Eneto-55

In reading over what I've written here, it does sound a bit "know-it-all". I tried to edit that out, but it still sounds that way to me. I don't mean for it to be like that, so please take it as just one person's opinion, based on some years of first-hand experience, but still limited in some ways. I have worked in both the plating and the powder coating industries, and I will say that like with other types of surface coating, the preparation stage is the determining factor for the long-term result. But the main difference in that context between these two coatings is that the constraints for a decent plating job are much tighter than with powder coating. With plating, if the surface is not clean and free of all rust or oil (even just from a touch of a clean finger tip) it will show through. With powder coating, as long as it will still conduct (electrical current), the operator can coat it with paint, and bake it on, "covering a multitude of sins". I protested, but what I saw happening every day on the powder line was parts sitting idle on the track between the wash cycle and the dryer, rusting over during lunch or break times, or during other interruptions. I didn't work a great deal on the chrome line during my years in plating work - I worked mainly in Cadmium, Copper, Nickel, and Tin, but in plating you just do not touch the surface with your hand or a glove, and steel parts are never allowed to just sit in the open air at any point after the muriatic acid bath. As for chrome, the quality of the work shows with time. A 3-stage chrome process (copper-nickel-chrome) will still be good after decades, while a single stage plating will be flaking and covered with pitted rust underneath. My 49 P15 came with an aftermarket grill guard on it. It is rusted, really badly in some areas, while the bumper is showing no rust other than where the chrome is deeply scratched. Because the current flows to the closest point, both methods require special attention in the case of recessed areas. On some custom plating jobs we had to use 'wands' to reach into those areas to coat those areas. You can try to float powder into recessed areas as well, but it's such a faster process that it can easily get really thick in the edge areas, while still not coating the internal parts. Powder coating, even on new steel, will do the same if the surface is not completely clean, which generally means sand blasting. (I built a Reece style hitch for our 93 Chrysler T&C, and I didn't get it sand blasted. It was all new steel, and it looked clean coming out of the wash cycle, and I didn't let it sit there before I coated it and ran it into the oven. For a long time it looked great, but the 'cancer' was at work under the hard powder coat. Eventually huge flakes bubbled and lifted, revealing the pitted steel. I heard that there are multi-coat processes available, but this outfit was run by people who didn't know what they were doing, and didn't want to learn. So maybe I haven't given powder coating a fair shake.)

Plymouth Service Manual Models P15, P17 and P18, P19 and P20 (Publication # D-13251) View File This manual was copied using a scanner that includes the de-screening process, which is designed to eliminate the 'cross-hatching' that results from scanning photos that were originally printed using the standard screening process. (This prevented dark and shaded areas of the photos from coming out completely black.) I have not been able to make monetary contributions to the forum, so this is my contribution, based on many hours of work. I attempted to adjust each page in the scanner so that they would not be at an angle. My only requests for those who download it are: 01.) enjoy it, and 02.) if you are able, make some contribution to the operation of the forum. NOTE: This is not any kind of 'rule' on my part, nor is it intended to pressure anyone to do so. Thank you to all of the members here who have freely contributed their scanning work in the past. Submitter Eneto-55 Submitted 02/02/2025 Category Instructions, Manuals & Templates

When I tore down the speedometer on my P15 (intending to just refresh the reflective paint) I found that what I guess to be white lithium grease was completely hardened. There was a lot of it right in the 'clock spring', so it wasn't able to perform normally. I had to use a small jeweler's screw driver to carefully chip that stuff off of the spring. (Maybe not the problem with yours, if it was working correctly, then started doing as you described - my car had sat already for at least 40 years by the time I opened the speedo. Plenty of time for that grease to harden like that.)

I think that Brazil has also moved away from DDT use, but when we lived there the health department would come through the mission center and do the fogging thing. Yes, it was DDT. In fact, the 'word' they used to refer to spraying was DDTisacao. (Pronounced as de de chi za sao.) Earlier in our years there they would come into every house and spray all of the walls, everywhere. It was the government policy that every house must be sprayed unless you had an official doctor's order against it. But the fogging was nearly as bad, because we had large 'windows', but no glass or shutters. So there was no way to prevent it from drifting through the whole house (unless you saw them coming, and managed to hang sheets of something in the window openings on the up wind side of the house). Asbestos - The roof on our house in Brazil was made of that same cement-asbestos material, and I also built our shower walls out of sheets of that stuff, so I've cut or sawed a fair bit of it. (That was around 35 years ago when I built that shower in the house.) Some people there also used it for counter tops, because the termites and wood borers didn't mess with it.

I wouldn't tend to think that regular steel would "soak up oil". Castings, yes. They are porous enough that it's often hard to get them clean enough for paint to stick well. (Like my transmission case. After I scrapped all of the old grease & dirt cake off of it, I cleaned it with a wire brush and gasoline, then coated it with aluminum paint.. The grease color came back through. The bell housing was just as covered in grease and dirt, and I took that through the entire process of soaking and then bead blasted it before cad plating it. No sign of anything coming back through.) But you could always put the cam in a pan of oil, and heat it up a bit in an oven. At least you'd know that you got all of the grit off of it that way.

Thanks for posting the link. I will watch the rest of those videos later, but I couldn't stand to listen to the whole thing in one sitting - the guy doing the interview drove me nuts, with his comments and questions that either revealed a poor general knowledge, or else he was just trying to ask the questions that a total novice would ask. Maybe that's his target audience, so I shouldn't "complain", I guess.

You will need some type of fairly thick material between the springs and the foam, or the springs will cut into the foam over time. I personally would not use foam, because of long term de-gassing. Maybe modern foams are greatly improved over older types, but I will go back with cotton batting when I get that far along.

Thanks everyone. I'll be on the look out for one of those, hopefully at a reasonable cost. Are there other sections of this book (those not dealing with the fasteners) that have information NOT in books like the Repair Manuals, or the Master Parts List book? (It's a good one to have, but it doesn't include the specs for the hardware. Maybe there was an unabridged version - mine is the 'condensed' version, but still 485 pages.)

THANKS! Now that I look at that, I suspect I have copied that in the past..... Old age forgetfulness, mixed with the possibility of on-coming Alzheimer's. (My Dad and two of his sisters have died from it. If I do get it, I just hope I can go softly into the gloom, not become aggressive or violent, as some sufferers do.) EDIT: Yep. I've downloaded it at least twice in the past. September 2019 I converted it to a spreadsheet, then last May I copied it to a Word document. The spreadsheet I have set up with only 2 columns, but I think I may have planned to create a separate column to enter information for the location of each part. I'm not sure if I have that kind of info in any of the books I have. My problem is that my work gets in the way of my hobby, and I also still do not have the necessary shop space to get back to working on my 46 P15.

I realize that this is an old thread, and that even BobT hasn't been on the forum for some months. But I'm wondering if someone can tell me if the Parts List book that the OP showed a picture of above is the one that includes the complete description for bolts, etc. (i.e., diameter and thread count, length, head type), Thanks much. (I received a copy of the Master Parts List Plymouth 1936 - 1948 for Christmas from my son-in-law, but it's the one there is a PDF scan of here in the downloads section, and it doesn't include that information.)

You should see my right front fender molding. Someone side swiped something that didn't give at all, and it's completely flat. I haven't tried to do anything with it yet, but I'm on a severely low budget with this car, so will eventually try to get it back into shape. (I've reshaped some of the other pieces, but those dents were nearly nothing compared to this fender molding.)

Painting before it's all really ready: I followed the progress of a 2-door 51 Dodge custom (chopped, sectioned, channeled, hood opening reshaped, top rear corner of the door reshaped, etc.) on Rat Rods Rule, and he often painted an area he had just started on. He said that he couldn't really see how it was going to look until it was all one color. But he also did the same with structural areas, partly because he always put the car outside over the winter, when he worked on a wooden boat. (He was from Michigan, too.) When we were doing the body work on my 46, we also sprayed a coat of sealer over the primer, to be able to spot any problem areas. So, maybe just paint it anyway. (I think I've heard of some kind of paint that is 'weldable'. Probably pretty expensive. As I recall, it is used in areas that will later be inaccessible.) But you probably know all of this already.

I thought that was a reorganization, on a new platform. (But then we had no internet 20 years ago, so what would I know about that?)

This is from the Dodge books you have, correct? ('46 - '48') At a difference of .09375, that is a quite significant difference from the size of the pins I removed from my 46 P15. (3/32". I realize that my car may have been reamed out for over-size pins over it's long years of service, but 11/32 is a LOT bigger. The Plymouth may have been different - - my understanding is that the Dodge bodies were new for 1946, where as the Plymouth was basically a carry-over from '42, not getting it's completely new body until early '49. Or did the new Dodge design come out already in '42?)

My brother was given a 47 P15 that had previously been nose down on a creek bank (to prevent erosion). We took off what parts we could get, and I really wanted that transmission (thinking that the grease inside might have prevented the gears from rusting), but no way was it going to separate from the bell housing. So our dad eventually scrapped it all. (Now I can think of some other parts I would have tried to get off, but it was already long gone.)

Back when I worked in a plating shop (late 70's through early 80's) cadmium was the go-to for rust protection. (We also Cad plated stainless roofing screws, not to protect it from rust, but as a lubricant.)

I have certainly made this same error in the past, but this time at least, it was someone else (the guy with the '38 Richards body - I don't know what that is, to be honest - An Australian vehicle?). I haven't decided for sure how I'm going to fix my hinges. I could look for used ones, but they're bound to have the same type of wear. I have thought of making a jig to get everything aligned correctly, then cut off the 'bulge' that forms the pin area, and weld on larger diameter round stock that has been machined to accept a larger bushing than what I have, so that I can possibly even install grease zerts. But the zerts would be over-kill I know, and I try to resist going over-board like that. (It's my tendency to go to extremes. The zerts would also have to have extension tubes that pass through the curved part of the hinge tongue in order to grease them w/o removing the entire assembly from the door pillar. So I should be able to resist that extreme 'solution'. Hopefully.) I was hoping that I would be able to read the technical pin size description on the Dodge parts manual page that Aussie Dodge (the original poster on this topic) posted a picture of, but unfortunately I cannot make it out. I reckon not everyone has an actual scanner for that sort of thing. I saw a Plymouth Parts Book like that on Ebay once, but it seemed rather high priced, I was short on cash at the time, and so I didn't move on it right away. Then someone else got it.... As they say, "You snooze, you loose." I need to check there again.

I had to go back and make sure it wasn't me that made that error "again" - writing 11/16" when I meant 11/32"..... (11/32 = .34375". Sometimes I have to do that calculation/conversion to make sure I'm getting it right.)

I did the bushing route (one-piece sintered bronze), but so far on only one hinge, the worst one of the 6. But I was attempting to return to the original size (or what I understood to be the original size from what info I had). So I have a different problem with the holes in the hinge frame - the holes are now too large for the pins I planned to use. I have considered various ways to build up the area INSIDE the holes, and created a discussion thread about this on Rat Rods Rule as well. (This was several years back already, and I got some good feed-back from the guys there as well. I haven't yet followed through with anything, because my car is still dismantled, and as I say, "My work gets in the way of my hobby." I also do not have a shop yet - the car just sits in one side of our 2-car garage, here at the house. But no room to work on it.)

Light snow here in Holmes County Ohio. Too warm to stick, however. Our entire family will be with us for Dinner, at noon. (Where I come from - Oklahoma - the big meal of the day is called 'Dinner' regardless of whether it is at Noon, or in the evening. So if it's at Noon, then the evening meal - if there is one - is called 'Supper', and if it is in the evening, then the Noon meal is called 'Lunch'.) Anyway, it'll be all of us, but that ain't a lot. Only our daughter is married, and they have 4 boys, 10, 3, and twins at around 19 or 20 months. Our two sons are still holding out for the perfect match, I guess. (36 & 31.) Thankful to God for the family He's given us.

I have run into the same confusion on the P15s. My hinge pins come out to 11/32", and a forum member had told me that he has a Dodge book that lists them as 5/16". The idea is that as the pins wore into the hinge tongue, the solution was to get over-sized pins and drill (hopefully actually using a reamer, but that probably didn't happen) out the holes for the larger diameter pins. On my four-door P15 (1946), ALL of the pins are this larger size. I can understand that on a car with over 90,000 miles on it, that the driver's door hinges, and possibly also the front passenger door hinges, would have been replaced that way, but it seems less likely that the rear doors would have required that to be done. By the way, I would appreciate it if you could post a scan of that page in your parts book. (I only have Service Manuals, no parts book that has the descriptions for each bolt, etc.) [I have posted quite a bit on this topic, and I thought that I have a document with the post information - how to find it all again - but cannot find it now.]

We had a '98 S-10 as well. I think that's the only one I ever sort of made up a name for - Esse Diess, which is really just an 'Englishification' for S-10 in Portuguese.

There were a number of fiberglass bodied Model T's at the 1973 Hot Rod Nationals (Tulsa), some being really wild customs. That was, I think, my first car show. I was just 17, getting close to 18. I remember that we thought the fiberglass bodied ones were "second class" to the real ones. I wish I had been more interested in the post-war cars then - the salvages around north Tulsa were full of them. I wanted something older, something from before the headlights were incorporated into the fenders. I didn't get my first P15 until nearly 7 years later. EDIT: I just looked it up. The next time it was held in Tulsa was 76. I was living in Nebraska that Summer, so I didn't attend.

I'm a lot more open to changes now than I used to be, but I'm reminded of what Tevya (in Fiddler on the Roof) says when his youngest daughter marries a Russian Orthodox guy. For the older daughters, he bent his Jewish traditions to increasing degrees, out of love for his girls, and a changing attitude toward romantic love itself. He went though his process of "On the one hand", and "On the other hand" wrangling with himself, but in that last case, he ended with "There IS no other hand!" It all just went too far. That's where I am with some really drastic changes to antique vehicles. Others can do it, fine by me - It's their vehicle, but for myself - my own vehicle - "There is no other hand." (Now if someone builds a complete custom body, I'm "all eyes", watching with interest and intrigue.)