Hot Rods The Belly Button Bucket Build Thread

A couple pair of skivvies and a tooth brush shouldn't take up that much room!
Good to see you are posting again Tim.

 

Or a credit card and just buy new skivvies and a toothbrush when you get there. Remember that you can get 4 days out of one pair. Normal, inside out, normal turned around backwards, and inside out turned around backwards…

 

Note to self:
Do not travel with Dave!

 

I travel light. An overnight bag will do it for me for a week. SWMBO, on the other hand, always looked like she was packing up for good for a weekend. Go figure…

 

Needed some more motivation, so binged on a reread of this today! Still extremely impressed by the details! How’s things going, Tim?

 

You ain’t right lol
Dan

 

No, I’m an engineer! I’m good with math…

Which proves your statement… lol

 

Dave, he posted in the garage journal thread about his renovations yesterday.
Let the man get his garage in order so then he can concentrate on the T!

 

Yup he’s going full “Tim” on that garage lol. Go take a look at the thread it’s pretty cool!

 

Thanks for checking in Dave (and fellas). I'm doing pretty good - full tilt on the garage renovations. I have some problem solving projects going on for the T, but they are mental only at this stage. I've set a goal for myself to have the garage wrapped up by end of summer, then it's back on the T. I've got a lot to do still, but I've been in a pretty good groove lately so I'm gonna go for it.

 

Very small update- mostly been working on the garage, but I did do a little clean-up on the T. There’s a lot of things I want to try with this car, all of which add time before it’s ready for the road. I’ve wrestled with this, especially when I’m not working on it- always thinking of what I can do better. I decided I need to just put it together to get it on the road, and I can make changes/add scope later. With that being said, I started putting the engine back together into the configuration in which it ran several years ago. In the process of this, I found a great lower radiator hose- previously I had to splice two hoses together to get it to work. I’m optimistic I can find an upper hose solution in the same fashion, but for now, here’s the part number of the lower hose for those interested. I trimmed about an inch off each end.

 

Going thru TFeverFred's old posts, he had 20416 upper, 21956 lower. I don't know if this will help, but more info?
With goggles, it's ready to go!

 

Excellent

 

More progress than I’m making these days, Tim. Keep at it…

 

I found a decent upper hose as well- it’s about a foot longer than this in stock form, with an additional gradual bend that I cut off. Also, you can see a simple radiator stay bracket- just a threaded rod with a vacuum cap on the end, butted up to the carb body.

 

Nice

 

Had a little more time to tinker. One thing I never ironed out was sealing/returning the secondary bases on the tri power setup. In the past, I’ve built a handful of tri power systems- I’ve purchased the kits, I’ve tried incorporating return springs in the linkage, all with mediocre results. One day I was thinking - why am I making this hard? This has already been figured out on pretty much every 4bbl carb. So I took a look at how Holley keeps a double pumper secondary closed, and it looked like the return spring could be adapted to a 2 Jet. After bending the tang 90*, drilling/tapping the baseplate for a 4-40 socket head screw, I think I have something. I’ll lap the throttle plates tomorrow, do some other small mods, then loc-tite everything in place. The return action is better than I expected- snapping closed without requiring a lot of effort to open. I’m stoked- this has been on the to-do list for many years.

 

Sometimes the solution to our problems are right there in front of us just waiting for us to see them!

 

That's gonna help some members!

 

More tri power “I’ll get to that sometime later” projects. I got the linkage dialed in, and I also did some port work on the baseplates and carb spacers, to allow each Venturi to feed both sides of the plenum. In every dyno test I’ve seen, a tapered combo spacer turned upside down on a dual plane intake is the best power and fuel distribution. You can’t buy 2bbl tapered combo spacers, so I made my own by porting the upper half of a 2 hole spacer. You could accomplish the same thing by porting the top 1/2” of the intake, but with this intake being somewhat rare, I chose to accomplish it with carb spacers.



The first two pics show the difference in air/fuel path from the view of the engine (last pic is top down for a different view). You can see the port work allows the air and fuel cross over to the other side of the plenum if the demand is high enough, whereas if the carb was bolted straight to the intake, each Venturi is only feeding half the plenum, which can be a limiting factor of a dual plane, especially one designed pre-computer software.

 

Beautiful work, Tim. I hope it works out better than expected.

 

The list of little things I’ve been meaning to get to over the years is very long. Today, I reassembled the carbs, set up the linkage (again), assembled the fuel rail, which required machining of the fuel inlets to work, and modified the air cleaner bases. I really like the air cleaners, but I felt the casting was somewhat restrictive, so I took care of that.

 

Very nice!

 

So - what keeps those air cleaners together?

 

There’s 2 10-32 x ~ 2.5” screws that come up from the bottom of each air cleaner base, threading into the top, sandwiching the filter in between. You can see the holes in the bases for these screws.

To hold the base to the carb, they come with an 8-32 set screw - these are intended for Stromberg/Holley 94 application. Technically, the Rochester application should go through the center of the airhorn, but since I’ve hacked mine out (both in the airhorn previously and now in the base), I needed the set screw flavor. I also added two more set screws per base, 120* apart. I can pry up on them without popping them off, so I think this will work.

 

500 million steps later and the bottom of the body is done. Lots and lots of work. Tabbed in all sides, made seat belt gussets out of 1/8”x3” steel strap, bonded them to the body as well as bolted them in, did a full layer of glass over the top, sanded it, and coated it 3x with a rubberized undercoat.

 

Tim
Have you ever said "damn, I do nice work"?
Ok, I'll say it, damn, you do nice work!

 

Behold, my life’s work:

 

Cripes!!!

 

I am so going to get another hobby… Tim, weren’t you in school when you started this project? And then a house project or 20? And we don’t know how many other projects, plus starting a career? And you have a pretty complete car… I for one am so very impressed by everything you’ve accomplished!