TodFitch

Coming back from the mountains yesterday and saw this on California 91 west bound from the Riverside area, so somebody in Southern California is driving their old Plymouth: I should be getting my old Plymouth out more. But I would rather not be driving it in stop and go traffic on the freeway.

Huh? What is "the plunger" inside your fuel pump? There is a rod that attaches to the center of the diaphragm, is that what you are writing about? The fuel pump on my old Plymouth is fully rebuildable and you can get kits from Antique Auto Parts Cellar (a.k.a. Then and Now Automotive).

This topic bothers a number of people on the forum. Previous thread was locked due to that. This thread has been reported to the moderators and I've already had to delete a number of posts to it. Keep your posts on the topic. If you don't like the topic at all, then don't post. I strongly suspect we'll end up having to lock this thread too, but I am hoping for more civility going forward.

I just wish the storms would come in colder. It was in the 40s at the 8,000 foot level today. Not much precipitation, less than 0.2", but it was rain and we only had an inch or two of snow so that is undoubtedly washed away. Been a lousy winter for skiing in the Southern California mountains.

I had a red light runner nearly total my daily driver about 3 or 4 years ago. Fortunately I was able to get an accurate police report before they started changing their story. I realized how close I'd come to a "he said, they said" situation where I'd have been held at least partly responsible and have had to pay pretty big bucks out of my own pocket. To prevent that possibility in the future, I purchased a dash cam so I'd always have a witness with me. The first dash cam died after a couple of years and I am on my second one, a Viofo A119s v2, and am pretty happy with it. The big difference between a dash cam and something like a action camera is a dash cam will: Start recording on power up. Loop record. That is it records small (1 to 10 minute) videos and when the storage gets full it will erase the oldest video allowing a new video to be recorded. Have a button (or other method) to save the current video. You can use it to assure that a video, like the one austinsailor posted above, is not written over by the loop mode logic. Be able to record a time stamp and other information on the video. Gracefully complete the video in progress when it is powered down. On the legal front, near as I can tell recording video in public is legal in all US states. Not necessarily true in other countries with different privacy laws. Many/most dash cams can also record the sound inside the car. This may be a legal issue: Each US state has different laws about voice recording. Some states are "single permission" (i.e. only one person in a conversation needs to know and approve it being recorded), others are "multiple permission" (i.e. everyone being recorded needs to know and approve). So you may have to notify your passengers that anything they say is being recorded. And if you drop your car off at a mechanic, valet parking, or loan your car out you may need to either disable the sound recording or specifically notify each and everyone that may be in your car, etc. So you will probably do one of two things: Ignore the law and accept the possible legal consequences if a video with sound ever escapes your grasp. Or disable the sound recording. If my research is correct, California requires every participant to be informed while Arizona is single consent (only you the driver needs to know sound is being recorded). If/when I drive into other states with a dash cam, I'll look up their laws. . . And, by the way, if you are in an accident and you delete the dash cam video of it and the other party gets wind of that you will be in a world of hurt for destruction of evidence with the presumption that you destroyed the evidence because it showed you guilty. However IANAL, so take any of this legal stuff with as big a grain of salt as you can. Rumor on the dash cam forums is that the cameras with batteries in them generally have a shorter life (stuck in the top of a windshield of a car parked in the sun will really cook them). There are two schools of thought about having a dash cam with a built in GPS. The argument against is that they show the speed you were traveling and if you are shown to be speeding, even if that had no bearing on the accident, you will have an issue showing that you are in the clear. My current dash cam is setup with a GPS mount and records location and speed. I don't normally exceed the speed limit and I find videos with locations stamps useful for my side hobby of contributing to OpenStreetMap (the mapping equivalent of Wikipedia). There are some dash cams made in Korea which apparently have a good reputation for quality. Most dash cams come from China. The odd thing about Chinese dash cams is that some are pretty good. But the good Chinese dash cams are then counterfeited by other Chinese companies with much less quality. So you have to be careful that you are getting the real deal from China and not the counterfeit from China.

When I was a bachelor I had the bright idea that I could clean the grease, oil and grime off of car parts using the dishwasher. This was a mistake on several counts. Needless to say I am glad that I did not have a wife at that time to share in my learning experience.

Anything other than other than the words "spark plug" on it that make it different from a run of the mill offset box end wrench?

Don't they still have L-head valve spring compressors at the local auto supply? Last I looked they still had them for people who were working on lawn mowers. Of course, I don't normally wander the tool isle at my local auto supply, so I could be totally out of date on that.

You will always find antidotal evidence of anything so if you go by that you'll end up believing whatever you want to believe however fallacious it is with regards to your actual odds of being injured or dying. Look at the odds (statistics) for injury or death for various ways to travel, etc. These change with time as demographics and technology change so look at as recent a set of statistics as you can. For example, violent crime rates in the US have, on average, been dropping for a couple of few decades now and on a per population basis we are about as safe now as we were in the 1950s and 1960s. A quick web search indicates that in recent years on a per mile traveled basis you are about 35 times more likely to die on a motorcycle than in a car. And, on a per vehicle basis, a motorcycle is about 5 times more likely to be involved in a fatal accident than a car. Bus, train or airplane (including private airplane) are all safer ways to travel than either motorcycle or car. For motor vehicles there are currently about 43,000 deaths per year and about 2.9 million injuries in the US. Regarding home invasion robberies, "on average, household members became victims of violent crimes in about 266,560 burglaries annually. Offenders known to their victims accounted for 65% of these burglaries; strangers accounted for 28%." See: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/vdhb.txt Interesting that in nearly 2/3 of the instances, you would have needed to protect yourself from someone you know. Anyway, comparing number motor vehicle injuries per year to home invasion victims per year, your odds are nearly 11:1 better at home than on the road. And if your family and friends are decent people (so you aren't part of that 65% who know their home invasion attackers), you are even safer at home. You may decide not to follow your safest option for whatever reason. But you should make that decision consciously. For example, I like to drive, so I am more likely to drive than take the bus even if the bus is safer. And the new car with its radar based pre-collision braking system, its crumple zones, its side curtain air bags, etc is a lot safer than my 84 year old car with its "safety steel body". But I'll still drive the old cart because I really enjoy it. But I'm not going to claim it is a safe way to get around and I am going to be consciously concentrating on my defensive driving skills to help mitigate a bit of the odds of being injured or dying in an accident in it.

Yes, and I veered away because on my '33 the oil pressure relief mechanism is different than on late '33 and up engines where the flow through the oil filter is shut off when the pressure drops too low. End result is that hot idle oil pressure on my engine is low enough that I'd end up with the fuel pump being shut off. So my immediate thought was to offer something that might also work on my car.

If the goal is to stop the electrical fuel pump when the engine stops (e.g. in an accident), then either an oil pressure operated switch or powering from the armature side of the external regulator wiring on a generator will do. If you have an alternator, especially a one wire alternator, then I don't think there is a place you can pull the DC power from that is on only when the engine is running. In that case, as Plymouthy Adams notes, an oil pressure activated switch is probably your best option.

In general, it should probably be in the range of 6 to 8 volts. The regulator should be holding at the proper voltage for charging the battery. Except possibly at idle where the voltage will drop some, the amount probably varies based on generator condition, idle RPM, etc. You probably want to check the idle voltage on the armature side of the regulator to verify it is high enough.

Couldn't you wire the pump power from the armature output of the generator (between the generator and the cutout built into the voltage regulator). Then the pump would only be powered if the generator was producing electricity (i.e. the engine was running). A SPDT switch on the dash, possibly momentary push button style, could be used to power the pump manually to fill the carb bowl if the car hasn't been run in a while.

The entries in the table at http://www.crankshaftcoalition.com/wiki/MOPAR_inline_flathead_engines#1928-1959_Plymouth_engine_specs are not correct for 1933-34. I'd have to actually look up the correct values for other years to see if what else might be wrong.

The lifetime senior National Parks and Federal Recreation Lands Pass is available for US citizens 62 and older. Price used to be $10 but they raised it to something like $80 plus some handling fee last year. Good for more than just the National Parks. For instance, the National Forests in Southern California require an "Adventure Pass", $5/day or $20/year, for some areas. And there are National Seashore and BLM areas that have a fee. The above pass covers all of that, so even at the higher price it is a pretty good deal if you visit pretty near any Federal recreation area. I got one a few years ago. Took a little time from when I ordered it to when it arrived, so you may want to start that process a a bit before your trip.

For what its worth, the mountains of California can get significant snow (alas not yet this winter). And CalTrans seems to use a salt-cinder mix on the state highways. Each county and town does their own thing, but it would not surprise me to learn that some of them use salt on at least some of the roads. And I've seen a number of vehicles that lived their lives near the beach that are quite rusty. Granted, the vast majority of people and thus cars are in areas away from salt, but not 100% of them. So just because a car spent its entire life in California doesn't mean that it is rust free.

1930 seems to be the date of the first car radio. Apparently made by a company named Galvin Manufacturing who cutely named their product "Motorola". It is my understanding that the early car radios used a motor-generator setup to generate the high voltages needed to run the tubes. Later they came up with a vibrator and transformer setup. My 1933 Plymouth was factory wired with a radio antenna, though I expect the number of people who could afford a very expensive accessory in the depths of the depression were rather small.

I suppose other companies may have marketed that body style as a cabriolet, but the Plymouth marketing literature called it a convertible coupe and I think Chrysler was pretty consistent across its various makes in regard to naming body styles. More examples: The body style that Chevrolet (and the S.A.E.) called a "coach", Ford called a Tudor and Plymouth called a "two door sedan". And what the S.A.E. called a "sedan", Ford called a Fordor and Plymouth called a "four door sedan" (not sure what Chevy called that one).

Means the body was designed and built in Australia for running gear (and possibly front sheet metal) imported from North America. Not sure on Dodge, but there were no North American built roadsters in 1933 for Plymouth. Only convertible coupes (roll up windows rather than side curtains, etc.).

Open water, free of ice, in the Arctic Ocean until late in the fall or early winter means a lower energy difference between there and areas further south. That, in turn means slower jet stream that is more likely to be a stationary serpentine (like a lazy river wanders back and forth). End result is the "ridiculously resilient ridge" of high pressure over California keeping us warm and dry and sending storms north (which keeps places like Alaska warmer) to cool off before driving them south into your area. So we get more heat and drought, Alaska gets warmer storms and people on the east side of the country get colder snowy weather. What ever you think the cause is or isn't, welcome to "climate change".

On some years it is not possible to unbolt the pedal from the arm.

Probably true on later vehicles but on my '33 the pedal pad area is part of the arm forging. My pedal dust seals are failing (installed 20 years ago). I might try that hot water trick that FlashBuddy mentions (last time I sliced them and then glued up the slice after putting them around the arm.

Been a while since I've had the vehicle, but I recall measuring the length of the 4.0L in line six in my old Cherokee and finding it several inches longer than the 23" length of the engine in my old Plymouth. I suspect you will have some considerable modifications to get the 4.0L engine into your PT-105.

I did the same when I moved from New York to Maryland in 1974. The NY registration had been by engine number but I wanted the car registered by serial number. I took all the numbers (engine, body and serial) in to the motor vehicle department when I was transferring the car from NY to MD. The clerk there disappeared for about 45 minutes, came back out and said they matched and changed setup the MD registration using the serial number. At the time I figured the clerk simply took a long coffee break, but now I wonder if they had been on the phone with whatever Chrysler Historical was called at that time. Anyway, when I moved to California in 1978, there was no issue having the car registered using the serial number. They did have an inspector come out of the building to verify the numbers on the car (that had never happened in Maryland). I recall seeing an image of a 1940s era California "pink slip" and noticing that in that day they had a field for engine number and a field for serial number. So, pre-computer and pre-VIN they had the concept that the two numbers could be different. I don't trade old cars a lot, but I've know some that do and I've heard mention that at some point it is often easier to go through the procedure the DMV has for "lost paperwork". One story I heard was about a vehicle that had been sold a number of times since it was last registered and apparently some of the intermediate sellers had since passed away. When presented with a stack of handwritten bills of sale, etc. the DMV looked at it all and said something to the effect that "it looks like a classic case of missing paperwork", slid all the documentation aside and did something from scratch.