1954 Nash Rambler light re-commissioning

Two doors down from my shop is an old Rambler dealership that has the coolest wooden door with that Rambler parts logo on it, I'd really love to have that. I might get a chance to buy out a bunch of leftover AMC parts out of their attic too. Probably nothing back to the 50's but I'm definitely going to have a look.

Funny you should say that....

 

So yesterday I tore into the replacement bumper. The underside was pretty beat up with bumper jack dents.





But a few hammer whacks against the ol' walnut stump and it straightened out really nicely. I had to cut all the old bolts off which were hopelessly rusted on, then I cleaned the back side of the bumper with a wire cup brush on a drill as good as I could get it, and hosed the back side with silver paint. It's a bit pitted on the back and I figure a cleanup and coating of paint might help preserve it, certainly can't hurt.



Then I polished it up as good as I could get it. Here you can see the old bumper next to the new one and how badly the old bumper was blistering. I already taped down a couple edges that were lifting up, and it was only a matter of time before it started coming off in sheets. Maybe if I was super careful I could have gotten a summer or two out of it before it went completely to **** but even though this replacement is a bit more faded, it's stable and not going to peel off, I feel a lot better about it.





All it takes is a little edge like this to get caught on a wash rag or something and it would just tear right off.

 

I very carefully removed the original oval head bumper bolts from the front bumper. One of the bolt heads popped off, it had a big dent in it. I actually pounded the dent out of the cap and reattached it, then buffed out the bolt heads as good as I could. I also tapped/die cut the threads nice. Probably too much work to save some old bumper bolts but I didn't want to use generic ones and I don't know if you can buy these new? The bumper guard ones are super long.





They turned out decent, and I bolted up the front bumper. Then it was finally time to put the skirts on with the side trim. That's when I noticed that the new replacement front bumper is 2 inches shorter on either side than the original. They must have changed that when they redesigned the front end to have wheel openings. It bolts up in the same place and fits nice but when I designed the front fender skirts, they have a clearance notch in the front that the old bumper would cover, but these do not.



Not the end of the world, I'm still going to run this bumper and use the skirts, but I'll have to fill in that hole and that awkward square and paint it to match. That'll be a job for next year, though. Otherwise, the skirts fit great.

 

Which brings us to this afternoon when I finally got to take the car off of the cribbing and drive it outside, to park it in the big garage.

Seeing it outside, I think I might need a bit of a lowering block in the rear, not much, maybe an inch and a half, and I might paint the wheels satin black instead of green to really seal in the hovercraft look. Imagine with the wheels blacked out, or up against a curb or parked on gr***, it's gonna look wild.

But overall I'm very pleased. My fender skirt design with the lip tucking under the molding really works well, they're solidly in place and it's much cleaner that way. In the overcast light, the paint looks pretty good. In direct sun the mismatch is more noticeable but overall I'm happy with that too. The brakes work, it runs like a sewing machine, I love the mirrors, the front bumper is a big improvement, and I'm happy to be done with it for the year. Next spring I'll start driving it and working the bugs out.

 

Looks Great.....

 

That does look so cool!

 

Quickie photoshop with the wheels blacked out and a slight lowering in the rear. I think I'm going to need to do this, this really sells it.

 

pretty neat little car. definitely needs to lowered and wheels blacked out. the real question is how many cars do you own? lol

 

It looks like one of those electric bumper cars that glide around on the steel floor at the amu*****t park. Just need the pole to reach the wire mesh electrified ceiling.
Neat car!

 

I love the grilles on those old Nashes. They make the car look like it has a "Big ole cheesy grin," as @anthony myrick would say.

 

Dang skippy

sure would

 

a great looking car. Im no bodyman and if I saw all that rot I might of given up. Kudos to you for your persistence and having that parts clip to get the other parts from

 

Jon, I think the car looks awesome! Well done!

 

Turned out absolutely kool.
Dan

 

Your efforts are well rewarded. I've disparaged their power but Nashes, Willys', Studebakers and DeSotos have some interesting differences that shows there was a lot of variety in the car building business. Thanks for the journey and sharing your knowledge.

 

Not going to work on the car until spring but it was 42 degrees today so me and a buddy made a junkyard trip and I was able to get a better look at this gem, it's a '59 American.






I saw it last year but didn't get a chance to dig into it then. All of the sheetmetal is hopelessly garbage, as is the drivetrain. It has a slightly foggy but OK windshield in it, I don't need a windshield but it's kinda nice to know it's there. The guy wants $100 for the windshield. If it was dirt cheap I'd just buy it to have a spare but I'm not overly anxious to get it at that price.

I did however get the complete front seat which does fold flat, my other one does not. Even being a 4 door, my car has the 40/60 split bench, I think they just put that one in everything, I'm hoping I can just put my cushions and upholstery onto this complete frame instead of converting my old frame using donor parts, which had been my plan.

I also grabbed the steering wheel out of it for a wall hanger, has a nice horn ****on at least, an extra tail light that's no better than what I've got but why not have a spare, some little trinket pieces and the license plate off of the front just because it has 409 on it and I thought that was cool.



Aside from the windshield, the only other thing this car has that I might consider is the gauge cluster. No idea how good it is but it's still in there and they look the same (or at least very similar) to the '54 cluster. Wasn't about to try to pull that out today though, it was hard enough getting the seat out through the p***enger side door almost vertically, I didn't feel like digging under the dash today.

 

I'd say that today was a pretty OK day for you. Good stuff.

 

Back on the Nash project. Got some good advice about the truly bizarre accelerator pump circuit on the Nash's Carter YF, you can read about that here if you're interested https://jalopyjournal.com/forum/thr...ator-pump-shot-desperate-for-answers.1352847/

This week has been deadly hot/humid though and I don't want to open my overhead door and let all the humidity get everything wet in the workshop so I've been working on other things that don't involve the car running.

First off was this door, which has ferociously bad door gaps, huge in front and touching in back, plus the door check strap was broken and it had swung open too far at one point, smashing the lower door molding.



You can see by the design of the door hinges, the two hinge halves are parallel when the door is closed, so there's no actual adjustment front to back for the rear doors. Also note the damaged/missing door check strap.



So I got to play every bodyman's favorite game, "beat the ever loving **** out of the door pillar in the hopes of moving it". All of my efforts gained me not even a sixteenth of an inch, and I was NOT gentle. But at least it's not touching anymore? I don't know that there's anything else I can do here. The other side is almost just as bad.

 

Now for the check strap. I knew I was missing pieces, so I sawed a big chunk out of a donor car at a local junkyard, which was easy to access since the door pillar and the door on it were not attached at the bottom in any way. I just nipped the top of the pillar off and the whole thing came out as a unit, then I carved it down to a piece I could carry out of the yard more easily.



Then I dissected my donor piece. Look how rotted the lower hinge was on this car, it had completely separated just from rust.



Quite a bit of work just to extract these little bits, and in the end I didn't even need all of this, mostly just the little tab at the one end, since I found part of the original stuff inside the door once I had the door panel off.



It was still nice to have though, just to figure out what it was supposed to look like without taking the other door apart. You can see someone had tried to braze something together here and that repair attempt failed, this area needed to be cleaned up some.



I did modify the tab to attach to the outside of the pillar instead of from inside, since it had been spot welded inside and it would have been really difficult to get the old remnants out without destroying the pillar, this worked well and I touched it up with paint and it works great again.

 

Looking good, do the doors catch or do they open ok?
Dan

 

Now I could fix the smashed molding without worrying that it would just get damaged again by the door swinging open. It had been pinched pretty hard.





I worked it over a reasonable amount and buffed it out. It's not flawless but it's good enough for this car, plus I didn't want to thin out the molding with too much sanding and filing, I'm happy with the results.

 

A helpful hint about removing Nash/Rambler armrests. I had to pull the armrests off to get the door panel off, the bottom plastic piece is screwed upward into the armrest and also into the door itself, and once you get that off, you'll see this.



It looks like it's riveted into the door and still doesn't come off with the screws removed. I tried pulling them and sliding them around and I could not get them to release, so I drilled out what I thought were rivets, only to reveal they are sliding pins. I did try to shift the armrests side to side before drilling but they would not release.



So the secret here is, take the door handles off and unsnap all the snap clips for the door panel so it's just hanging loose, then you'd be able to shift the door panel over along with the armrest to release it from those sliding pins. My door panel did not have slotted holes for the armrest but I think it was supposed to, maybe on other cars you'd be able to just shift the armrest over to the side and get it to pop off, but I didn't. I ended up replacing the pin system on this door with license plate screw style inserts and now the whole thing just screws on like a GM armrest, only with 4 screws into the door instead of two.

 

I also filled in the odd rectangle and bolt hole in the fender skirts which were exposed by my new bumper last fall.



I have very little of this paint left, not enough to respray the skirts, so I just made little filler panels for those spots, filled them in and brush painted the area to match. A bit hokey but it's fine, it's a pretty incon****uous area.



Currently working on fixing up the seat frame from post #136 and transferring my original front seat upholstery onto it so it'll have the Twin Bed fold-down seat option, which seems like a must for an old Nash sedan. Gonna add some seatbelts at the same time in case of a deer hit, which is a real threat around here.

I did find this under the front seat when I pulled it out, kind of a neat find near the 4th of July on the US's 250th.

 

Thanks. The doors close really nice, with a very satisfying, mechanical latching, like an old hump top refrigerator. Nothing binds or requires a lot of force, they just have really bad gaps. I bet the gaps were that bad from new. This 4 door sedan body was all new in '54, designed to be cheap and with door hinges that didn't have any front to back adjustment built in. I think that's just how it was.

 

Great job on the molding
Dan

 

Not familiar with these cars but from the appearance the hinges may be sprung from the broken, missing door check stop. you could remove the door and hinges and straighten them but not too much as it will be a lot of trial and error. Removing and re-installing the door possibly several times to check without leaning on the error side. What you did worked. If you ever decide you want them perfect try the above. Great job on everything and you are very ingenious in your repairs and work. The chrome molding looks marvelous.

 

My Morris Minor woody has similar door hinges, I made a bunch of shims from 1/8” on down and shimmed the doors for better gaps and latching. Might work on your doors?

 

I had that thought too, and it's possible, but it seems like over-extending the door to the point of bending the hinges or twisting the pillar would only bend the pin part further forward, which would make a bigger gap at the rear of the door. At least I think that's what it would do, hard to say.

Shimming the whole hinge will only push the hinge further back, but another HAMBer suggested shimming just these two bolts on the upper and lower hinge to add some angle to the hinge and push the pivot point forward, which might work. I can see the logic there, I might try that if I decide to circle back to door gaps.



The doors all latch really nice and now that nothing is touching I'm gonna focus on some other stuff first but if those gaps really bug me (and they probably will) I'm going to give this a go.

 

Only thing I can think of right now, is to get another set, or preferably two sets, of hinges, for each door,
then at least you'll still have the oem ones to fall back on.
Before removal, I'd mark each hinges' location, preferably by drilling 2 small 1/16" holes in each hinge "ear" so that I could reinstall those hinges to that particular location & get perfect alignment(well, at least the exact same as you now have).
W/the extra hinges, you can modify them(read: cutting &/or welding new material{a steel block?} for the pins' location/drilling/etc)(or: probably better, cut-n-weld 2 sets to make one correctly-altered-pin-position pair), by moving the pin-location forward a bit more than the required amount desired for correct(perfect) door-gaps. That way you could shim a touch as needed. maybe slot the hinges too, if needed. At this point, even worn-out hinge-sets would work well for the mod, since if you'll be drilling new holes, could even plan for thin bronze bushings.
Marcus...

 

My donor check strap is from a '56, which I have confirmed have different rear door hinges, and the fronts and rears of the 54-55 sedan are different as well, so the extra hinges would have to come from a 54 or 55 Rambler 4 door sedan or Cross Country wagon. If I ever find one of those in a junkyard I'd grab those hinges to play with, but that might be a while. This one remains the only '54 Rambler 4 door I've ever seen outside of pictures on the internet.

I do think you're right that an extra set of hinges could be modified to push the pivot points further forward to correct the door gap, so I will be looking, but for now I'm going to move on to other things, I can always circle back to the gaps.

This morning I did get the parking brake to work and I have functional turn signals so things are moving right along. Once I get my front seat put back together and installed I can play with the carb again and then I can actually road test it, pretty exciting.