chrysleritis

So now that the car is in good running condition again, and having spent quite a number of hours crawling around the dusty underbody, I figured it was a good day to do some deep but light cleaning. I knew there were old mouse nests in the frame rails. And I know that the original owner of the car lived in the rural region of the Sacramento river delta and spent a lot of time on dirt roads, and it's this very fine central valley loam that is everywhere in the nooks and crannies of the car. So I taped off many of the holes in the enclosed section of frame, and with the blow gun at one end and a shop vac at the other end, I had at it, working my way down with the blow gun into the various frame holes, and I had pretty good success with that. And out came quite a bit of old newspaper and old fiber from carpet, underlayment, and upholstery; weeds and bits of wood and straw and mouse ********. Included in the newspaper was a legible scrap about a game where the Philadelphia '76ers defeated the Baltimore Bullets, a team that folded in 1954. Another scrap was an ad for a sale on tires at Sears.

Drums: yeah, you need a gauge. There's a gauge which approximates the function of the the famous Ammco 1750, for sale by moparpro.com Little tricky to use, but it can probably help you out getting things back to concentric, and I've used it to good effect on several cars when installing new shoes or cylinders, which fouls up whatever adjustments you once had... https://www.moparpro.com/brake-shoe-alignment-tool-1932-1959-plymouth-dodge-desoto-chrysler-/p1744 Pins: I have a big box of pins of all kinds of sizes, scrounged from lots of different eras of cylinders. It's important to get pins which are in the right length range to go from your cylinders' pistons to the shoes so that the shoes will retract the right distance and the pistons will not have to move out too far to engage the shoes to the drums. If you have saved your old pins and cylinders, you should be able to figure that out. Local auto parts stores carry various kinds of pins for different makes, but they may not be the right length. It's not too tough to modify or grind down too-long pins on a bench grinder.

Also chiming in: bleed the lower front cylinder first, then the upper. It's always worked fine for me. But it can be a bear getting the last bit of air out and it's important to set your shoes correctly, if you've had it all apart. If you're just doing a maintenance/keep the rust and gunk out bleed, just check the minor adjusters and bleed away.

The radios are repairable. But if you don't have the experience playing around with old tube-style electronics, doing it yourself is not practical. The short version of radio repair is: 1. you replace all the old electrolytic capacitors, which have failed and are likely shorted (which is why is draws huge current when you power it up...), with modern capacitors, which have the advantage of being much smaller and more durable. 2. you replace the speaker with a same-size modern speaker based on a permanent magnet instead of an electromagnet coil -- this also saves a large amount of current that the radio draws, and may be another reason that your unit draws too much current right now -- the old coils in the speaker tend to short out 3. you replace whichever of the tubes has gone bad -- these are actually pretty easy to check with just a voltmeter to check for continuity of the filament. mostly that's the only thing that goes bad on them 4. to get fancy, you insert an input jack in the circuit right after the demodulation section of the radio, before the final amplifier section -- this allows you to put in a standard audio input jack from your phone or ipod or other mp3 player, or an FM radio receiver, or a bluetooth player. you need to make sure that you respect the positive ground polarity when attaching external inputs, which should be floating and AC-coupled. For all this, you need a schematic for your 602 radio, which are available, and you need to be able to understand it... Sending it out to someone who does this work will cost you several hundred euros/dollars, but you will get a functional unit which fits where it once did and looks great.

If it runs for 3 seconds, it's not the timing -- you have to hunt for the timing after switching to the pertronix setup -- it can be off by 5 or 10 degrees from where the points wanted to be. But there's a lot of forgiveness at being 5 degrees off either way, and if it runs, it's close enough. I would support the suggestion to open up the carb and just check the overall cleanliness and look for something gooing up the fuel/air mix. If you can get it to run by just spraying starter fluid or dribbling some raw gas down the carb throat, then that'll tell you that the idle circuit is clogged. Check also the fuel pump rate. Maybe the bowl isn't really filling?

Congratulations! Sounds pretty good. Chug, chug, chug! There's a lot to be said for getting it running and having a little fun with it before really working your tail off on every last thing.

Replaced/reworked: Remove/reinstall fluid drive. Multiple times. Replace rear main seal Fresh oil pan gasket Replace clutch disk Replace throwout bearing and sleeve Replace clutch fork retainer spring New leather boot for the clutch fork! Sexy new boot! Clean/regrease clutch torque shaft Replace motor mounts Rebuild/clean oil pump, new gasket to block Replace U-joints on both ends of propeller shaft Replace e-brake band New e-brake cable New speedo cable Replace transmission output seal Replace differential input seal Replace exhaust hangers Replace front sway bar bushings Replace rear sway bar bushings, repaint rear sway bar Change brake system over to DOT5: new hard lines, new master cylinder, new wheel cylinders, new pressure switch Bang the dents out of the downdraft tube, clean, repaint. Writing it down in a list like that, it seems surprising that the car ran and drove as well as it did, but a lot of this fell into the camp of "Well as long as it's up on the jack stands and not going anywhere any time soon, may as well fix that..." It took me most of the day just to clean out the garage well enough to be able to drop it to the ground and back it out. I award myself a well-earned beer.

Well, that was a longer repair than I had initially imagined. But the car -- it runs, it rolls forwards and backwards, it stops, it no longer spews fluid from every system. The fluid drive had to go to the repair shop three times before success. Details later, but it's a pretty good feeling to have it accomplished. Number of non-running cars in the household is now once again back to zero.

You don't need much of a tight seal on the fill cap on the master cylinder. The caps all have a small air vent hole in them, strategically placed so as not to let dirt in. So the gasket under the cap can really be any old thing as long as it does the job of keeping out crud. DIY cork or fiber should be fine, and I've had some janky-looking homemade gaskets on there over the years. Probably you're the only one who sees it! I prefer fiber, since it won't flake apart like a cork one might, which would land you back in the same place as with your piece of o-ring...

Hey, while I was crawling around under the car, it needs some new bushings on the front and back sway bars. Rock-hard, cracked rubber, not really doing anything. In the photo above, AndyD, you look like you have some fancy blue polyurethane bushings there, perhaps a MOOG product. If it is MOOG, can you tell me the product number on that and maybe save me some trial and error? There are some reproduction sway bar bushings available for these cars, but they look to be made of pretty undistinguished stuff. I have the snazzy urethane bushings on another car, and it really made for nice handling, so I'm interested in an "updo" on these. Thanks, if you can.

New motor mounts in! The previous owner or garage had installed the bolts in from the bottom, with the nuts on the top. Pro tip: it's very hard to install new mounts this way. It's much easier if you just bite the bullet and remove the floor pan so as to have access to the top of the clutch housing so you can get everything back into alignment. Old upper mounts were oil-soaked and gooshy, and one of the spacers was broken at the weld joint. Next up: replace speedometer cable with a NOS one I found in the pile of parts. I apparently bought it in 2005 for $40 and it is in great shape compared to the old one coming off. Replace parking brake cable -- old one has a broken strand that not only catches when you set and release the brake, but also catches me in the scalp whenever I shimmy under the car. Replaced pinion seal on the differential, and the transmission output seal. Parts are going back on the car. Fluid drive received back from rebuild. Now need to actually buy the magic fluid. And I think I need copper sealing washers for the fill plugs.

Fluid drive unit was shipped out in June. It's in the rebuild queue, should have it back in a couple more weeks. I think I have finished the stage of the project where you clean everything. No small task. Very messy and time-consuming for the home mechanic, but I feel like I'm better, faster, and tidier at this than I used to be some years ago. I'm annoying my wife less with the greasy filth, for sure. While everything is pulled off the drive line, I'm gonna address several of the leaks. (Today I passed by a cruise meet-up of Pontiac GTO's and those guys were all comparing notes on how many drip pans they have on the garage floor.) I have a pile of new parts to put in, including the rear crankshaft seal, rear output seal for the transmission, pinion input seal for the rear end, new gaskets for the oil pump, new universal joints, new grease seal for the propeller shaft. The propeller shaft was a real mess, so that got blasted and repainted. Clean and re-grease the clutch torque shaft and all the linkages and cranks. Fresh clutch disk to replace the fully-greased one. Clean up the transmission case. See if I can fix whatever is funky with the shift rail and fork that makes reverse gear not want to stay there. Propeller shaft before: Prop shaft yoke getting unstuck, which was bad: Prop shaft after: Transmission very dirty: And cleaned and painted. It's the little-known R7B-1 overdrive. Feels like I'm making good progress

Oh sure, you can just grab a length of steel stuff from the local auto parts joint. But if you have leftover nickel-copper stuff from the brake job, that's nice.

I think the short answer is no, nobody is remaking them. I've done both silicone molding from originals and 3-d printing and have had some success with both. The 3-d printing worked very well for simple forms on rear door and rear vent window trim panels. I made bunch of measurements and tracings, turned them into a CAD drawing of the pieces, and electronically sent the job to a 3D print shop. There are lots of colors available for the plastic material, or you can paint what you get to be the color you want. You'll want to spray some clear coat on them anyway, probably, for a little more UV protection, although the modern 3D print materials can be pretty good in that regard. The 3D printed pieces I got back did require a little hand-sanding to smooth the machining lines out, but that worked very well. I did have to invent a method of attaching them to the door/window molding pieces, but the the 3D plastic printed material drills and taps easily, so that worked well. For the more complex pieces, I tried some silicone molding, using an original piece. For that, I had to doctor up the originals to fill cracks and holes and stuff with a little body filler. And making good molds that pick up all the detail is tricky. I wound up making several different molds and several plastic castings before getting something satisfactory, which then got a little paint to look the way they should. So: 3D print simple stuff, try casting more complex things. Silicone-molded steering wheel insert here on 1941 Chrysler. 3-D printed garnish molding pieces as received from printer: And installed on re-painted moldings:

Often you see various conversion fittings on those things that have accumulated over the years. For what it's worth, my Chrysler parts book shows that in 1938, there was a standard nipple coupling that converted the double-flare tube fitting to the female input to the distributor vacuum chamber and also on the other end to the manifold. The manifold likely has the 1/8-27 pipe thread. They wanted you to use double-flare tubing for the oil gauge line, the distributor vacuum line, and a couple of places in the brake system. I think 3/16" tubing is right, and the flare nuts are 3/8-24. And yeah, leave extra length and use the flexy nickel-copper tubing.

And now that it's been cleaned up in preparation for re-build, should the fluid drive unit be painted? It looks like there's some remnants of black paint on there, and if I mask off the important bits, should I spray it?

Thanks, that was the technique. I got out "the good crowbar", and applying the principle that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, you have to just persuade the crowbar to be where the other thing currently is. The fluid drive weighs 51 lbs, although it might still have a bit of oil left in it. Once it broke loose, I slipped the transmission jack under it to get it down and out without trying to heft the thing on my chest. This step concludes the teardown process and represents the point of maximum number of parts all over the floor, so it's all gravy from here. Now have to concoct a shipping crate arrangement to send it out to be re-sealed. The rear crankshaft seal is fortunately not the dreaded rope type, and is available as Best Gasket kit #3774, replacing Mopar #695786.

Need a little info from Fluid Drive Whisperers -- anyone who has pulled one of these units out before. All the prep work is done. Large pile of parts neatly on the floor in the garage, fasteners sorted and labelled. I've pulled out the propeller shaft, transmission, clutch, clutch fork and throwout bearing, lower clutch pan, removed the oil pan, and I got those booger nuts off the studs that hold the fluid drive unit onto the crankshaft flange. Best tool: 5/8" flare nut wrench and a short cheater pipe. The manual says, "Remove drive flange stud nuts and pull fluid drive unit back free from crankshaft flange. ... After removing nuts, fluid drive and clutch driving plate may be withdrawn from clutch housing." The fluid drive unit will not budge and seems to be good and stuck on the crankshaft flange. Can I safely pry on anything, like between the studs and the engine block? Is there some trick to this? I don't think I wanna whack or pry on the fluid drive unit body with anything very hard. Any advice appreciated.

That's really a find and looks to be in good restorable condition. Running? Good luck and have fun with that!

I am now well and truly into this job. It's most definitely the fluid drive leaking. Have pulled out the propeller shaft, and now the transmission. The prop shaft needs attention -- needs new U-joints for sure (cross-type U-joints for an 8 cylinder car are hard to find and $$$), and the slip yoke is pretty stuck, although it has moved a bit. I think I can get that loose and cleaned up and regreased with the help of a ratchet strap and a sturdy anchor point. The transmission slid out without too much difficulty. Now it is a large pile of parts on the floor, and I still have to remove clutch before getting to the fluid drive. When I ship out the fluid drive for repair, that will be some down time, so I will also replace at least the rear motor mounts while I have everything out, and there is a brake line which is now completely accessible, and heck, the brake master cylinder is now 20 years old, and it probably needs at least a rebuild kit. There's so much room under here with all this stuff pulled out. How do you know where to stop on repairing stuff? Transmission out. Thanks, cheap transmission jack. Third time I've used you. Not the best tool, but good enough. There's really a LOT of oil in all the things. Transmission, overdrive, engine oil, and fluid drive (6 3/4 quarts for the 8 cylinder unit). There is a trip to the household haz waste drop-off facility in my near future. I've got some electronic junk to go, too. There's a big hole where the transmission used to go. One bummer is the carpet nails sticking through the floor pan. I think I will be re-cutting this gasket myself, as I can't find a store-boughten one available anywhere.

Yeah, just did this job. I used a box-end wrench from below, and didn't have a lot of swing room, but it came loose just fine. No kind of socket would fit up there, and I'm putting off pulling the floor panels till later. I find that prep work under the car up on jack stands saves a lot of time and effort. Get the car up as high as safely possible, get plenty of light under there, bring plenty of tools with you under the car, use a good creeper, etc. And of course, the admonition to remove the pain in the ass fastener first so that the last one, which may be holding up the heavy part, is an easy one to do.

1941 Chrysler New Yorker, C30, inline 8. The drip, drip onto the garage floor has become too serious to ignore any longer. The last time I started up to check to make sure I no longer had an intake vacuum leak (I didn't), I ran the engine for 5 or 10 minutes, all seemed good, and shut down, but then on the way out of the garage, noticed a shiny new puddle of about pint of oil on the drip pan. It's from the clutch/fluid drive housing pan, or at the very least the rear of the engine, except it's clean oil. Pulled the pan off and it's the dreaded fluid drive unit leak, and it seems to be from the middle of the unit, at the back end, toward the clutch, and not from either of the fill plugs. Drat. Wish me luck, it's all gotta come off and then ship off the fluid drive unit to a guru to install a new seal. I envision many weeks of a lot of parts on the floor. But hey, it's an opportunity to repaint the propeller shaft and replace mushy motor mounts. Questions: Can I replace the fluid drive seal myself, or is it best left to someone who has done a few of them? Is Andy Bernbaum still rebuilding these things with fresh seal kits? There was some other shop mentioned, in upper midwest, I think, who refurbished fluid drives? Does anyone in northern California have the remainder of a recently purchased bucket of the magic Mobil 104743 DTE Oil, Light Circulating? How about a clutch alignment tool? Is that a truly necessary tool for getting the transmission and clutch all lined up and bolted up, or can I just struggle it together?

Me too with the no vote on the Mi-T-Vac. Just worthless for vacuum brake bleeding. And brake fluid seeps into the hand pump and necessitates taking it apart and cleaning it out. I use it for other things around the shop, though. I've had good results with the Speed Bleeders -- the bleeder screws with the ball check valves in them. That turns it into a one person job that takes very little time and you just rig up a catch can with an old plastic peanut butter jar and some silicone tubing. I've also had good results with a garden sprayer-type pressure bleeder, but I find I really have to carefully clean ALL the DOT 3 brake fluid out of it, or else the whole thing is a mess when I come back to use it the next year.

Often on these things, the starter will spin no matter what position the switch is in, but the ignition switch switches on the ignition. So unless the ignition switch is in the "ignition" or "run" position (clockwise, right), there's no current flowing through the ignition coil to make spark, so it will not fire up. Little toggle switch under the dashboard there should control the brightness of the instrument panel lights when the headlights are on. It's usually 3 positions: off, dim, and dimmer. Assuming the instrument panel bulbs and the wiring are still good...

Andy Bernbaum has started carrying reproduction, original style rubber floor mats which aren't original looking for the trunk, but they do have the right era look, in my opinion, and you might be happy. Not cheap for a trunk mat, but your other choices are pretty clear. Lots of places to get ridged rubber matting by the yard that are close to the 1941 pattern. https://www.oldmoparts.com/parts/c-interior-rubber/reproduction-floor-mat/ Restoration Specialties has a pattern which is pretty similar-looking and not too expensive https://www.restorationspecialties.com/MAT017-WS-Sold-By-The-Foot_p_36898.html