '51 F-1 is basically complete. Switched back over to doing more body work on the cab.





Maybe it is time for an On-Topic project.....