LC, I really like your vintage small block build. Looking forward to the rest of your build. Thanks for posting!
On a completely different subject, today as we were preparing to head South in the morning, I took the time to go out and look at an old Industrial Hemi I bought sight unseen a few months ago. It's been sitting out in the weather and may be ruined, but got it so cheap (40 bucks!) had to take a flyer on it. The carb butterfly was stuck closed and packed tightly with dirt, so I dug it out and with a little oil and a gently persuasive brass hammer got the butterfly open, then poured a gallon of oil down into the intake and hopefully the cylinders. Poured another gallon into every other orifice, then covered the carb with one of the plastic jugs and tarped it. The 56-A should be a 354. Worst case scenario, if it's completely unusable, just paint it up and set it by the shop to look cool.
One cool thing about this era engine. Super thick cylinder walls. So even if you had to bust the pistons to get it apart there'd still be plenty of material to machine
Honestly this lil mini discussion may have helped me out lol. Was talking to someone about a junk 57 283 short block that is junk because it sat heads off in an area with a lot of moisture. I may rear it down and send the block off to be checked. May still be a viable block lol
Even though we're down in Arizona, the wrenching never ends and thoughts and efforts for the RPU continue. At the January swap meet at Havasu 95 Speedway, found a much needed steering column for the RPU; It'll need some cleaning and fixing, but that's ok, only paid 50 bucks for it. There's another swap meet this Saturday, will hopefully find a few more pieces for the RPU.
Back in the shop and determined to make progress on the '29 RPU build. Yesterday started cleaning and sanding on the old tri-five steel wheels and painting them. Also took the rattle gun and removed springs and shocks from the S10 rear end and stuck it under the Model A frame. Just for fun set the box side panel on the frame to see where things land, and if I line up the mounting hole to the rear cross member, the panel sits about right against the phaeton body piece but the fender mounting point is too far forward. Feel like I'm missing something here. Your thoughts and ideas would be appreciated!
Tire mounting fun; Swapped those tires n wheels onto the rear axle and then got out the old bead breaker; These rims were then prepped and painted and will get the new front tires mounted tomorrow.
Tires mounted, 215/75-15 Nexen for rear, 26x6.00-15 MT for front; Wanted to do another quick mock-up to see how it looks with tires n wheels, so drug the pickup box sides outside to do a little trimming with the death wheel; I'm not 100% on using the phaeton body piece for the rear cab, my biggest concern is the slope where it meets the box, which should be straight up and down. As discussed before, the phaeton piece can be cut apart and modified, or I could sell it and try to find RPU pieces. There's a bunch of work to do before then, just trying to get my ducks in a row. With the parts on hand, a lot of progress can be made, but before buying any more suspension parts, gotta sell some of my old motorcycles (they're out on marketplace, fingers crossed). Have been working hard since we got home two weeks ago, mostly on my wife's 55 Dodge/440. Removed the chinesium electric fans and installed a mechanical fan. Still need to do some finish up and also install a later model rear end, but is coming along nicely. Her car is project 1A, the Roadster Pickup is 1B. This will be very different from last year when motorcycles and vintage racing were all consuming.
For you 283 Chevy fans, I may have stumbled onto another good one. Some friends were buying and cleaning out an abandoned property and I looked into a dilapidated trailer that was under a partially collapsed shed, saw it had some SBC's, so told him I'd buy the trailer if it came with the motors. He said sure. I paid $350 and went over to get the trailer after they drug it out from under the shed roof. Here's what I found on closer inspection; The trailer is pretty gnarly! The SBC 400 was what originally caught my eye; Here's what I saw when I stuck my head in the broken front window; In yellow grease pencil on the left hand PP head it says "57 Corv 270 283". I about wet my pants! Stuck the phone in and took a pic of the identification stamp. It says F411EK. No side mount holes, so pre 58, decoding the stamping (if it can be believed, the K looks suspicious) it would be a passenger car (not Corvette) 283 with fuel injection. The full break down of the EK code is: 1957 283 cu in, 283 HP, 3 Speed, Fuel Injection, High Lift Cam, Passenger Car. A plain E code (no K) would be a 220 HP power pack, ok, but nowhere near as rare. I'm not getting my hopes up yet, will need to do a lot more research with casting numbers, date codes etcetera, but no matter what, it turned out to be a good little treasure hunt. I've located another wheel and tire for the LH side of the trailer and will probably unload as much as possible before trying to get it rolling, and dragging it ten miles home. Can't wait to get in there and start rooting around.
As @swade41 says, looks like that is the seam between the wtr pump and block. The wheels are 14.5" mobile home "clincher" style (the trailer has a mobile home tube axle), got another wheel on there today and drug it home, what a job. I'll post more info on engines when I've had time to sort thru what's there.
What a buy you had there, even if some of those blocks and have cracks. There is enough parts that are salvageable.
Before trying to jack the old trailer up out of the dirt with a couple thousand pounds of iron in it, I first threw out a half dozen cast iron intake manifolds, all for quadra-jets. Also tossed a couple cylinder heads that look like they might be for an Oldsmobile. After that started rooting around in the dirt, and using two different jacks and any sort of blocking material I could find, started slowly lifting the flat tire out of the ground; Buddy Vince stopped by to help, he showed me a technique for lifting a trailer tongue up, once he had it hooked up and over the tire to my hitch, I drove forward, it lifted the tongue off the ground and we blocked and jacked from there. He's getting instructions from his girlfriend, lol; It felt good to get to this point; It was a slow and careful drive home and we made it without any problems. Casting number on one of the 283 heads; Block number on one of the other short blocks; It has domed pistons and large balancer, on the front balancer in yellow grease pencil it says 350 horse 327; F0923GA doesn't show as a performance engine, so another engine that will need all the parts and casting numbers examined to make a determination on what it might truly be.
Spent the day in the shop, first I did something just for fun, snapped the '57 dog dishes on the RPU just to see what it will look like; I was pondering using some vintage trim rings, but kind of like how these look with just the caps. While waiting on a fan shroud and pulleys for the '55 Dodge, got started on prepping the '65 Belvedere rear end. This change is being made to replace the old tapered axle rear with something slightly more modern, change the gear ratio and end up with functional emergency brakes. We picked this up two years ago in Vancouver at an older wrecking yard, it came from a plain Jane car. Pulled the brake drums and was surprised to find decent drums, shoes and hardware; With the drums off, it was the first time I'd had the chance to rotate the pinion and see how it felt. As it rotated (and felt good), I noticed the axles both rotating in the same direction. What??? Started cleaning the thick gunk off the third member looking for tags and found these; A 3.23 Sure-Grip, that's a win! With a few other chores out of the way, began cleaning and organizing the trailer full of engines. Moved a lot of iron around, made a pile for the scrap yard, and smaller keeper parts, then took a few more pictures. The inventory of SBC engines, to the best of my ability are as follows; 400 complete (approx 75 to 79); 350 complete (haven't looked at numbers yet) Mystery Motor 283/327 (with TRW L2211A pistons) I believe this is a '65 283 block (casting maybe shows 1964) with 327 crank and rods; Note the bent/folded timing marker to accommodate the big balancer; The sketchy 57 283 that is either an E code or an EK code; And two possible 56 short blocks; barely legible, says "56 sedan 265" "FI03IFC" so Flint 10/31 FC? And last is this "F55G"? In addition to the engines, there were three pp heads; 2 3884520 and another not identified yet, as well as several exhaust manifolds, and a TH400. Whew
Some of my pics came thru, but some are showing as a red X, what am I doing wrong? I am doing a copy and paste from Smugmug.
Hello, Smugmug is like a photo collection/holding program. It has its value for a lot of people. But, as you found out, problems can go wrong when you upload your photos to the site and they hold it for you. My son liked smugmug at first and his photos were uploaded to the site. Then he, too had problems and so he no longer saved his photos “off site.” Off site meaning his home computer. Our granddaughter was born and like all new parents, there was almost one second that was not recorded on phone cameras, 35mm digital size slr cameras and of course photos from the two grand parents who were overjoyed. Along with tons of movies. So, needless to say his computer hard drive was getting full fast. Then the smugmug problem and now he was looking for solutions. One was photobucket, but that too was another company with larger hard drives to store other folks’ photos and movies. Not wanting to waste time with those crappy companies, he opted to buy an external hard drive. At the time it was 500gb and it was large! Wow… so, he spent a few minutes filling up that hard drive. At the same time, Our own computers were filling up fast and it was amazing how many photos and live action movies a granddaughter can be in a few weeks. For us as grandparents, when we went to the beach, the whole day was filmed for posterity and her parents who were at work. Later, we realized that our computers were getting slower, due to the last several gb of stuff being loaded on to them. If a computer had 500gb hard drive, then when you approach 300 gb, the computer starts to slow down as it tries to find the stuff, get it off of the hard drive and send it to the display or transfer it to email or external hard drives. At the time, very few flash drives were around and what was there was expensive, but portable. We got a few larger flash drives to copy all of the week’s photos and loaded them on our granddaughter’s mom’s computer drive. Jnaki So, what is the deal with smugmug? The same thing as photobucket. They are a storage facility and charge anyone to store and send photos to others. Yes, it is convenient, but costly and “things” happen. For the cost of three months of storage, you could own your own 2 tb external hard drive and keep all of your valuable photos and other files handy and connected to your desktop or in a drawer waiting to be connected to your laptop if needed. No need to load up the basic built in hard drive over half full. Your home desktop computer and laptop will run smoothly and fast as it should. But, plan on keeping it ½ or less full on the existing hard drive. So, that is where the external hard drives come into play. Yes, we go overboard on external hard drives. When one gets full, then rather than copy and paste to empty the drive, we just keep it handy. Then our “new” larger 4 tb external hard drive gets the photos and films transferred to it and it barely clears a few gb of size. Now, I have several 4tb hard drives that aren’t even close to being half full. Those are two of the emergency “go bags” worth of family archives and what not we saved from the old days to today. They are constantly upgraded with new stuff every so often to keep it going with new valuable stuff like tax papers we see once a year, plus our home policies. So, the cost of a 2tb hard drive is around $70 dollars. 2tb should store most of your stuff. If it gets full, then jump up to a 4tb or even a 5tb hard drive. Now, it will take years to fill up a 5 tb drive. Don’t worry about the naysayers on large hard drives failing so, stick with the small ones. They are the ones putting their stuff on “hard drives” at various companies and then claim hard drives fail… YRMV We have three 5 tb hard drives. Two act as emergency files with everything in case of a fast exit. We live in a fire zone a few block away. One is used to store daily stuff that can be used later, but no need for access daily. The large 1 tb hard drive on my laptop holds the majority of photos and files I use daily. Those old 20 year old baby photos are nice, but I don’t look at them constantly. Even as nice as grandparents as my wife and I are, those photos and films are stored on the extra emergency hard drives, just in case. These are small format, fit in jacket pockets and are easily carried to location along with your camera or laptop. A simple plug and play… At home, they stay in drawers until called upon to do some uploading/downloading. No sightly box sitting on your desk at home or a coffee table to hook up to your laptop. So, if you have the original photos on your computer and the hard drive says over half full, then it is time to get a larger external hard drive. Western Digital, Seagate, and San Disk are the top three companies that are long time hard drive builders. Toshiba has a ton of drives that are good and low cost, too. We have several of each company for back up to a back up. Stay away from non descript companies as they probably make a good drive, but the long time companies have a solid program going and failure is not part of that game. We have ten year old drives still working and waiting to be reused if needed. We gave a few to our granddaughter to erase and store her filming and files as she went away to college. So, they can be cleaned and reused again. Stay away from photobucket and smugmug. Do your own thing. It is a simple copy and paste to move your photos to the external hard drive. And you have access and free saving of your files. Instantly called up and found to use daily.
@jnaki thanks a bunch for all of this great information! It hadn't occurred to me to do my own storage. As the price for Smugmug escalates and the issues continue, doing my own thing begins to make more sense. Much appreciated!
Hello, Yes, we have gone overboard, but I regress. Sometimes, if you have a photo like this: That is on my own computer files, is it labeled: TWO BROTHERS BAKERSFIELD 1960 PITS But, here is one thing I found out. If the title is altered slightly to say: Two Brothers Speed Sport Roadster 1960, the posted first title is on an old HAMB THREAD. But, if you change the title of the same photo, due to a specific reason, all posts from the old title will have a red X on them. The search engine knew the first post as all caps and title. Now, a new post for another thread with a specific title is posted using the same photo creates a puzzle for the thread and now the red X shows up. Jnaki I have been guilty of several changes to photos I have posted on later different threads. Then if I have a need to go search for a photo of my brother at the 1960 drag races, I have to type in the new name and not the old one. So, watch out when you save the original photo or any photo. Remember the name and on your computer search, the correct one will pop up for you. Otherwise, you will have to find it in your own files. At least, if you have a photo on your own external hard drive, you can find it easily. big companies are hard to work with. Note: For all of your folks that have Apple Cloud, it is a great automatic holding pen. All phone photos go directly to the cloud as backup. They are still on your phone, but it is also in the cloud. What if something happens to erase all of your phone photos? Heaven forbid, but the Apple Cloud can easily replace them. For a lot of folks, like my computer savvy son, trying to find a photo in the Apple Cloud is like floating around a cloud with a magnifying glass looking for a pinhead. They hold photos for millions of folks, but trying to get a specific photo is a nightmare. So, that is why he has an larger external hard drive with the same photos as a backup. Redundancy at work... YRMV
Sold the Hemi today, it went to a local fellow hot rodder we met. After recently buying the trailer full of small block chevy's, I'm committed to the bow tie brigade!
No, I don't know what it is. It does look like Ford. This is an A bed (internet photo). It doesn't have the flattened area where the fenders mount pressed into the box side.
The Jalopy Journal
