1954 Nash Rambler light re-commissioning

Oh, and I guess this makes me eleven...

 

See, you opted to remove your shoes!

 

Don't know if you've spent any time studying the front suspension on the early Ramblers. They use double control arms on each side, but have no ball joints. In their place are trunnions. They apparently can be rebuilt but it may be difficult to source the parts.

https://www.ramblerlore.com/AMC/Suspension-1950-1963-small/index.html
https://www.ramblerlore.com/index.html#HOME

 

You mean you could've turned that thing into a 2 dr. and didn't?!?!?

 

When my brothers and I were kids, we used to play some of Mom's old records (usually the 33 or 45 rpm got played at 78 rpm). One of our favorites was "Beep Beep" by The Players, about the Cadillac that couldn't shake the little Nash Rambler. When we visited our parents this summer, Mom dug the records out for us (along with the record player we had that still has the Bud Man sticker inside the lid - I think I was the guilty culprit who put it in there, although we're not sure where it came from), and we had a good time listening to it again.

 

In the mid 1950's my family had a 1951 Ramber wagon that was purchased new. When we needed a second car, my dad purchased a used 1951 Cadillac.
Beep, beep!

 

This is like the Bud Man sticker I put in there!

 

What!?? And give up that cool 3 piece back window?

 

Bud Man... I bought a bud man lidded stein at a garage sale for $5.00 and it sold for $300.00 on ebay. ebay was crazy about Bud Man steins at that time (2008). they sell for about 30 - 50 dollars now.

 

7

 

I should finish before posting LOL
Dan

 

Means you have lost your toes and a few fingers!

 

Neat! It's huge, at least a foot long, could make a ton of dental plaster with it. Makes a great undercoating scraper.

Not gonna happen with this one. All of the 4 door Ramblers got a 108" wheelbase instead of 100" for the 2 doors, which I think gives it better proportions, one of the few cars I prefer as a 4 door sedan over a 2 door sedan.

Although, a 2 door on the 108" platform could be cool, too, would be 1 of 1. Luckily the doors were long gone on that donor car, keeps me out of temptation.

 

Saw this today. Thought you might find it interesting

 

I just want to thank you for the best / most interesting / imaginative explanation/pictorial representation of straightforward and PRACTICAL repair process I've seen in ages! My compliments to you and thanks to our moderator for getting this moved over to this forum!!!!!

 

Budget36 said: ↑I’m out of fingers, can I still watch?

Or find a hole in your pocket!

 

where's lois??

 

I was going to mention that connection myself!

 

A little surprised anyone cares about this build, but happy to share, thanks for all the replies.

When I left off, I had rebuilt the carb but had flooding issues with it, and that turned out to be a struggle. You can see my call for help thread here.

https://jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/carter-yf-flooding-issue-need-guidance.1341219/

But long story short, my rebuilt fuel pump was putting out 9 psi of fuel pressure, where the carb seems to be much happier around 2 psi, also my carb seems to like a much lower float setting than the book says, and my many attempts to get the car started to diagnose all of this had severely cold-fouled my spark plugs to the point it would barely run and sounded awful.

Luckily, its all sorted now, so I moved the car in my shop to the spot in front of the overhead door and tonight I was able to start tackling the bodywork. After about 7 hours I've got most of it roughed in.

Not much picture worthy, I like to clean up the areas that need filler with an 80 grit DA pad, just to make sure there's no fingerprints or flash rust on the bare steel and to rough up the surrounding paint areas a bit where the filler might overlap, then make a pass over the top of the whole area with filler, and once it's set up, shape it with a hand block, then take the heavy scratches out with the DA.

It went pretty well, but the lower front fenders (right hand, mostly) needs more fine tuning yet, that was kind of expected since the hole that got filled there was massive, and the patch panels were all made up, unlike the tail light areas where I had donor car bits.

It's also tough doing bodywork next to another panel that you don't plan to paint (like the doors) so I have to avoid getting sanding scratches there, and there's almost no flat surfaces on the areas I'm working over, lots of compound curves.



But it's already shaping up. Maybe one more day and I could have all the spots in fill primer. My only tech tip of the day is that used-up gift cards make great disposable filler spreaders. They have a very sharp edge with rounded corners and they flex pretty easily too. Unless you need a big, wide trowel to fill up a very large area, these things work great and you don't have to clean them, either.

Not that regular spreaders are expensive, but I'm cheap, plus regular spreaders seem to get an ugly edge on them pretty quickly, and I prefer to just grab a fresh one every time, especially for doing small spots.

 

Another use for used up gift cards; in the winter when you get a thaw and freeze, the door windows almost always freeze to the bottom wiper strip. The card slips in between glass and rubber strip, and you can run it along, and break that icy bond. For those who are stuck up north.

 

Can vouch for this. ^ I would argue none at all, actually.

You are making great progress on a not-always-enjoyable job.

 

I think you're up to an even dozen readers now including myself.
I've owned a lot of Ramblers in my lifetime, When I was younger it's because they were a couple of hundred bucks each mind you I am 47 currently So that wasn't all that long ago probably around 2000 to 2005 ish. As I've owned them I've realized that they are way more fun to take to a car show everybody likes a goofy car And because we are so far removed from an era of Nash's or Kaiser's or Willy's or any of the other oddball makes most people don't even know they are American so it's a great conversation starter.

 

Primer is on!



I had some time last night to go over the bodywork one more time and today it was calm, warm and dry, perfect weather for some gravel parking lot paint booth action.

One new trick I learned from Cold War Motors on Youtube is when you're spraying fill primer, on the first coat you can use a spreader to spread it around to fill in pinholes or in my case, some deep scratches that didn't come out in the blocking phase. It works incredibly well, takes a little practice but you can level off deep scratches and fill in pinholes all in the first coat with a spreader as long as you do it while the primer is still wet. I'll be doing this every time from now on, it worked great.

Second fun item are these magnet bracket things I bought at the Goodwill by-the-pound store. No idea what they were originally for.




I think the magnets are rare-earth ones, they're pretty strong for as small as they are. I've used them as welding magnets to hold panels together, but they worked great for keeping my big sheet of plastic in place as I was taping, and as I was spraying. Seems like usually when I spray a car masked with plastic, the plastic constantly wants to blow around and flap everywhere. Using magnets to hold it down worked great to keep it from flapping around, and made it a lot easier to get it positioned before I started taping it into place.



I'm feeling really good about this. I think I can safely sand these spots out without breaking through if I'm careful, and then paint right over them. Hoping to spray the paint on Friday, another warm, dry and calm day is predicted for then, and I'm going to try to have my skirts ready to paint by Friday as well. But even if the skirts aren't ready, I think I'll still put the paint on the car, I can always do the skirts separately.

Finally moving right along! Was also nice to be able to drive the car back into the shop instead of pushing it, although I did temporarily forget it has no brakes! Gotta tackle that next.

 

Those are a couple of good tips. I do use magnets on occasion to hold stuff for set up.

 

Great thread, that rust would of stopped a lot of people, following

 

Your magnets kinda make it look like an old porcupine that's loosing its quills.

 

Great Thread. It sounds like you've corrected your fuel issues. I've had good luck with Wix 33040 fuel filter, it has a return and limits fuel pressure on the output to ~3 psi. If you can stomach a return line its great for vintage cars and helps avoid fuel boiling as well. Good luck and keep it up

 

Awesome thread! I'm starting to like these cars after seeing your thread for the first time today. You're doing an amazing job, thanks for posting it.

 

Come hell or high water, this thing is getting paint on it tomorrow. I'm not 100% confident in the color match yet, gotta do some test panels today. But before I can do that I had to make fender skirts.



Starting here, I had a pair of old aftermarket universal overlay skirts that had "RABBIT" painted on them (would love to have seen what those were on), a pair of '52-'54 Foxcraft flush mount skirts that got heavily weathered, and the bottom corner sections of the rear quarters I used from the donor car.



I cut down the "RABBIT" skirts for the rear, so the upper edge will slip under the stainless quarter panel molding, and shaped them with my favorite anvil (a piece of train track) and my best metalshaping hammer (a croquet mallet with the handle cut off). The fronts have the pointed part of the Rambler donor quarter grafted on so the shapes match front and rear, otherwise the front of the front skirts just kinda hung off into nowhere. The top edges of those also slip under the molding.

I'm happy with the final design, looking forward to seeing them in color. I just hope that color matches pretty well.