Ulu

Hey You guys... It's been over two years since I logged in here last, and lots has happened. Unfortunately, exactly nothing has happened to the P15 except new rust. Well, I did push it around on its cart, but not one wrench has been turned in this time. So I can't recall where I left off in my ranting and pontificating, but my mom passed away, wife broke her knee, my wife and I have both retired, traveled a bit, and started working on the house. I had quit flying but then had eye surgery. I see OK now and am a crack shot at 200 yds. I was going to resume flying, but my flying partner lost his medical so I never have. Instead I resumed target shooting. A lot of remodeling has been done to the house and property since my wife retired, and all this left no time for my hobby cars (or aircraft!) Discovering some termites extended the duration of the remodeling, and we spent a lot on appliances and landscaping. I've been re-arranging my garage and planning a shop. I joined the local rifle club and started shooting a lot. I had quit when I got out of college in '75, and never owned more than one piece in all that time, but my flying buddy got a firearms license and I started fixing old guns. I recently bought a .308 Ruger Precision and I've been tuning that up. I've been teaching my wife and grandkids to shoot .22s and .38s. Due to the market boom it looks like I will be able to afford a new workshop and carport, and I might be able to hire out the whole construction. I've been waiting for the new shop to get back on the Plymouth, and as soon as I straighten up my garage a bit more and fix the clutch on my motorcycle I'll get the workshop going. By fall, I should finally have inside workspace for Edith d' Plymouth. In the nonce I've taken stock of what I want to do, and I've decided that if I want a restored P15 I will just buy one. Mine was built from parts of other cars and can never really be restored. I've decided that if I'm going to work on this car it will be a full custom job, and I'm pretty much decided on a 2-passenger roadster. I have 3 other vehicles with roofs. I want to cut this one off. 2015 and 2020:

I drove my old P 15 Club Coupe up and down to Yosemite and Kings Canyon and the Giant Sequoia Forest. It was NOT stock having a carburetor from a slant 6, a glasspack muffler, and a lightly milled head, front and rear lowered with staggered low profile Michelin sport radial tires, & 3-speed overdrive from the later Flathead Plymouths + 3.90 gears. I had the same problems. Handling was a fabulous going downhill, but it was hell on the brakes. When going downhill you simply have to take it out of OD or relegate yourself to abusing the brakes. The only alternative would be changing gear ratios and tire sizes to try and get a more favorable Cruise ratio for these roads. Normally I think 4:10 gears would be called for. This would allow the overdrive to kick up without the car speeding as much. Anyhow I was very happy with the performance of my car as far as handling on mountain roads and I had spent a lot of time changing all the bushings, King Pins and steering gear in that vehicle. I also had high pressure KYB gas shocks all the way around and the rear sway bar from a 74 Thunderbird. I had removed all the packaging from the rear springs, made my own silencers and clamping. I also switched to a Spicer U joint drive shaft as I was not happy about the high torque performance of those Detroit cup joints.

I'm not sure about the construction of the Cokers but when they added belts to the bias ply tire and came out with the belted bias tire that was a big deal for high-speed stability in heavy vehicles. Until they started making radials, that was the state-of-the-art. I definitely preferred the ride of the bias ply tires but the radials lasted longer.

If you think the radial tires are making your car wander try pumping them up a little more or letting out a little more air to see what happens to that effect. The more you pump them up the more you can feel the loose things in the front end as being distinct from wandering of the tires.

Who remembers when they invented the first Tire designed to resist squirm?

Regarding the original topic of radial tires on an old Mopar, I would suggest that if you are having bad handling with bias ply tires then it might be those particular tires; because I had excellent ones which I thought made the car ride better than radials. Unless your wandering goes completely away buy mounting radial tires I would advise you to have your kingpins checked carefully and maybe replaced, because they are the major source of shimmy on these cars.

Clean white rags and Dot 3 brake fluid will make white wall tires look like brand new. People have told me this is bad for the tires but if brake fluid is bad for rubber I don't know why we're putting rubber pieces inside of brakes? Anyhow just keep rubbing with brake fluid and a clean white Rag and don't rub the dirty stuff around in circles. Wipe it off the tire and turn the rag and then wipe with a clean spot, then turn. Go in One Direction Around the Clock. This will make the oldest yellowest Whitewall tire white again, because we understand that yellow rubber is slightly "burned" by oxygen and sunlight. The brake fluid removes the burned rubber, exposing the pure white rubber underneath. Regarding portawalls I think they are a bad idea unless you trailer the car. You'll find that out the first time you drive through a pothole. Actually you might find out just backing the car off the trailer. Unless they have improved remarkably in the past 50 years portawalls suck & are only for show cars.

I'm happy to report there were no leaks, and we had her in the lake for 8 hours. There's my lovely wife holding the boat for me. It was a terrible fishing day but a beautiful day for boating!

Well the X-36v suffered some small hull cracks at the site of a previous repair, and has been dry for 2 weeks now. I ended up repairing 1/3 of the transom heel with epoxy and glass cloth from the inside, after removing some rotten plywood from the transom. She's tight again now, and will be back in the water Wednesday. I had to open a 4"x8" hole in the top of the flotation chamber & R&R the styrofoam to do so. This led me to find that this boat has only 2 chambers, and not 6 as I thought. The bottom has one, and all the others are connected internally around the perimeter. This is my first and only boat, so no clue if this is a typical situation.

I had a matched pair that was swiped in the great tool theft of 1982, along with a matched set of 4 Stewart Warner vacuum gages. This made me into a bitter old man far ahead of my time.

You mean all those little rats don't run inside a squirrel cage to power the thing?

Well I was so happy with the performance of the electric outboard that I decided to repair and replace the two Navigator 5000 trolling motors. This will essentially double my horsepower at the stern. From 1 horsepower to 2 horsepower. Exciting stuff huh? Anyhow these motors are Obsolete and it's impossible to find brushes, so I bought some bigger brushes at the National Hardware Store in Pinedale California and cut them with a little saw and then some sandpaper. This motor was very noisy and previously had water in it, so I spent some time cleaning it up and replaced the seals, though it was not the seals that were leaking. A casebolt had come loose. The brush shown installed in the holder is still way too long. I trimmed and dressed them as exactly as possible by hand. I soldered the leads and then insulated them with urethane rubber glue. When I hooked it up to 24 volts, she ran as quiet as a brand new motor.

what? 13mm × 0.04 in/mm = 0.52" it's a full half a mm bigger than 1/2"

Rock sailing . . . now there's an interesting sport. 'Course once you stop moving she sinks like a stone. When I was a little kid I lived on Cape Cod, & I don't remember ever seeing Plymouth Rock. But my mom spoke of it and I always imagined this thing like Gibraltar. What a disappointment. If you planted Plymouth Rock on top of Morro Rock you wouldn't even notice it. The West definitely has better rocks. Better Plymouths too, because they don't seem to rot as fast out here. I remember back in 05 when the Old Man of the Mountain came down. A buddy from New Hampshire was visiting here when it happened and I had to tell him the horrible news. ;( East Coast rocks are just too rotten, just like their Plymouths.

I agree: the three lines which are the 2 vertical edges and peak of the center panel should be Plumb & straight in both front view and profile view. This panel looks like a seagull from the plan view but there is no curvature in the other directions.

I went back and looked at my photos and realize that I had uploaded the low-res versions here. Even I could not tell what the parts were. Anyhow two of the clamps which were clamping my tubing are tie rod clamps from the p15.

Well I see that no one identified the two Plymouth p15 Parts on my home made electric outboard. They are quite visible in the photo. Those parts are removed and now back in the parts bin because I have completely disassembled the test rig. I had in fact been so distressed by the poor seakeeping in rough water conditions that I disassembled and reassembled my device in a more rigid configuration with motors closer together less cantilevered and more restrained. I also got all of the slop out of the trunnion bearing so that helped as well. Unfortunately in my testing one of the motors started to squeak badly. I didn't have any replacement parts for them on hand so I knew it was time to set these aside for now if I wanted to get any more fishing in this year. Properly motivated by the results of my initial testing, I bought a real Minn Kota 1hp electric outboard. Being a born cheapskate, I found one on sale at a goodly discount. It was also a 56" model with the tiller reversed for bow mounting, so it needed shortening. Using a pipe cutter, I grooved the composite shaft deeply, and cut 23 inches off of it with a small hand saw, being very careful not to nick the wires inside. There was plenty of room inside the head unit to just coil up the excess 23" of wire so I did not bother to shorten them. I had to drill one through-hole at the top of the shaft for the lock screw. I reversed the tiller as I reassembled it so I could transom Mount the motor. I actually spent more time making and installing that piece of wood for the transom cushion then I did modifying the motor. She's bolted solidly to the transom and through the steel tubing, and so my $900 investment won't disappear in any random parking lot. I finally got a GPS speedometer application for my phone and did some real testing and I found out that the boat was not as fast as I thought. My little boat speedometer was off by over one mile per hour and I was really only hitting about 4 mph. The boat is perceptibly faster now, and I have clocked a calm water speed of 4.54 knots which is about 5.25 miles per hour. I'm going to rebuild the Navigator Motors and put them back on the hull, with a non steerable kick up mounting tube. Maybe I'll hit six miles an hour with a little luck.

I retired in February after 42 years in the engineering business. My wife also retired this year. We are very lucky to have made it in reasonable health and with some financial security.

That looks like fun Plymouthy, but I'm too much of a cc snob to ride anything less than a literbike nowadays.

19mm??? OMG, I probably have almost as many 19 millimeters as 3/4 inch.

I have overlapping and ongoing projects, so jobs never actually end. I go through periods of shop cleaning, where I find all the things I need to continue the projects which are on hold.

@Young Ed I arranged all my wrenches like that once, really neat, in order, by sets; and it stayed that way for about one day. If somebody was paying me by the hour to fix their car I might take more time to keep things neat. If I get really bored someday I may arrange them neatly again like that. But I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

Well it was no trophy that's for sure! Considering the drought we've had for many years I was happy to catch anything at all. You have much more water this year but the lakes are all screwy for fishing. But I was very happy at the way the boat ran and if it'll go a little faster I'll be even happier. This is the kind of experiment that Engineers call "a quick and dirty". There wasn't a lot of planning, I didn't make any drawings, & my calculations were very minimal. In view of all that I'm thrilled. BTW, owning an electric boat does not prevent me also owning a gasoline-powered engine for those occasions where it is still appropriate. I think 15 or 20 horsepower however will be appropriate. I'm going to set this up so it will be easy for me to hoist off the gas motor and drop on the electric motor, or vice versa.

This is why I have not been working on the p15 lately or posting pictures of my progress: There hasn't been any. I sprayed the body down with oil and let it sit Raw Under The Canopy. ( I don't know why my cell phone capitalizes these random words when I dictate to it. ) Since I retired this year I have not done much except little fishing and work on my experimental boat. This boat had a 40 horsepower 2 stroke pushing a modified and reinforced 30 horsepower hull. I have owned it for 20 years and it is a '76 Columbian by RJ Smith. Here's a photo from a couple years back and you can also see I hadn't stripped the Plymouth down yet. It's so modified today that you would not easily recognize it next to the original boat. I have converted the boat over from gasoline to all electric, so I can fish at quiet lakes where they do not allow fast boats. This is a totally experimental setup built from scratch, mostly out of junk I had laying around, and mostly because someone gave me the Navigator Motors (Over $1200 new!) I also have a $500 MinnKota motor up front & each of the three is 55lbs thrust or approximately a 1/2 horsepower gasoline motor at cruise and I can run all three from my seat. Here it is parked in front of my tow vehicle. The X-24v had lots of mods since I took that photo. I added a casting deck and spend a lot of time reinforcing the gunnels with fiberglass. It was in the high 100s this summer and so lots of the work was done at night. As you can see there the sun was well over the yardarm and around the horn. I built the casting deck with a seat in the front. It's mostly all just glued to the plastic boat with siliconized latex rubber. With the Electric setup it goes just as fast as it did with a 4 horsepower gas outboard. Slow. So far this is the only fish I've caught out of this boat worth keeping and it was only 14 inches. See the deck there? I put grit on the top so it wouldn't be slippery. The front motor will be upgraded to a 24 volt motor and I have a larger 1hp electric motor on order It will replace both of the Navigator Motors and Tiller arrangement for now. Eventually it will replace the small front motor and I will get a 2 horsepower electric motor on the rear. It will never be enough to make this boat plane but that's not my object. I figured the top hull speed on this is going to be somewhere around 6.5 miles per hour if I'm really flogging the batteries. Right now I have run 5 hours at 5 miles an hour without a problem, and with six group 29 batteries on board there was lots of reserve power. But my homemade tiller Arrangement is flexible and no good at all in rough water. It will handle much better with the new electric outboard, but my experiment in building this was that I wanted to see if I would be happy with a 5 or 6 mph boat after owning a speedboat. I am and so now I'm not at all squeamish about spending thousands of dollars on high quality electric gear. If you don't count batteries or cables, my big expense on the electric conversion was for the stainless steel hose clamps which hold each motor to the tiller. There's also about $8 worth of electrical conduit, which I reinforced internally and externally at the critical mounting points. I swaged out some tubing to make doublers and triplers for the main pivots, & there are solid internal stainless steel slugs. I used at least two parts from a Plymouth p15 on this Electric outboard tiller arrangement, and anybody that can spot them wins many brownie points from the gods of mopar history.

I have been working on one of my other rides lately, but it's an experimental Electric boat.