DonaldSmith

If you look under the car (so you bought a hoist - now that's commitment) the Hy-Drive torque converter and clutch assembly takes up a good bit of space between the engine and the transmission, more than a clutch-only bell housing. Post a photo to get verification from the assembled multitude here. Your previous photo shows the oil pan, some bell housing?, and the crossmember that supports the bell housing. Guessing from that photo, i would bet no Hy-Drive, but what do I know. Added thought: Look where the clutch fork goes into the bell housing. If no Hy-drive, the fork is near the engine, since the clutch pushes against the flywheel bolted to the engine. If there is a fluid coupling, the clutch fork is back farther, since the clutch pushes against a plate at the back of the fluid coupling.

Vintage photo effect complete with the white fold lines from the photo being found folded in the drawer all these years!

2003, on the way to a National DeSoto Club convention, a hubcap went sailing off. Several times later, I scoured the roadside, to no avail. Then three months after the convention, I saw an ad in the club magazine - hubcap found! A GM employee had found it, and told his friend who was a DeSoto aficionado. Reunited with the hubcap, I gave the clubbie two DeSoto coffee mugs, one for hi and the other for his friend, After that incident, I permanently marked the inner face of each hubcap with my name and phone number.

Good job. We knew you could do it!

Let's look at an assembly that is working right. At rest: The cap, pics 4 and 5, is screwed tightly to the non-metallic ring, pics 1 and 2. This draws the 8 lugs of the horn ring, seen in pic 3, against the spring. The horn ring and its cap in themselves are isolated from ground, since they are fastened to the non-metallic part of the steering wheel, seen as ring-shaped in pics 1 and 2. The spring is kept from contacting the brass tee, which connects to the end of the grounding wire. (For fun, contact the horn ring with a grounded wire; the horn will sound.) To sound the horn: Press the horn ring forward, and it rocks the lugs. The lugs opposite the pressure are lifted away from the spring, so that the spring in that location can contact the brass tee. Circuit completed. (Pull part of the ring backwards, just to be different; the horn should sound.) The lugs of the horn ring should not touch the sides of the brass tee. Things would have to be out of alignment for that to happen. Anything look worn? The design of the ring and cap should keep enough gap between the lugs and the brass. Do the clips in pic 5 extend too far and contact the brass tee? Not likely. Late Night Edit: Grounding: Necessarily, the brass tee is not grounded, being screwed to the plastic of the steering wheel. Immaterial whether the horn ring is naturally grounded. It is grounded when it contacts the spring, which is always, once everything is assembled. Let's sleep on it.

How the horn ring works: (Not what you would think.) Look at Pic No. 1 above. Yes, the spring is contacting the Tee-shaped thingie with the end of the grounding wire. Yes, this grounds the circuit. Sustained Honk. (Disconnect the ground wire from the horn relay, or under the steering box, to keep from driving yourself and the the neighbors crazy. You can connect a bulb in a circuit from a power source to the ground wire, to tell when the horn wire is grounded.) The ends of the Tee are fastened to a plastic molding, and thus are insulated from the ground. The tee has to contact the spring to ground the circuit. What keeps the spring and the tee separated are lugs on the horn ring. (The horn ring is also insulated from ground.) Push the horn ring in one location, and the opposite side pulls away from the spring, allowing that part of the spring to contact the Tee. Honk.

You can get a ratio changer, which you add in line with the cable. Police maintenance garages use them to correct the speed readings. The professional kits are very expensive, because they include a full set of interchangeable gears. But I found one on line a reasonable price. Its ratio was 10 percent, but I don't remember whether it was up or down. That was back in 2009. I mounted the ratio changer at the transmission, and modified the floor cover. I should have added a short cable, to put the changer more comfortably below the floor.

Is it like "The Old Man's" tires, in the Christmas Story movie, round and were once rubber?

One year off. I missed the "I".

Steering wheel on the right - right? For cars that drive on the left, like in the British Isles, South Africa, Australia, Japan, and a few other countries under the influence of Great Britain. I heard that there was the country that decided to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right. cars one week and trucks the next. It didn't work out so well. At least that's what I heard.

Andy Dodge, where are you? South African RHD, in the UK, calling Oz, calling Oz...

I usually skip the power range, and start in 3rd. Nobody on my tail. If I do start off in 1st, I'll skip 2nd. One time I found that I needed first was at a car show, where the lawn where I was parked was lower than the drive. I needed first to get over the short but steep slope to the paving..

I was getting mysterious puddles of coolant in the spark plug wells, mostly at No. 1 and 2, after the car sat idle for long. Apparently, running the car would help boil off the coolant, and the plug wells would be dry. After the Winter down-time, coolant re-appeared in the two front wells. I sopped up the coolant with paper towels, and found that the source was at the head of the nearer bolt. I could have drained some coolant, removed the bolt, and Permatexed the threads and under the head. But no. I had to remove the t-housing and related paraphernalia. I cut a new gasket and reinstalled the housing, with gasket surfaces and bolt threads slathered with the non-hardening sealant. Always having to do things the hard way, but not as hard as milling surfaces. These are non-pressurized cooling systems, so I'm putting my faith in a squeeze-tube fix.

The official shop-manual wiring diagram for the DeSoto S-11 (post-war) shows the horn relay powered off the ACC post, and the hot side of the relay connected to the solenoid post where the battery cable is connected. But we have the option of keeping the horn relay hot.

The ignition switch on my 47 DeSoto has a long post which connects numerous always-live accessories with an always-live source. Turning the key counterclockwise powers the Accessories post, for stuff to be live when the ignition is not live (Such as the radio. and maybe the horn.) Turning the ley clockwise from the off position powers the coil as well as those items powered in the Accessory position. I have a separate button to power the starter. If I wired it right, the starter will work only with the key in the Ignition position.

You might want the signal circuit (16 gauge, grounded at the steering wheel) to be controlled by the ignition switch as noted (IGN or ACC), so that kids in the car cannot play with the horn. Then you might want the power for the horn (10 gauge, noted as from the common connection at the starter solenoid) to bypass the ignition switch, because of its heavy current.

180 degrees off? Been there, done that. Now, a trick to know that the distributor is not 180 degrees off, is to have the No. 1 plug out and your thumb on the hole while you crank the engine up to Top Dead Center. You will feel the compression. (Do this with the coil disconnected, so you don't get a surprise from the loose plug wire. Do this with all the plugs out, so it cranks more easily.) This is easier than removing a valve cover to check that both the valves at No. 1 are closed.

The standard, original cap is vented.

The thickness of the handbrake band is critical. I had my band relined locally, after verifying that they had the appropriately thin material. No problems getting the band reinstalled.

Bolt lengths? There is some room within the bell housing (brain lapse - is that what we call it?) for the bolts to go in, without hitting the clutch assembly, so they can be long enough to help pull the transmission in. As I remember from six years ago - Of the four bolts to the bell housing (?)' the bottom left bolt has to be short enough to fit. (I forget the purpose of the bolt is on the boss below our lower left bolt.) I used various sawed-off bolts as guide pins to slide the trans into place, some really long at one point. You shouldn't need a guide pin for that short bolt location. x

Does Tired Iron have the manual trans or the Gyro-Matic behind his fluid coupling? Would the Gyro work without the fluid coupling? Like an overdrive (but as an underdrive)? Inquiring minds need to know.

We used to use a loupe to look at photo slides. Remember? Those films in a cardboard frame that were stuck into a projector, to show still pictures? For sorting the slides, one would put them on a backlit translucent surface, and look through the loupe. Return with us now to the thrilling days of yesteryear.

I remember when the big push was for the metric system across the U.S. Metric makes sense for products with an international market. And I'm quite used to it for wrenching contemporary vehicles and foreign-sourced stuff. But otherwise, why bother? Feet, miles acres, what we're used to. Don't make us change our lives. Tongue in cheek, I expounded that I wouldn't touch the metric system with a three meter pole. My Canadian cousins, of advanced age like me, live grudgingly with the metric system. Hard to think in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, KMH instead of MPH. They are like immigrants, who get by in the new language but still think in the old. For their benefit, I repeated a jingle for temperatures that I had heard: 30 is hot, and 20 is nice. 10 is cool, and 0 is ice. They looked at me like I was from another planet. So, tonight it's 32 degrees around Detroit, but southeast of here, in Windsor, it's zero.

Have fun!

I did the column surgery and U-joints to put a Power steering gearbox in my 47DeSoto. I fabricated a column support and bushing at the firewall, a spline on the shortened shaft, and a sleeve-and-brush arrangement for the wire from the horn ring. My report should be somewhere in the resources. But here's a photo. Once you get past the gearshift linkage, there's not much room to vee around a manifold to the steering box. I used the Bergeson shafts and U-joints. The maximum angle of the U-joints is 30 or 35 degrees, and there would have to be bushing to hold the shafts away from the manifold.