Ulu

I've been shopping for an anvil online, but haven't found a good used one for a reasonable price yet. Plus they're all on the east coast & probably real civil war relics, costing way too much. Not to mention shipping. Most folks don't want to ship a 90lb+ anvil. I found a 65 lb forged steel anvil new for a more reasonable price ($1.25 a lb roughly) and it's in California so shipping no problem. Probably from Mexico. Not sure you could ship an anvil from China so cheap. But then I found people trying to sell short hunks of rusty railroad track for $50 + shipping too.

I didn't use a gasket. I just glued it down with 3M strip caulk. that seals the wires and screws. Do they still sell that? I dunno... Otherwise I'd use rubberized cork .094" thick.

I've owned a lot of cars and they almost all started irregularly with automatic chokes and wound up with manual chokes installed. I never liked automatic chokes. They're fussy little nonsense that wears out quickly. If you can drive you can use a choke, and factories all went to automatics generally because people would forget to turn off the choke.

Aw thanks Don. I have a manual, I just hadn't gone to look in it 'til after my musings here. I took the engine out of Edith in....mmmmm....1992 I think, so I forget all the little details. Oh, sorry for being so cryptic. I have a '47 P15 & I bought a 230 Dodge engine for it 20+ years ago. It came out of a '48 Desoto, and that's the bell housing which came with it. As far as I can tell, my old bell housing will fit fine, but I completely forgot what that plate was actually for... This is one part of being a Senior Citizen I'm not going to like: CRS syndrome.

Geeze, it's been so long I forget. Does that plate normally exist on the regular P15? Somehow I thought this plate welded to the bell was to make up for the engine mounting position being different. Maybe it's just to allow deflection of the engine relative to the frame. Part of the "floating power" setup.

When I bought the car it had the serial numbers on the engine defaced. I assumed it was because the engine was stolen. I didn't want to own it and I certainly didn't want to sell it. Anyhow I junked it & bought an engine with good numbers.

Paul, you've been bitten by the mopar bug, and while owning a convertible will go far to ease the stigma of late-model ownership, in time you'll come to the same realization as those in-the-know. P15's are the best and while all the other Plymouths are still wonderful cars by the mere fact of their evolution from and association with the P15, you must be prepared to withstand some earnest sympathy from P15 owners in general. Also you may be asked to park a bit closer to the Port-A-San.

I believe they built a lot more P15's than any subsequent model. It ran over 3 years with no material changes. After that it was model changes every year, so fewer of any model produced. At least in the 50's. I like the P15 because the parts are so available. They made a lot of spare parts because it ran so long in production. It's the kind of antique car a young engineer with a family could hope to keep running as a daily driver, because of that fact. Mine went over 65,ooo miles, and it had 170,000 total miles when I parked it. Later 6 volt Plymouths were more aerodynamic looking, but not more reliable. Fortunately for those owners many of the P15 parts will still work on their cars too.

One man's solution... the distance between the original and new ball location = difference between long and short Mopar block? Anyhow, this bellhousing was on the 230 dodge engine I bought 20 years ago & never used. The engine has been stored inside & still functional. The head etc you see here is from my old 218 which I scrapped because it had bad numbers.

Hmm... I wondered what those things were when I picked them off the floor & threw them away! (Not really. Mine have been missing as long as I've owned the car. Never had defroster hoses, anyhow.)

I used a momentary switch on the shift knob. It would do this but you had to hold the button. Normally you would just coast without compression braking unless you held the button.

Hmmm...OK, you know what I meant. Same plates, same lumber. The longer sizes of that design (T36 4-33 4/3) might have had slightly different metal plates, or have a requirement for better lumber in some members, but they all were built off the same engineering drawing of a Fink truss. To the casual observer they would appear the same design except for size.

My skirts are certainly different dimensions than yours, though the shape it quite similar. I imagine that there were a lot of little companies making aftermarket accessories, but somehow I figure there's some data somewhere on this stuff. The visor looks completely different from any Fulton I've ever seen before. All of them were 1-piece, 3-piece or 4-piece from what I've seen. I've done lots of looking over the years and have never seen another visor exactly like this one.

These are the visor & skirts that came on my Plymouth. They were not the correct ones AFAICT and my intention was to maybe sell them if I could figure out what they really fit. The skirts are only 10.25" high & 34.75" long and just barely cover my wheel openings. The shape isn't exactly right, though they looked well enough for this car to win a trophy with them. A couple folks have mentioned that they appeared to be from Foxcraft. Anyhow, I'm curious to know if anybody can identify this visor. It's aluminum with steel hardware, and it's made in 5 pieces, screwed together. It seems a tad wide for the P-15, so I imagine it might be for a later car.. The middle joints are flanged, but the end joints are lapped, and by varying the lap I suppose you could vary the width slightly. The clamps had been trimmed & drilled somewhat crudely, then seriously overbuffed & rechromed. I bought this car over 30 years ago, and they've rusted up some since then. Any ideas folks?

Pics are always helpful, but why do you think we don't believe you? BTW, back in the 70's I designed wood roof trusses for hundreds of houses and small commercial buildings. Some trusses have a lot of excess capacity and some do not. it depends on lots of things considered during the design phase. For instance: we commonly sold exactly the same truss for houses, with a span ranging from 25' to 36'. The same exact truss! Now it was well within the building code requirements at 36', but a 25' house with that same truss will have a much, much stronger roof. So, though what you did worked well, all houses are not equal, and in fact (depending on design liberties taken by the designer) they can be far, far from equal when it comes to the roof.

I just put new tires on my truck. Twice. Dealer put the wrong ones on the first time. I hope they're getting the right oil filter on it! This is the first vehicle I've owned in my life that was serviced at the dealer since new. I've never really worked on it at all. But now that it's 7 years old, it might be in line for some personal attention.

I have just the stock rear end. The T-bird clamps for the axle attachment worked OK, but the Ford axle has straight tubes and the P15's are tapered, so the brackets tended to work loose over time. I wasn't intending to keep the original axle, so I never worried about modding them to fit correctly.

I really like the rollover setup. I had to design several very heavy duty rollover trunions for welding Manlift boom hoist chassis, where were were dropping 500lb counterweights into a 3500 lb weldment. They had hydraulics to raise the fixture, and to roll it over. It'd be nice to have one of those now... I'm thinking I might just weld a simple box jig onto my car so I can roll it in steps, but not all the way over. Just enough for comfortable welding on the bottom.

Mine is from a 1974 T-Bird, and I made the brackets and links to mount it. I mounted the brackets to the original rear shock holes and relocated the upper shock mount to a hole already in the frame, which made the shocks more vertical. This, coupled with radial tires and the addition of KYB Gas-A-Just high pressure shocks all around was a real improvement in the handling. In fact It was so much better I never bothered to add a better front bar. I just wedged all the bushings up tight, lowered the front end slightly, and ran with it. I don't know that there was ever a standard rear P15 rear anti-sway bar available ever, but perhaps there was. Anybody know? Also, if you added a rear bar, which one did you use?

Sorry, no, but basically you put a 4X4 post under the joists you want to lift from, one on each side of the car, close to the car. That cuts the joist span down to a bit more than 6', and it will not cave the roof in when you start hoisting the body. I did this to hoist a very small tractor, and I just cut the posts 1/8" too long and jacked up the joist a little & stuffed them under there tight. Then I just clamped a 2X4X8' stud each side of the joist to essentially triple it in the span over the posts. I stuck a couple wood screws, "toenailed" from the new 2X4s to the post. You could go buy a steel post cap at the local hardware store, which will work fine. just don't weaken your joists by putting a lot of screws or nails in them. All the load goes right to the floor when you do this, and they'll stay in place fine if you don't run into them. BUT Here's the thing: if the joist flexes sideways the posts will tip over, so the joists should be bridged together with a flat 1X4 so they all share the load in that direction. My garage already has bridging from the original build, but yours might not. I can post up some sketches if you like.

Exactly so. On heavy equipment they are used to route & protect various hoses, where they were exposed to being chafed, pinched, struck, etc.

Yeah, it's about 18" of interference if you try to go straight off. I had to think about this a while and go look at mine again, because the one we "rescued" 30 years ago was a 4-door & in rather bad shape from the floor down. There wasn't much left of the spare tire well either. In fact I'm sure we crushed the muddy rusted remainder up a bit because it was hitting one wheel of the trailer we were loading the body on. The rockers were pretty bad too and we didn't try to lift under them at all. We just kept prying between body and frame a bit at a time, where we had solid metal and wired boards under the floor to it. I often wonder what happened to that car. It was from Tulare County, and my friend was going to use it for a hot rod project, but then he bought a complete '49 Stude and sold the P15 bits off.

That is a ghetto method, but it works. I pulled a Cad axle (flanged) with a hammer & chain. Same principal as a slide hammer. I put the chain thru the access hole in the flange & used a screwdriver as a cross pin in the last link. I wrapped the other end around the hammer handle close to the head with a bolt & nut to make the loop. Swing the hammer & when the chain goes tight the axle will pop out. To pull a drum, bolt the chain to two opposite lugs, wrap the middle about the hammer handle at the head & wack it away. The force will be somewhat eccentric with 5 lug pattern hubs, that is, not centered on the axle, but the axle has a taper and you don't have to pull straight to get the drum off because of that. You can pull at the angle of the taper or thereabout. This is all very hard on the hammer. One with a steel handle would be best, but you're not actually hitting anything with it, it doesn't have to be an actual hammer either. a steel dumbbell or other similar weight could work. A heavy pipe...anything with solid mass that you can swing...but steel or iron because, if wood, the chain damages it. Also, this is not recommended for really stuck rusty hubs either, as you can easily strip threads or worse, if you do it wrong.

I made one similar to this. I don't use the lug bolts. I use bolts about 6" long to keep the plate off the hub. I just welded a big nut to the round plate & drilled five holes. I put up a pic if I can find it in my messy garage. I've moved 5 times since I last used it.

Ah ha! There's the ticket!