TodFitch

The spring sleeve material is available though it would take me a little time to find the catalog/website(s) I noticed them in. So it is possible that the lines were replaced. That said, it is pretty unlikely that whoever replaced the tubes would have put new but original style spring sleeves on them so you are likely correct. Brake tubes usually rust from the inside out so if there is any question as to age or condition they should be replaced.

I don't know how they did it on your year/model but on a number of years the spline for the steering wheel is setup so that it only goes on one way. I hope yours works for you.

Just read an article this week where Chrysler has revived/registered the old “Airflow” name for use on a possible EV crossover utility vehicle. Talk about reusing names on entirely different kinds of cars.

I recall the rope seal I put in way back when as coming with those rubber pieces. And I recall not seeing how/where they installed even after I pulled the rear main bearing cap. Were I to do it today, I'd give the neoprene seal a try. Seems like it would be easier to get it to seal than the old rope style and probably wouldn’t have to muck about trying to get it as tight against the crankshaft to do its thing.

Back when I was a child in Southern Arizona on winter mornings we could tell the tourists and new comers to town a mile off because they’d be wearing short sleeved shirts while we were bundled up in our heaviest winter clothing. Moved to the SoCal beach a few years back and find that I am really a weather wimp now. I find it stifling hot when above 75°F and very chilly below 65°F. Had to wear a jacket going to the store today as it is only 60°F outside.

No. There are two sheet metal holders (top & bottom) that bolt to the back of the rear main. Been decades since I did it on my '33 (which I believe is identical in this respect). If you simply bolt on the replacement then there is not a good enough seal on the crankshaft so you end up doing it again. At least that was my experience. So, the second time, I removed the rear main bearing cap to install the lower half of the seal properly. For the upper half, I just worked it as tight as I could against the crankshaft. Hard to do with the limited clearance, etc. I do not have fond memories of the whole operation (done in the parking lot of the apartment complex I lived in at the time). When I was done I got the leakage down to about 1 qt every 2000 miles which happened to be the oil change interval I use for that car. So I called it "good enough". This was all with the original style rope seal. It is possible that with the replacement rubber seals you may not need the seal against the crankshaft quite as tight. In which case removing the rear main bearing cap may not be needed.

https://www.ply33.com/ The post you quoted probably got information from the parts section: https://www.ply33.com/Parts/numeric

The bigger the temperature difference between the coolant and the ambient air, the smaller the radiator has to be to transfer the heat energy. By going to a pressurized system to get a higher boiling point on the coolant they could put a smaller, cheaper, radiator into the car. Or, given the era, they could put a bigger V8 engine in the car without having to put a bigger radiator.

I have wondered a bit about this. The “Instruction Book” (i.e. owners manual) that came with my car when it was new in 1933 lists ethylene glycol anti-freeze and gives suggested concentrations for various temperatures. My father was born in 1926 so he was 6 years old when my '33 was built, far too young to drive or own a car. So I think tales about alcohol based anti-freeze solutions must be from my grandfathers' generation (one born in 1896 the other in 1898) rather than from my (and I assume your) father’s generation. Or maybe the alcohol based anti-freeze was so much cheaper that there were people who put up with its limitations long after ethylene glycol was available and recommended. (To be fair, the 1946-54 Plymouth Factory Service Manual still mentioned alcohol based anti-freeze solutions so they were still around 20 years after my '33 was built.)

Hmmm. It has been a long while but I was able to remove (and re-install) the flywheel with the engine and bell housing together and in my '33 PD. I wonder if the mounting bolts have been replaced with longer ones. Or if mine were installed with the nuts on the block side. In either case, I don’t recall any particular issue with getting the flywheel out once it was unbolted. I do remember that getting the upper half of the rear seal replaced was a real PITA: laying on my back, only able to move the open end wrench a trifle at a time and no real way to force the rope seal down tight against the crankshaft. I vaguely recall that I removed the rear main bearing cap to replace the lower half of the seal which means I must have removed the oil pan. If it does come to splitting the bell housing off the engine, there are a couple of alignment dowels that are pretty tight (they need to be to align things properly). Long after my adventure with replacing the rear seal while laying on my back in the apartment parking lot, I did a body off attempt at restoration. At that time I pulled the engine and, again if I recall correctly, getting the bell housing off the engine required a bit of patience and care to due to the alignment pins/dowels. I am not sure I would want to try that with the engine in the car. Sorry for the rambling. But I think if part of the goal is to replace the rear main seal, you are likely to need to pull the rear main bearing cap to do the bottom half properly. To pull the rear bearing cap you will need to drop the oil pan. If the oil pan is off then you have a good strong edge around the bottom of the engine to build up some sort of cribbing to hold the engine if you find you really need to pull the bell housing.

Instead of plastic corrugated, heat shrink, or rubber hose, etc. you could use “auto loom” as sold by the vendors who stock antique car wiring supplies. For example: https://www.store.ynzyesterdaysparts.com/wire-cover/auto-loom.html

For myself, the first part was having a good idea of our current expenses. Then adjusting that number based on what we expected for additional travel, medical, etc. including long term care. Second part guessing how long were were likely to live based on current health conditions, family history, etc. and then adding a lot to it (having an estate left over is less of a problem than going broke before you die). Third was figuring out how we were going to cover those estimated expenses over the estimated life time. Since defined benefit retirements didn’t exist for us this means just Social Security and savings/investments. SS was pretty easy, they have tools to tell you where you stand and estimated monthly based on when you retire. Savings/investments are much harder as they are at the whim of the financial markets. Since I was a software engineer, I ended up creating a number of tools to model expected outcome based on the historical probability of various past results for inflation and market returns for various portfolio mixes that fit our risk tolerance. Eventually that led to basically a table that said for any given retirement age how much money we needed in investments. That all sounds daunting. So there are no end of “financial planners” and/or “retirement planners” that will separate you from some of your money to do the above estimates. But if you just sit down with your spouse and work through things piece by piece it isn’t too hard, especially if you consider portfolios that fit the Bogelhead concept and use some simple formulas for withdrawal rates (no need to go over the top like I did with Monte Carlo modeling). Your situation is likely to be quite different than for someone in the US as your healthcare costs are very different. I suppose there is some equivalent to our Social Security. And maybe you actually have a defined benefit pension, a rarity in the US for non-public service jobs.

Edited link to remove the Internet tracking cruft. There seems to be two standard spacings for mounting screws and most of the replacement dimmer switches I’ve seen are set up for both. This switch only has one set of mounting holes so I would double check the spacing to see if it is correct for our cars.

Welcome to the retired! So true!

Might be a regional thing or from a different era, but my father who was born and raised in the Chicago area called them Allen Keys.

p.s. Marc, When do you think you will get around to starting the engine? You are probably about 50 miles by road from me and it has been a while since I’ve had my old Plymouth out of town. . .

You can start and run an old points and condenser car on the battery alone. Can probably run it all day as long as you don’t have heavy loads like headlights. Actually on newer ones too: Back in the 1980s my alternator failed west of Vegas coming back from Colorado. Drove it all the way home in the LA metro area on the battery. You need the generator or at least something there to properly tension the fan belt. But as long as there is no field current it should just spin along just fine with no damage.

The rebuild kits from Then-N-Now Automotive (also known as Antique Parts Cellar) are compatible with modern fuel. I guess there might be some vendors out there with kits that are not but that seems unlikely as the fuel compatibility issue has been around for enough decades now that I would think the older stock would be long gone. One thing I would not trust would be a NOS kit from way back in the day.

Oh boy, people being pedantic! May I join in? Your ”P/N 33-208” with the dash looks a lot more like a “Part Type Code” than a part number. The part number would actually be 33208 and was used, near as I can tell with my incomplete collection of parts books, from 1933 through at least 1948. Given how low the part number is I suspect that it was used on some other non-Plymouth several years earlier perhaps even in the 1920s. For what it is worth, the 1936-48 book has the part type code as 22-06-2 and calls it a “Front Wheel Bearing NUT”.

Not just what you search for. . . This site, like many others, has installed Google analytics to give the webmaster some visibility into how people get to the site, where they poke around in the site, and what sites they go to when they leave. So Google can track you around the web even if you never do a web search. When tracking you around they see what types of sites you visit and what pages you spend more time on and can build a profile for serving targeted ads. Google isn’t the only one that does this. Facebook is another big one and there are a bunch you probably have never heard of. It takes some work on your part to figure out how to block that type of tracking without actually breaking the websites you want to look at. In my case, I have put some open source firmware in my router that blocks many of the common ad servers and trackers. So I seldom see ads and can’t recall seeing an ad that looks like it was targeted to me in years. This works for all devices on my home network. And pretty much anything Facebook is outright blocked. But I am a retired embedded software engineer and have a bag of tricks that most people don’t. @Sniper mentioned using an ad blocker add on to Firefox. That will help a lot. And I understand that the newer versions of Safari from Apple on both the Mac and iOS are starting to put in tracker blockers. In my case, ads don‘t get through at all so I don’t know how good the Firefox add ons are nor how good the Apple anti-tracking is.

That is an excellent practice! Using a password manager makes it easier but anyway you do it having a different password for every site/account mitigates a lot of the risk for being hacked across the board. I know someone who insisted, against my advise, on using a single password. When they were hacked it took them a lot of time and effort to regain control of their bank accounts, etc. You don’t want to have to go through that. In addition to the two things you can’t avoid (death and taxes) you should also add that at least one of your online accounts will be hacked. The hack probably won’t be your fault (hackers get in through some fault in the server itself). But once a server for one of your accounts is hacked the account information on that server will be tried against other servers hosting other accounts. You want those attempts to fail. You do that by having, at the least, separate passwords for every site and account.

I recall seeing those Boler camping trailers back in the day. I’ve always thought they were a ”right sized” camping trailer for me if I ever got in to camping trailers. We only recently decided that we are probably done with backpacking and are currently more into car camping but maybe we will move from car camping to trailers someday.

Those look like they would be a good bulb. The draw more current than the original stock lamps so you might consider setting up a headlight relay and running heavier wires to keep from overloading your original headlight switch and wiring.

Those numbers are not in my Plymouth parts book so I assume they must have been used on some other Chrysler manufactured vehicle. The numbers are in a range that would probably be from the late 1940s. As I understand it, Plymouth in that era had a non-pressurized cooling system. It would not surprise me if other Chrysler built vehicles of that era were also unpressurized. My first question: Is there any other indication that the engine is over heating (temperature gauge readings, etc.)? My second question: How large, relative to a modern cooling system, is your top tank? It is possible that you are simply overfilling it as the older unpressurized cooling systems used the top of the top tank as the expansion area. I know that if I fill the radiator on my old Plymouth to the top it will spew out coolant through the overflow until it gets down to the proper working level (where the top of the coolant is just barely visible above the core). The car runs nice and cool (with the appropriate thermostat) and the coolant level well below the top of the radiator neck. It would not surprise me if your loader also has a non-pressurized cooling system and will act the same way.

Some of us moderators come here daily to simply read the posts and hope there is nothing that actually requires moderation. We do miss some things when first posted but there are members who flag suspect posts for us, usually very soon after they were posted, so usually we can take action fairly quickly. And yor are right, posts won't last long if they violate the rules.