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If you can see water moving, and it speeds up when you goose the throttle, the pump is OK. Perhaps a big flake of rust broke loose & is now blocking the water distribution tube. You can look inside the tube if you pull the water pump off.

If it's a positive ground car, hook the + terminal of the pump to the ground. It may well run just fine wired "backwards", but why confuse the issue? Positive ground cars confuse enough folks already.

Photos of Plymouths are always welcome, flatheads are preferred & and P-15's are particularly welcome; but there are many DeSoto fans here too. As long as the photos are in good taste go ahead & post 'em!

I had bought a Volare & that was my plan as well but I decided that there was a lot of welding and plating involved, and if I was going to do that much work I wanted better suspension than the Volare's. I decided it was less welding to make new a-frames and put ball-joint uprights on the car.

OK, I was wrong. Ours was a '56 and looked like this: The only red was on the Spartan badges, which were the same as those on the tail of the plane. <edit> It looked like this, and this year, but it's not the exact model either. Ours had the living room in the middle and this one had it in the front. My bedroom had the front windows. </edit>

Oh, that's nice.... Spartan was a aircraft builder, and our trailer matched the first one you posted in detail, just a different model. I think ours was the Executive Mansionette, but not quite sure.

Oh yeah! Show the metal. Soooooo tasteful! Even if you paint it against rust, paint it the color of the raw metal.

My P15 never overheated & we live in the desert. It's 100 F right now. Something is likely plugged up, and by that I mean the distribution tube and it's openings, but the whole system probably needs a good cleaning. OR, the water pump isn't pumping because it's maybe sheared off the impeller. When you look in the radiator, with the car running, can you see the water moving? Once the thermostat opens it starts moving a lot. Another possibility is combustion gas leaking into the coolant from a cracked head gasket or such. Often you can smell the fumes when you stick your nose over the open radiator, but the best test is to use a smog gas sniffer. My car would puke up a little coolant after shutting it off on a hot day. I put a plastic bottle in the nose as a coolant recovery tank, and saved myself some coolant, because it gets hot here a lot.

The first thing I thought when I saw that kit was "PCV valve conversion."

Yes, almost the same except 10' longer with dual axles and a "back" door same as the front.

Lemme get my umbrella up here before PA gets his broadband back up!

Well most of what you see in the photo of the garden above is removed & I've dug most of it up & re-worked the sprinkler system. I laid out the slab last night & we're getting some estimates for someone else to level, form it & pour the concrete. Aside from the lamp, the rose bush & the cistern, it's all bare dirt now.

Maybe, "Hun, that huge ol' trunk makes yer butt look really small!" Naaah....there's nothing one could safely say.

Totally untrue, now that I think about it. I was rear ended on the Nomad, entering I-5 at Red Bluff back in 2007. It got a couple scratches on the saddlebag which didn't polish out. The P15 got hit-and-run damage in a parking lot, while I was attending traffic school in some Visalia motel confrence room. They crushed one of the front fender spears. Also I noticed a big ding on the Camry yesterday, so I'm batting zero here.

My childhood friend had a wealthy dad with one of those record players in his Chrysler Imperial. They owned a store in Duluth Mn. Duluth is on a very steep hill (and had lots of broken pavement due to the bad weather). If you were on the fairly level Streets, which parallel the hill, it worked pretty well. If you were on the very steep Avenues, which went up & down the hill, it didn't. It sounded great in the garage though.

Paul, with your friendly demeanor and winning smile, that doesn't surprise me one bit. ( I hope you told those guys to pray for more rain.)

I have a '69 Evinrude Lark 40 HP that I've run almost each year since I bought it in '96. It has the electric shift, which relies on electromagnetic clutches in the lower unit. The forward one was worn enough to start slipping under full power, so I just swapped the clutches, and don't try to back up at full throttle. Those are tough old engines, and aside from wiring and carb/fuel pump rebuilds, it's run very well. LOL...my tarp collapsed as that photo was taken.

Allpar doesn't let you "hot" link their photos, so we can't see them without visiting their site.. Hot linking is really stealing someone's bandwidth, so I don't recommend you do it as a rule.

I paid only $400 for a complete running 230 with trans, but that was about 20 years ago, and the engine and trans worked but were far from perfect. So, nowadays $350 might buy you a running engine, but perhaps with serious issues (bad block, cracks, etc) or a good rebuildable core, but I would't expect to get one that didn't need lots of work for that money. That being said, if the ad clearly said "a good running engine" I'd have expected to hear it run, or get some kind of guarantee from the seller. If he wrote, "it was a good running engine" and that it had "been stored 10 years" then I would expect it to need a rebuild from just getting rusty sitting.

Wow! I've never seen a Vagabond, but there's a guy locally with a Kaiser Traveler that opens the same way, with a bed in the back.

Well "good running engines" don't need penetrating oil to turn 360 by hand! But I don't know what you paid. If you paid $1500 I'd be pi$$ed. If only $100, then not so much. So hard to say if you're out of line without info.

Oh how I wanna make a camper from that Ice truck!

No, you shouldn't. You have to lead them. Your kids will do what you do, and particularly in those things you wish they wouldn't copy. My daughter is unafraid to tear into a broken car or a broken TV. When the washing machine needs repair she doesn't call her husband. He's a nice guy, but he's the son of a banker who never held a lug wrench or a torch or knew what to do with either. He watched his dad watch TV & he's real good at that. Mine watched me fix things and build things. They don't watch much TV.

I head on the news that a cop trying to arrest some JD got bit by the kid, and then the cop tazed him & took him to jail. The kid's mother actually apologized to the cop whom her kid bit. So not everyone is crazy, and clearly there is hope for the world yet.

Hell that Elsinore practically launched the SoCal dirt bike boom. It was quite a feather in Honda's cap.