Ulu

I did a little more straightening up on the crossframe today, and I got the main frame cut in half with the sawzall.

I finished welding up the jig tonight, and I got the chassis welded right down to the jig. Now it’s finally time to cut this car in half. I have to do a little more cleanup on the parts that I welded before I can get them to fit up perfectly, but it’s getting pretty close.

I have been building a full frame jig to hold the frame while I cut it in half. This jig is all built from donated or salvaged materials. Some bed rails, office furniture, rails from a broken wood lathe, and bits of a power lift chair, an electricians spool rack, old gate posts and door posts and rails from a security door. Every clamp I own was brought into service for this plus I went to Harbor freight and bought 8 more. I needed 10. Anyhow, I got over half of the jig weld it up last night, and recovered about 30 clamps in the process. Sorry about the tiny pictures. I don’t have any more server space here, and I had to delete some things, even to show these.

After 33 years (in which 32 out of 33 we cooked Thanksgiving dinner for the whole family) We are having dinner alone this year. My children have moved to other towns, and most of my grandchildren have grown up, and they’re moving about, and some getting married! My wife is recovering from surgery so we’re not going to travel. I’m gonna take it easy this year, which makes it a real holiday for me. A happy holiday to you all!

I didn’t want turkey for the 34th year in a row so today I’m smoking pastrami on the Weber. I’m going to make some German potato salad later. We’re not up to traveling to see the kids, so it’s just me and the wife this year, unless someone bothers to stop by. All the kids and grandkids are in Visalia so we may only see one or two of them.

Is that a Datsun Z car?

Well the guy that owned that car had probably never read a service manual in his life. At least not pertaining to suspension and steering alignment.

When I bought my P15 it had this problem that it steered fine in One Direction but in the other direction you could not steer unless you were going very slow or there was basically no load. It turns out that at some point someone had given it into a curb and smashed the roller bearings on one side of the worm gear in the steering box. It wasn’t just hard. At some point it would literally lock up during the turn, and if you don’t let your foot off the gas you couldn’t turn it any further. Eventually I found a solid steering gear in a junkyard for $100, which pleased me enormously. When I first took it apart, I had no way to repair that steering correctly, so I smoothed out the rough bearing surfaces and replaced all the rollers with a hard plastic bushing. This still didn’t work very well, but it worked better, and I was able to drive the car for two years like this by being careful. But it was never safe and I would advise nobody to do that. One other thing that makes a steering gear hard to steer in one direction, but easy to steer and another, is if you get the sector off the center of the worm when the wheels are pointed straight ahead. The steering ratio varies as you turn the wheel, and at the very center of the worm you have plenty of leverage, but as it gets further towards the steering lock in either direction it takes more effort to turn the wheel. With a power steering car you basically could not notice this very easily but on a manual steering car it is very noticeable. I first discovered this on my friends Mustang when he had changed the steering gear, but had a tie rod too short on one side and two long on the other. He just put the wheels straight ahead and took the steering wheel off and put it back on straight! You can’t do that with my Plymouth because it has a fat spline. The steering wheel only fits one way and IIRC the Pitman arm only fits one way. It also has a fat spline. On the mustang it could go anywhere. The splines were all equal. Anyhow the bottom line was that he could turn it easily in one direction but it would not go as far in the other direction and was difficult to turn.

I read this a while back and I could not let it pass without saying something. [quote] “ Steve Lehto doesn't look like a car guy to me.”[/quote] I must assume that you have never once watched his show. You couldn’t be more wrong. Not only that he is a Mopar guy! Steve Is an automotive historian, and he wrote books about very famous cars, including the Chrysler turbine car and the Tucker car. He also wrote for Jalopnik and other automotive journals. Steve is a lawyer, but his show is produced in front of a wall covered with license plates and model cars, including the famous winged Daytona. He has made most of his fortune by suing automotive companies for defective cars. He owns (Among other things) a Dodge Viper. Don’t think that because he didn’t weld up a rusty frame by himself that he’s not a car guy. He’s one of the few guys standing up for our rights as automobile owners, Including the right to repair your own car. Some folks thinks it’s too dangerous for us old farts.

I am the son of a military man as well. Navy, Air Corps, USAF, & civil service. 45 years all told. Wounded in WW2. Hazardous duty & Remote postings. Survived the Texas Towers. FCAC running Radar in DongHa during Rolling Thunder. Dad handed me some bicycle bearings to clean in 1960, and I have been greasy ever since. He’s been gone for 21 years and I think about him every day.

Build a small die and punch them out.

That is a damn painful way to get into the hobby bro!

If I’m working with acid I keep a bucket of diluted washing soda. That will neutralize it quickly. But I wear rubber gloves, so mostly it’s not about getting it on me. It’s about getting it on the concrete, which will disappear if you put acid on it.

I finally got the front bumper brackets to match, and I capped the open tubes on the top of the rears. Here’s the whole pile, and you can see the edges are not filed yet. From the factory, nothing was filed smoothly, and everything was as it came from the shear and notcher. I sanded all the edges & filed them. After another hour or two of cleaning, it was all nice. It all got acid etched and washed with a blowout and a rubdown. Finally, I shot it all with self etching black paint.

I bought a gallon of phosphoric acid solution at the local swimming pool supply store. Our hot tank had an electric heating element in the bottom of it, and it also had bubble pipes for agitation with an air compressor. When I worked at the Kawneer company, we had giant tanks to etch 20 foot long aluminum extrusions. They would collect the aluminum hydroxide sludge from the bottoms & haul it off in railroad cars. That’s how much we were making. Most of it went to the cosmetics companies. (Check the ingredients on common types of under arm deodorant.)

50 years ago I worked in a shop where we had a big hot tank with caustic soda in it. It was nasty and stinky but it worked well. Probably completely illegal in California now. Amazingly one of the senior mechanics thought he could put an aluminum porthole frame from his boat in there, and it completely disappeared overnight. LOL I’m telling you, a little chemical knowledge can go a long way in this life.

I finally stripped the paint off of those bumper brackets today. I would normally buy Jasco paint & epoxy remover or Zip Strip brand paint stripper, but this time I decided to try caustic soda in the form of generic barbecue spray cleaner. I have never tried this before. I got the brackets as hot as I could in the sink with scalding water, but I think it would work better if I heated them up to about 400° in the oven first. It ended up taking me three applications and some scrubbing with scotchbrite, but they’re looking just about ready to paint. I do like the finish better than when using the zip strip.

Welcome to the age of bluetooth. The only thing I find myself listening to in the truck nowadays is YouTube. Unless I want local news on AM radio.

Very little was accomplished on the car over the past two weeks. I did lots of household improvements that had come due. I got back to my brackets, and finished welding up the unneeded holes. There was lots of shaping and filing, but it’s nearly ready to sand, strip and paint.

It’s almost brochure ready now. When did you start working on this one, Plymouthy?

My neighbor has the gasoline powered version of that truck but he bought the TwinTurbo V6 gasoline engine. Ford is rebuilding all of those things under warranty because they were failures. Some people reported that the rebuilds are only lasting for 30,000 miles. They keep changing the parts that are failing so maybe they finally made some that last? The newest ones have a redesigned bearing cap for the front of the cams. So be happy you got the Diesel engine. Do not get water in the tail lamps. There have been horror stories reported where rusty tail lamp sockets caused all the same tier computer modules to start failing one by one, as bulb power back fed into the communications bus. Remember when a bad ground on a tail light was a simple thing to identify and repair? The basic tail lights are reportedly $1200 each without the circuit modules that go in them. One guy that had the late model with all the departure lane warnings and electronic sensing systems paid $5600 as I recall to help both tail lights and all the modules replaced, and it took a long time to do the diagnosis because of the “zipper failure” action of the electronic modules. When the first one burned out it took out the next one and that one took out the next one etc. When the cam phasers blew out on my neighbors truck he had to fight with Ford and wait months, but in the end, even though it was technically out of warranty, he got it all fixed by Ford. I don’t know if that means they replaced the heads with the newer model heads (which evidently solved the cam phaser problem.) My question to you, is do any of these modern diesel engines have variable valve timing on the cam? I am only used to working on Detroit diesel’s from the 1960s. I could rebuild one of those In my dreams, but don’t ask me to look at a Caterpillar!

I got that cross frame all finished up and painted and put it away to cure while I work on the bumper brackets. I figured out why I could never get the front bumper to look really straight with the fenders. One of the front bumper brackets was put in the brake crooked, and it doesn’t match the other one at all. These things are 1/8” steel plate, and I am not going to bend them easily nor will I be able to heat up the bend and hammer it into the correct orientation, so I cut the offending flange nearly loose and bent it into the correct orientation so I could weld it.

This is the frame which under-girdles the floorboards and connects them to the running boards, fender tips, seatbelts, and seat frame risers. I decided I should weld up all the unnecessary holes in this thing before I weld it up under the chassis. At least a dozen holes got relocated and there were about 30 holes in this that needed welding. There are a lot of corresponding holes in the floor boards that need to be welded up as well. I did this, again, by first clamping an aluminum chiller block underneath the work and then flipping it over to weld the backside. I find it if I leave the aluminum chiller on until the weld cools considerably, I don’t have any corrosion problem on the back of the weld, and they come out clean. I got about 3/4 through before I ran out of Argon and had to head for the welding shop. I will finish this up tomorrow and sand it and put some paint on it. Then I will put it away until it’s time to fit it on the chassis.

After many side projects and other delays I finally did finish cleaning up the suspension on the back of the Volkswagen. I degreased it and acid etched it and flipped it over so I could paint both sides. I painted everything that I had stripped to bare metal but I did not paint anything that I need to weld on yet. When this is dry I will cover it all up so the welding can continue.