I placed the door in the molasses bath for a spell and pulled the panels that were in there. The front valance, spare dash and grill had been in the bath for a while so I have spent some time on them I tied plastic bottles to the panels as floats to make it a bit less messy to get them out and shuffle them occasionally. I proceeded to break the grill down to all it's individual components to get access to all the surfaces to treat them all and coat for future protection. After molasses dip, water blast, sanding, Scotch pad, phosphoric acid wash/Scotch scrub, water wash, heat dry, dry Scotch, prepsol wash they are ready to etch prime.....phew! So glad the pieces are cleaning up nicely with very little rust or damage that a few taps with a hammer and dolly haven't fixed.
Primed and top coat, either gloss for hidden parts or satin for visible ones. The shop was looking like a Chinese laundry today. All the pieces are protected from the elements now. I am waiting for some new thread clips to arrive so we can reassemble it all .
This grill has been hungry! It seems to just keep on eating 5mm machine screws and nylock nuts! I have coated the back side of all the chrome panels with either black epoxy or under seal. Glad to be done with all the fiddly little fasteners. So many fasteners! Really happy with how the satin painted parts turned out. I have coated all the fasteners with lanocoat to prevent future rust. After I took this picture I realized there is a brace missing between the center horizontal and vertical bars. Sitting back on top of the valance panels I am waiting for a bunch of new sheet metal speed nuts that clip on. I have ordered a couple of park/market lamps. Then it will be ready to hang on the car.
Something a little different today. A while back I bought a bunch of stuff at an online auction, amongst it all was a heavy duty metal shaping machine. It was a "single hit" type flywheel driven machine. I wanted a fast hammer type of shaper so set to and removed all the bits not needed. This week I bought an electric sewing machine motor. The reason for that was the clutch and brake set up so the hammer can be started and stopped quickly. The pressure etc adjustment will come soon. For now I have mounted the motor, actuator, switch etc. I mounted the motor on the back of the machine because there was a machined face there and a place to drill and tap a couple of extra holes. The clutch actuator was facing back, but was located on a boss so I clocked it around to be able to pull down to use the original pedal set up. The drive pulley will be driving another that will be 4 times the diameter to get the RPM down to about 800 and amplify the torque. More on that later.
The motor was $49 brand new, because it was noisy! I ran it up and could barely hear it above the crickets and the tinitus!
Oops! Both the voices seem to have won this time! It would appear "Buy it!" was first and "Build it!" will follow soon after. Today we bought a house, and we will be building a workshop very soon. So for the next little while work on the delivery will be replaced by packing, moving, Tetris, planning, building etc etc. As always fellas, stay tuned!
So it looks like I managed to shoot myself with a shower of my own shite! All the time and effort I put into smoothing out the engine on the coupe and painting it beautifully has bitten me in the butt. For a few weeks now the coupe has been a lottery to start, struggling to crank or just clicking the solenoid and doing nothing. I charged the battery multiple times and used jumper cables, sometimes directly on the starter to little avail. Even weirder was that the headlights would come on when I was trying to crank the engine over. Today I took the battery from the car into auto tech and Boris put a load test on it. Results were fine, battery performed perfectly. At his suggestion I was sent home to look for a bad grounding somewhere. Very long story short, paint between the engine ground strap and the block was the problem. Up until recently the thread of the bolt was providing a contact but must have been deteriorating. I scraped the paint away around the ground strap attachment point and refitted the strap....... viola! The starter spins over with no effort at all. Sometimes looking good isn't enough! I worked out that the headlights coming on under load was the electrons finding an alternative route to make the circuit complete. Now with a quality ground they no longer light up under cranking situations.
The Jalopy Journal
