Ulu

Simple as it comes for an OHV-4. I assembled a well scrubbed 1098cc in Mom’s kitchen, when I was 18. It was a Midget dual carb though, and had a PCV device! Also bored .060” over, but I never bothered to calculate the final displacement. It ate the transmission like a bulldog. Big bites.

Thank you. It’s a fun project. I let it languish for quite a while because my wife ticked me off. There’s no reason my wife can’t park outside of my garage. But she demanded to park in the garage. Whenever she demanded to park in the garage I just quit working on the car. It took her almost 6 months to get the message. The thing is, when I got this car I was kind of disappointed. If my wife had not fallen in love with this car, I would have just flipped it; So that crap was a little hard to take. Anyhow today I got around to working on the trim plate for the steering shaft. This was once a chunk of commercial aluminum window sill, 0.1” thick (before I sanded the snot out of it.) Making the rough pattern: Hogging it out: Slitting the slot: Sanded but not buffed:

I put the front plate on with rubber insulated clamps on top, and on the bottom I tapped some 1/4-20s into the fiberglass, which is quite thick at that point. I don’t have all the chrome hardware on yet and those ugly carriage bolts holding the bumper on are not in the same place. I marked the ugly ragged fender tips with blue tape and a sharpie. This is after trimming them off with a cut off wheel, and flat sanding with a long board to make them even. I did some touch up paint with a little brush & some matching red from my huge collection of skateboard paints. There are lots of chips and rough edges which need trimming and filling, but all I did is touchup the bits that you could see easily.

I changed my voltage regulator yesterday. This is the third one and son of a gun, when I started it up it didn’t show a charge. GIRrrrr…. I didn’t occur to me at the time that I might have a defective ammeter, because I did actually see it show a charge and a discharge when I put the electronic voltage regulator on the car. It stopped quick and I blamed the regulator and changed it again. To No avail. After I had shut the engine off I thought to beep the horn and watch the ammeter move, and son of a gun, it wasn’t moving. Then I put a real load on it with the highbeams and son of a gun it really moved. So I think my ammeter is sticky. Temporarily I will clip a voltmeter on the wiring and go drive it today to see what happens.

I remember Mr Bean at the Olympics, and the parachuting Queen. Best fun ever at the Olympics.

That’s kind of what it seems like, riding in the Volkswagen kit car. I can stick my hand out and touch the pavement while I’m driving it.

I just got a huge kick out of the fact that while you couldn’t understand the Japanese narration, you could clearly tell how excited the announcer was to say the words “sports car tire!” Clearly, and in English.

Scientific? Plymouthy, please just let them have their joke. This was the Japanese engineers attempting a joke. I wouldn’t be surprised if they planned the ramp to collapse so that they wouldn’t launch that huge tire into the next town. OK, to be fair, I have no idea what the translation is of the Japanese, and it may not be anything to do with “which tire goes farthest”. I just made that title up after watching the video.

Japanese engineers attempt to find out.

Valley Chrome in Clovis

These brackets are made from flat pressed stainless steel but they are not well engineered. They might’ve been OK if they were twice as thick but even then they would have been wobbly in my imagination. The original car had brackets with some section to them, that were made from pressed steel (painted black) or possibly even castings. I can’t tell from the photos that I have. They mount with the same triangular pattern of bolts, but considerably higher on the car. It wouldn’t bother me at all to make some by hand with a hammer and a torch and a grinder. I live only a mile and a half from one of the top chrome shops in California. I would take them and have them plated. My windshield frame needs to be re-plated badly, so I will be visiting them eventually.

Thanks guys. These things are awful and they need to go.

These are the door latches that are on my off topic project car. I’d like to know what they came from because clearly they weren’t manufactured just for this car. I would hate to toss them because they are at least 42 years old, but if these are just ordinary hardware store parts that are available to this day then they are junk to me. Whatever they are, They are not old or sloppy. This car was never driven much after it was built.

So I have a serious problem with organization right now. I want to work on the Scout but I have the P15 all torn apart, and a whole lot of the parts are in that scout right now. I was planning to do the P 15 first until I realized how much body damage it had. The Scout is much straighter. Since my plan is to cut the P15 up and customize it completely, I may end up selling a lot of it as parts. It really chaps my hide though, that I will be cutting off the straight parts of the car and keeping the most dented parts. I’m going to have to re-organize the garage so I can bring in the motorcycle from my shed, and move all the Plymouth parts from the Scout into the shed & into the Plymouth itself. This would all be simpler if I had another garage.

The Midget could hold 0.88 G’s on the skidpad with stock tires. That was Ferrari territory in 1964. And it was probably just as reliable as any Ferrari ever built.