Eneto-55

I would like to - thought of doing it for years, but I do not have a shop yet. I do have a small power washer, and so I know that it would take a good sized system before it could provide enough pressure for the number of nozzles I would want. Another idea is to get one of those attachments for washing driveways, that has a bunch of nozzles pointing down. Then modify it so that they point up. I would also want to install a twist T-handle, that would tilt the nozzles forward and back. Then you could just roll that deal back and forth under the vehicle, and could do it all outside, to avoid all of that grit and salt inside the garage. I suspect that if it was to be installed inside, then it would be best to use a pretty good sized electric motor. [The missionary center where we lived in Brazil had one to keep the mud washed off underneath, but I never paid attention to the size of the electric motor that ran the pump. (The road to town was either mud, with deep pot holes, or dust, with deep pot holes. At one time there was a pot hole that was so deep that if you went through the center of it in dry season, the top of a car like a VW was completely below the road level on either side of the hole. In the rainy season, the idea was to skirt around the brim of the water hole.....)]

Dragging this discussion back up. Loren, did you ever compile the parts list you mentioned in this thread? (Being in the middle of the largest Amish settlement in the world, we don't have any salvages close around here. But I'm looking at going this direction on my 46. (I'm in the middle of a brake disk repair job on our 2009 Dodge Journey, and my dislike for disk brakes grows every time I have to work on one. I tore down the side that was scraping, and the pads were missing sections, and fell off of the steel supports when I knocked them out. On the left side the wheel was stuck fast to the hub - that's the doings of the Salt Devil. I kicked the living daylights out of it, but couldn't get it loose. Finally made a rotor & brake pad 'delete adapter' - a chunk of wood & a bunch of washers to make up the thickness of the rotor - and put it back on the ground. Left the lugs a bit loose on the left side, and took it on a swing through the hardware parking lot near here. The wheel popped loose on the first turn.)

I haven't done this myself, but watched my son replace the cells in a 40 VDC Kobalt battery. We have several tools that use this same battery, a weed wacker, a blower, and the latest one is a trimmer chain saw deal I got on an auction.) He used a spot welder he had built himself, but the 12 VDC battery power he used appears to have been insufficient, as the battery later quit working. He is working on building a better spot welder, but hasn't re-welded the battery yet. We also converted the battery from a 2 hour to a 4 hour battery. The battery pack was only half full, so just doubled the number of cells. (But my wife doesn't like that battery pack, because it's now pretty much twice as heavy. Oops. Didn't think of that.) He just had to also purchase the metal strips that are necessary to connect the cells together. That was the problem area - the welds were not good enough to maintain a reliable connection. I have a 12 VDC Milwaukee battery drill I bought back in the late 80's, when 12 volt battery drills were the biggest voltage anyone made. I have two dead batteries that I need to get rebuilt as well. (I converted the first one that failed to a 12 volt corded system, because that allowed me to use the drill out in the remote village where we lived in the Amazon, where there was no electrical power within a few days walk. In those early years there, we had a single automobile battery, and one solar panel to keep it charged.) There are also companies that will rebuild old obsolete battery packs, but I haven't sent any to such a place as of yet. Waiting for my son to build a bigger spot welder.

"Rusty Hope" very obviously did a great deal of research and possibly trial and error to create that parts list. I like the idea of having the best braking performance possible, but I'm just not sold on disk brakes. The pads just disintegrated on my 09 Dodge Journey. I'll have to check the little spiral record book in the car to be sure, but I think I only got very little more than around 4,000 miles out of them. And I do not use the brakes hard, either. Maybe it's the winter salt and brine they put on the roads here. These pads didn't wear down - they just crumbled to pieces and then it was suddenly steel on steel, and that did some rotor damage before I could get it into my garage & tear it down.

I was posing the question as an either/or, not a both/and. (That is, change it in the Fall, then change the oil again either the following Fall, or according to the normal mileage related interval. OR, change it in the Spring, then only again the following Spring. I don't know which is best - I'm just thinking about it.)

Not a disagreement, just a question. I'm wondering if it's better to change the oil BEFORE the car is going into the long winter sleep, or after? Do contaminants, acids, and moisture build up in fresh oil as much as in used oil? If the engine is not going to be run at all over the entire winter, might it be better to change it after parking the vehicle, as a part of the winterizing process? (And then maybe turn it over a few times, but not start it.) Is anyone aware of any tests being done on fresh oil that has sat in an engine for an extended period without being started? (I guess I could get a test done on the oil in my engine, as I did the complete rebuild around 45 years ago, and have never started it. That would be an extreme test, but obviously I wouldn't have any 'control test' with which to compare the results.)

I saved the struts from the 93 Chrysler T&C I scrapped out 15 years ago. I know that lid was heavy, as it came down on me once during the first year we had the vehicle. One strut just suddenly broke off at the top. I replaced just that one, but I kept both of them, and have thought about using them on the 46 deck lid, because even though it stays up OK, it can actually be lifted a bit more, and with my height, it's a head knocker. It might also be possible to re-design the hinges, to allow it to go up even farther.

I pulled a 1/2" corded drill out of the dumpster some years ago. It had been a drain snake outfit, a rental tool from the hardware store. The snake chuck and the snake itself were both rusted and worn out, so I installed a new regular type chuck. Anyway, this drill must have been designed for that application, because it's geared lots lower than normal drill speeds. It's not a huge drill, but it can about twist my wrist off if it binds - lots of power for its size.

Would like to see a picture of it, just to compare to the old one I have. I don't know the brand, but I know that it's not a Snap-On. (I can possibly get a photo up of mine tomorrow. Bought it in an auction some years back, but don't recall what I paid, and nor have I needed to use it yet. When I pulled the drums years ago, I made one with a piece of an old bumper hitch, and an old wheel that I didn't care about drilling holes in. I have a picture of that someplace, but I have no idea where.)

I bet it REALLY feels good to get to that point.

I cad plated my backing plates, just because I was working at a plating shop at the time I started this project, and they let me do work on my own stuff after hours, at no charge. That was back in the early 80's. Many years later (2004-2007) I worked on a powder coat line. I'm with those who say that it is grossly over-rated. The only real advantage is that you can paint stuff, run it through the oven, and package it as soon as it's cool enough to handle. It's good for the manufacturer, but my opinion is that it is not at all good for the end user. As others have said, it goes on thick and hard, but once rust gets under it anywhere it works its way all over, and you don't see any sign of it until it begins to flake off. By that time there is lots of serious rust deterioration going on under the paint. Also, you cannot feather the edges by sanding. It gums up sand paper, and flakes off where you are attempting to smooth the edges. The only thing I disagree with here is the statement that it 'goes everywhere', and I only disagree in certain cases or contexts. The application science - how it works - is similar to electro-plating, in that an electrical current is what moves the particles onto the object being painted (or plated). And electricity, just like lightening, goes to the closest point. That means that the paint does not flow into crevices or internal areas. We painted things like metal lunch boxes, pipes, etc. And if the paint had a lot of color, you could see that the inside areas faded out to a light clear coating the farther away from the opening you looked. (With plating, we could get around that by using an anode on a probe, and it's also a slower application process, so we could also ramp up the amps right at the beginning to get into the crevices and interior areas more, then back off the amps to avoid 'burning' the exterior areas or edges. Some parts we bench plated, where the part was the plating tank, and we were just plating the inside surfaces. Smaller parts can be plated in a tumble basket, and that also gets a more uniform plating. But none of these techniques work with power coating.) But in short, I think that even just spray-bomb Rustoleum is far better than power coating.

I rebuilt a 230 and installed it in my 46 back in 80 or 81, then "life happened", and I have still never run the engine. I used to manually turn it over from time to time, but then became concerned about the damage I might be causing to the cylinder walls, which probably get no oiling in that scenario. If it was a working vehicle, I think that I would either run it long enough to come up to operating temperature several times each winter, or I'd winterize the engine each Fall, what we called 'pickling it'. We poured ATF down the carburetor until we had a good cloud of smoke out the back. (If it was a really long-term pickling, then after it started smoking we'd pour it in really fast, until it drowned out. We sometimes left a vehicle sitting for years after this, and they always ran fine after starting again, with some gas down the carb (and lots of smoke at first until it burned the ATF out again). If I had a vehicle stored in a heated garage, I would look into one of those deals that routes the exhaust outside. There may be some that include a fan in the system, to make sure no fumes leak out into the inside of the heated area.

I downloaded a .HEIC capable photo editor for a customer. It is called Picosmos Tools. (I got the ver 2.6.0.1 for him.) Seems to work well, if you would rather not do the on-line deal.

I supported the body (46 four-door sedan) on beams sitting on four 15 gal drums (instead of jack stands), but also kept the chain hoist and come-along connected overhead the entire time. (Lifted the body that way. Old drive shafts across three truss cradles at both lifting points. Dad's shop - 24' wide, built back when wood was wood.)

One of the guys that worked there lived in Claremore, and I bought my 46 P15 from his brother. The guy's name that was at United Plating Works was Rick Stacy. His wife's name was Debbie.