TodFitch

I harbored some doubts on that for years. But a few years back a bunch of us did a tour into Arizona. In the spring so the temperatures weren’t too hot, only in the 80s. The whole time I had Arizona gas in the car it was subject to fuel boiling in the pump. Okay on the road when there was plenty of air flow. But idling for more than a few minutes was an issue. As was hot restart (think stopping at a gas station). The car would run (or start) okay but when the carburetor bowl went dry because the pump was having heat/vapor issues the engine would die. (Pouring some water on the pump to cool it would get me running again, so it was not a huge problem but it was a huge annoyance.) The problem went away on the first tank of California gas. And in California I’ve only rarely experienced that (temperatures > 100°F, after long periods of high speed driving). So I did some research and found that California put an upper limit on how volatile the gas can be. Most states don’t. On a modern car with the pump in the tank, a high(er) pressure fuel system feeding injectors it doesn’t make much if any difference. But for an older car sucking gas from the tank via a pump in the well heated engine compartment it can make a difference. So I don’t bad mouth California gas as much nowadays. Other to complain about the high price.

When driving to a local store recently the old Plymouth started running very poorly. Fairly quick onset of symptoms following hitting a bump in the road. My guess was some debris got knocked loose and obstructed a passage in the carburetor. Today I finally got around to looking into things. The inside of the carburetor was filthy and there was stuff in the fuel pump sediment bowl. Cleaned it all up, removed and blew out the various jets and orifices, etc. and it is running like it should again. Thinking back on it, I am pretty sure it has been at least 15 years since I touched the carburetor. Maybe even 20 years. I am actually surprised it went this long.

Guess I am out of it: When we moved to the current house a few years back I never bothered to setup an outdoor antenna or get cable TV. We just stream Netflix, Smithsonian Channel, etc. to the TV. End result: I don't think I've seen a TV ad in several years so I was unaware that dancing in commercials is "a thing". Maybe there is a similar thing on ads shown on streaming videos, but I've setup a whole house ad blocker system so most ads don't make it to any device in the house.

And thank you for letting everyone know: It is good to get feedback.

I'd be a little cautious about that. Maybe it is my very much older car with a third brush generator, but the system voltage could go up to 8 or so volts and you would be relying on the 5v regulation, built to lowest cost with not much heat sinking, in the device you are running to deal with it.

That little device sure looks like it would do the trick. Except maybe for polarity reversal, got to make sure that any metal part on the USB cable or device being charged doesn't come in contact with the same ground as that device is using. Can't beat the price!

According to one website, North Carolina has no estate taxes. If I read the IRS page correctly, Federal estate taxes for 2020 are on estates of $11,580,000 or more. Only about 1% of US households have that kind of money. If you have the kind of money that requires Federal estate taxes you are likely already tied into appropriate legal help so you are unlikely to be asking on this forum. However, unless you set up a trust you are very likely to have an estate that will need to go into probate. If my Internet search turned up good information, that would be anything over $20,000 ($30,000 to surviving spouse) in North Carolina. Many (most? all?) states seem to have rigged the system for probate lawyers. Their fee is often set to be a percentage of the gross estate value, not the net value. So, for example, if your estate consists of only your house and property with a market value of $100,000 and you have a mortgage of $80,000 then their fee is based on the $100,000 not on the net worth of $20,000. And if you go through probate there will be court fees of probably several hundred dollars in addition to the scalping you'll get from your probate lawyer. You really want to stay out of probate! Cost to set up the appropriate trusts, etc. is much, much lower (can be done for not much more than the notary fees on the documents). If you retain a lawyer to help you set up the trust, it will still be much cheaper than probate. I am not a lawyer. Laws vary from state to state. You should at the very least read up on the laws in your state. For my wife and I, we hired a lawyer for the initial trust creation but have done the revisions ourselves (once we became familiar with the process and requirements).

I guess if you define government to include lawyers and court costs. Especially lawyers. Estate taxes, at least in the two state's I've had to deal with recently kick in on estates worth far more than average. Same for the Feds. So there is a good chance that the actual taxes (other than the most recent year's income taxes) won't be a problem. And a trust, at least a straight forward legal one won't protect against taxes anyway. But I agree, if you don't have a trust (or actually a trust and some other things setup properly) then the lawyers and court fees will eat up a huge amount and will also make things a lot of work for whoever it dealing with your estate. My parents screwed up and had some assets that weren't properly setup for transfer to heirs and we had to go through probate on it. A lot of calendar time, work and money involved. The only good thing, from my point of view, is one of my siblings handled it so all I had to do was sign things from time to time. My wife's parents handled things better, having a proper trust setup, and that was a breeze to go through in comparison. While you are at it, figure out all the paperwork your state wants for medical power of attorney or equivalent. There is a reasonable chance that you'll end up in a condition where you are unable to make your own calls on medical treatment and you need someone you trust to have the legal ability to do what you want.

All look like good things to have. I find the factory shop manual and the factory parts manual to be the two that I refer to most often. Regarding CD/PDF vs printed: The couple of manuals I got in electronic format I ended up printing and binding into books. Maybe I am old fashioned but it seems easier to me to use a printed item than look at one on a screen. Best of both would be to have a nice printed reference copy and then a PDF where you could print the pages needed for what ever operation you are doing for use in the garage or shop. The “shop copy” would be disposable so you wouldn’t fret too much about getting it grease stained, etc.

Probably no better or worse than I did as a child when I mailed in my cereal box tops along with a dime to get a magic decoder ring. By the time it finally arrived, seemingly a year later, I had pretty much forgotten it and gone on to other toys and things.

Funny thing. . . Back after the "hanging chad" issue there was a big push for changing out the voting machines with new electronic ones. At the time I was employed in Silicon Valley as an embedded systems software engineer so the type of systems they were trying to deploy were something I could consider from a professional point of view. I did some research and decided that they were way less secure and way more easily manipulated than I'd like. So my wife and I switched to what was then called a "permanent absentee ballot" (a.k.a. "vote by mail") as it is actually more secure and more easily audited for issues than the damned electronic voting machines (at least the ones they were deploying in the early 2000s). Apparently every other engineer in Silicon Valley thought the same as I because by the next election the use of mail in ballots went sky high in Santa Clara County and they ended up having entire voting precincts empty and needed to consolidate them. As implemented in Santa Clara County (where I was then) and Orange County (where I am now) there are far more checks and balances and tracing associated with mail in ballots than there ever was with electronic voting machines. I notice that the same people stirring up suspicions about "voting by mail" are also pushing "absentee ballots" for their followers. They are just two different names for the same thing. I notice my neighbor who wears a hat pushing a candidate from the party casting aspersions on voting by mail is worried about that but is not concerned that he is going to be using an absentee ballot. Talk about disconnect.

Nice!

Yes, that would be the 23" engine. As I understand it, the fluid drive cars had eight bolts holding the flywheel on but four of those match up with the four bolt crank. And when they went to 12v they changed the number of teeth on the flywheel ring gear. They may have gone to a narrow fan belt around that time too, not sure about that. Other than those items, the later 23" Plymouth and Dodge car engines should just be a bolt it operation.

Good looking car and I see a bit of the trunk in back so it is the touring version. With respect to putting a 265 into it, better measure twice! In the very late 1930s Chrysler started building engines in Canada and all of those were the bigger 25" block. The follow on was to design the low end cars like Plymouth so they could take either engine (Dodge branding being used for Canadian Plymouths). But that all happened after your car was built. So I think it highly likely that fitting an engine two inches longer than your current one into the engine compartment will not be an easy task. It would probably be much easier to fit a 1950s US Plymouth or US Dodge car engine into your car. I believe that would be just a straight bolt in.

Too old to require smog check.

I think that "matching numbers" fetish is mostly for later vehicles. For older cars the AACA is often clueless about whether the correct engine is in the vehicle or not, at least for things other than Model A Fords for which they have lots of expert members. The Plymouth Owners Club only cares that the engineering code on the engine is correct for the car. I don't know what a Dodge or Dodge truck specific club has in their judging rules but I suspect it will be similar to what the Plymouth Owners Club does for older vehicles. That said, the build card for my 1933 Plymouth indicates that the engine in my car is the one that it came with from the factory. Woo hoo! Matching numbers! But nobody looking at the car could tell without looking at the build card. It will be nice to hear if the Chrysler Historical Collection is still around and able to pull up build card information. That was a great resource.

It is called crown and they still make roads that way. They just use less crown than they used to, I guess experience has shown that they did not need as much crown for drainage to work as they once thought. Sorry, but I can't be of help for James’ issue: I've found he knows more about this type of thing than I. If he is stumped that it is unlikely that any suggestion of mine will be useful.

The index/illustration at the front of the engine section of my '36-'48 parts book says that part should be in group 9-16-6 but I don't see a listing for it there. In the meantime, the plugs I see in group 200 of the standard parts book come in 16ths of an inch sized and your measurement does not seem to match up with any of them. The closest I see would be 1 7/16 (1.4375) inches. For that, the original Chrysler number is 105603 and it is listed as being made of steel (no brass listed in that size). I am having a difficult time with the Dorman site looking for their number for that part but it is likely they carry it.

Sounds like "tappet wrenches" to me. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tappet wrench They are pretty useful for adjusting tappets on L head engines.

I have never figured out why people mail order ignition parts. I've had good luck over the years getting that type of item at my local auto supply store. Might take a day to get them into the store from the local warehouse, but often if you give the store a call in the morning they will have it by that afternoon. And then you can look at the parts and compare them with the worn our existing ones and see if they match up before paying and taking delivery.

Not sure what you did, but I've used a battery charger on my 6v+ with the battery in the car any number of times. Just have to match positive to positive and negative to negative. I don't do it very often so I have to be very careful to remind myself that the red cable from the charger goes on the engine block and the black on the terminal lug on the starter (battery under the front seat so it is inconvenient to connect to the battery terminals themselves).

My modern car with all of its electronics, including “keyless” door locks and ignition, will drain its battery if left parked for a long period of time. So I have a setup where I can put a 12v Battery Tender on it when I know the car will be sitting a while. But I have never had that problem with my 6v+ Plymouth. When the key is off there is no load energized anywhere on the car and the battery seems pretty happy even after sitting for months. Not saying you shouldn’t get a 6v trickle charger of some kind. Just saying that if I noticed that the battery in my old car wasn’t keeping a charge I’d start with looking over the car’s electrical system first.

Our most recent camping trip in the old car ended with a flat bed return to home because: The tools were behind the rear seat, buried under all the camping gear. The only place to carry the dirty spare tire cover would be in the car on top of all the camping gear (cover doesn’t stay on a deflated tire with the bead broken very well). Continuing home without a spare incase another tire tube failed did not seem appealing. (Turns out the failure was a tube and all the tubes in all the tires were the same brand and age.) Other than that the trip was actually pretty nice. Now if I could only figure out how to embed PeerTube hosted videos on this forum instead of posting a link, it would be great. But I think it would need the ability to use HTML in the response and I don’t see how to do that.

Not sure I know what “S.A.E. horsepower” is. In the really old days there was N.A.C.C. Horsepower which was based on the bore and stroke and assumed something like a 1900 era engine design (low RPM and low compression ratio). It was woefully out of date by the time my 1933 Plymouth was built. The NACC horsepower was sometimes called "taxable horsepower". There is Brake Horsepower (BHP) which is based on putting the engine on a dynometer and using a brake to put a load on the engine. And that is what I think most US build cars from the late 1920s through the 1960s advertised. The issue there is that they did not include the losses in the driveline nor losses to accessories. By the 1960s with automatic transmissions, air conditioning, higher electrical loads, etc. a lot of the engine BHP never made it to the tires. So I think current cars are supposed to be rated by how much power actually makes it to the wheels. With all that, my 1946 through 1954 Plymouth factory service manual shows the 217.8 cu.in. engine putting out between 95 BHP in 1946 and 100 BHP in 1954. Looks like much of that gain can be attributed to the increase in the compression ratio from 6.6:1 in 1946 to 7.1:1 in 1954. For all those years the taxable horsepower is listed at 25.35.

That might be better phrased as “immigrated to what is now the U.S. from England around 1640.” The U.S. didn’t get started until quite a few years later. I can also trace ancestors in what is now the U.S., on both my mother's and father's sides, to the 1640s.