That pesky dis­trib­u­tor issue has finally been resolved!!  File this one under you live and learn.  Here’s my story and I’m stick­ing to it.….. It turns out that for what­ever rea­son, the shaft con­nect­ing the oil pump to the dis­trib­u­tor shaft was not cor­rectly seated in the oil pump when I installed the dis­trib­u­tor, this caused the dis­trib­u­tor to bot­tom out on the shaft before it became fully seated and would not allow it to tighten down, this in turn is what caused it to con­tin­u­ally go out of time.  How we found it was kind of lucky, on our first three starts the oil pres­sure light went out imme­di­ately, the fourth time it remained on and I shut down imme­di­ately not want­ing to cause any dam­age.  I bor­rowed an oil pres­sure gauge from the engine shop hop­ing that we had a bad sen­sor, but when we hooked it up and re-started, we had zero oil pres­sure so now knew we had an oil pump prob­lem.  I pulled the dis­trib­u­tor again and then pulled the shaft from the top end and found the shaft chewed up on the oil pump side.  It turns out it was never seated prop­erly and the down­ward pres­sure from the dis­trib­u­tor was in fact caus­ing it to turn the oil pump just by fric­tion for a while before it gave up the ghost.  As you can imag­ine I was not a happy camper, and so through­out this week I spent time drop­ping the oil pan, remov­ing the oil pump, tak­ing it back to the engine shop where they dressed the shaft and insured every­thing fit cor­rectly and then finally installed it back into the car.  Of course, there was no pan gas­ket avail­able locally, so we had to wait for it to be deliv­ered by UPS.  It came in yes­ter­day and is all back together, the “Gray Lady” once again is purring like a kit­ten, with oil pres­sure at +30 and another prob­lem is finally resolved.

I am very pleased with the alter­na­tor con­ver­sion, but I do have an issue with the gen­er­a­tor light.  As pre­vi­ously described, it has been installed on the orig­i­nal gen­er­a­tor bracket (with some minor mod­i­fi­ca­tions) and con­nected it directly to the bat­tery with a #4 cable.  Fol­low­ing instruc­tions I found while surf­ing the net, I con­nected it to the wire lead­ing to the gen­er­a­tor light on the dash and in fact the sys­tem func­tions well, when started the gen­er­a­tor light goes out as it should as the sys­tem is charg­ing but when shut down with the key off, the light stays on.  Appar­ently the arma­ture is ener­gized with the key off because of the direct con­nec­tion to the bat­tery caus­ing the light to stay on.  I am going to have to re-think the wiring or install a diode to pre­vent the back­flow of power to the light with the key off.  I really want that light to func­tion, though the sys­tem oper­ates per­fectly with­out it, the bat­tery stays fully charged, the car has no start­ing issues and the whole sys­tem will alle­vi­ate many prob­lems and make for a much more pleas­ant  expe­ri­ence as we begin dri­ving her down the road in the future.

The garage has been cleaned up, parts put away and now I can leave with a clear head, know­ing Paul can go in once a week and start her up to keep every­thing lubed and charged.

I’ll talk again from Florida.…

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Hope Santa was good to you and the New Year smiles upon you.  I must have been a whole lot bet­ter than I thought last year, Santa (dis­guised as my wife Mary Lee) gave me a NOS Speedome­ter Clus­ter as a gift this year.  It includes the temp. and fuel unit, a brand new clock and the odome­ter shows just 2 miles.  I can’t imag­ine this part sit­ting around for 52 years some­where just col­lect­ing dust, beyond that I can’t imag­ine how she found it, it’s the first one I have ever seen.  I am absolutely thrilled (though I cringe when I think what it might have cost.).…..

With the New Year upon us, it’s time for a recap and review.… The past 7 months saw a flurry of activ­ity and frankly, I am much fur­ther along with this project than I had hoped to be at this point.  While I would have liked to do a frame off restora­tion, space and equip­ment lim­i­ta­tions would not allow it, instead, we jacked her up, put her on jack stands and got started.  The front and rear bumpers, grill and hood were removed, the gas tank pulled out and the outer and inner front fend­ers taken off.  Then we began with the mechan­i­cals, the radi­a­tor, dri­ve­shaft, engine and tranny were all removed, along with the rear axle, upper con­trol yoke and lower con­trol arms.  The front sus­pen­sion was com­pletely removed along with the exhaust sys­tem, brake and fuel lines and then we were left with a bare frame with the pas­sen­ger com­part­ment and rear fend­ers still intact.  Now we were ready to go.

We began by thor­oughly clean­ing and pres­sure wash­ing the under­side, scrap­ing and treat­ing any sur­face rust (there were no real cor­ro­sion issues under the car) and coat­ing the frame with Por-15.  We touched up the under­coat­ing in some areas, but it was more than 90% intact when we started.  Then I cleaned and painted the fire­wall, restored the blis­ters and we were ready to begin putting parts back on the car.  The fuel tank was put back in, a new stain­less steel fuel line installed, a com­plete new stain­less steel brake line set along with a rebuilt mas­ter cylin­der and trea­dle unit,  wheel cylin­ders, rub­ber brake lines, re-lined shoes and freshly turned drums were all put back on.  All of the sus­pen­sion parts were media blasted, painted and re-built with new bush­ings, ball joints, tie rod ends, bear­ings and seals before being put back up.

The engine was com­pletely rebuilt, sleev­ing 2 cylin­ders and over­bored 0.40, the tranny was cleaned, had a new rear seal put in and then painted before being put back.  The dri­ve­shaft had new uni­ver­sals installed and the rear end was cleaned and painted with new bear­ings and seals put in before instal­la­tion.  A new radi­a­tor was fab­ri­cated using the old upper and lower tanks along with a brand new over­size core and a com­plete new exhaust sys­tem was installed includ­ing new muf­flers and res­onators.  New hoses were made up for the tranny cool­ing and power steer­ing sys­tems. I removed the gen­er­a­tor and replaced it with a new alter­na­tor and so here I sit with a mechan­i­cally set-up rolling chas­sis that should be as good as if not bet­ter than the day she rolled out of the show­room back in 1958.

The rear bumper has been repaired, replated and is back await­ing instal­la­tion.  Rear tai­light bezels, hood and trunk vees, emblems, tail­fin chrome and the Cadil­lac let­ters are all out at the plater as we speak and will be installed once the body has been painted this Spring.

The next few days will see us remov­ing some more of the exter­nal trim and gen­er­ally get­ting her ready for paint.  If time allows I will pull the door pan­els and begin work on clean­ing and lub­ing the win­dow sys­tems.  Mary Lee and I are tak­ing a break, leav­ing the 10th for sunny and warm (hope­fully) South Florida where we will try to relax and spend some time at a few clas­sic shows and swap meets, pos­si­bly take in the Miami Inter­na­tional Boat Show in Feb­ru­ary, maybe do a lit­tle fish­ing and spend some qual­ity time with great friends we only see every win­ter sea­son.  We expect to return early March when the weather is bet­ter here (it is snow­ing as I write this) imme­di­ately get her off for paint­ing and con­tinue our race to the fin­ish line.….….…..

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Well, the gifts are wrapped, the tree is trimmed, the gin­ger­bread house is done and the dog (Wyatt) is back from the groomer with his jin­gle bell col­lar on, so with lit­tle else to do I went over to the shop and trial fit the new alter­na­tor this morn­ing.  It really was a sim­ple install, I pur­chased a Delco 10 si 63 amp alter­na­tor, pulled the gen­er­a­tor, dis­con­nected the wires from the volt­age reg­u­la­tor and began.

I reversed the gen­er­a­tor mount 180 degrees bought a 3″ 3/8″ bolt and put it in.  It was out of line so I shimmed it out with 6 wash­ers and bingo it was lined up.  The adjust­ing arm needed to be shimmed out from the water pump too, I used the old belt ten­sioned it up, used a no. 4 cable from the out­put to the bat­tery ter­mi­nal and I was ready to go.  I just capped off the orig­i­nal wires and taped them into the har­ness, leav­ing the old volt­age reg­u­la­tor mounted with noth­ing con­nected to it, so it will be easy to reverse every­thing should I decide to down the road.

Started her up and she was run­ning a solid 14+ volts at idle, should work out very well and deal a lot less aggra­va­tion in the future.  Now that I know every­thing is prop­erly aligned and func­tion­ing, I will dress it up by mak­ing some spac­ers to take the place of the wash­ers and I have also ordered a 2 wire plug to fit the alter­na­tor so that I can wire it in to the gen­er­a­tor light and have a fully func­tion­ing unit with­out all of the gen­er­a­tor headaches.

Stick a fork in me, I’m done.…. Time to cel­e­brate!  Have a very Merry Christ­mas and I sin­cerely hope Santa brings every­thing you really want (notice I didn’t say need, because we all def­i­nitely want more than we need.….lol).

Until next week.….……

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Got her up and run­ning again this morn­ing to check what I thought was a minor exhaust man­i­fold leak, and it turns out that we do have one, not from the man­i­fold itself, but because we neglected to install the man­i­fold heat tube that goes up to the choke assem­bly.  I ran her for a solid 30 min­utes and every­thing checks out just fine.  As noted ear­lier, we do have a prob­lem with the gen­er­a­tor mak­ing a racket and not charg­ing.  Every­thing seems to be solid and tight, with no leaks, oil that is, my newly built radi­a­tor is leaking.…eeekkk.  In fair­ness, it is very minor and while I can­not locate the source, it is com­ing from the lower left cor­ner, there are no fit­tings or hoses in the area so I sus­pect a pin­hole in the sol­der joint attach­ing the lower tank to the core.  So it will have to come out and go back to the shop for pres­sure test­ing and repair.

Exclud­ing the radi­a­tor, and gen­er­a­tor the only other issue I have is a baf­fling sit­u­a­tion with the dis­trib­u­tor again.  I set the tim­ing per­fectly, tighten it down and within min­utes it backs off and dis­rupts the tim­ing to the point where she stalls.  Right now, the only way I can keep her run­ning is to put a wood block between the intake man­i­fold and the vac­uum advance on the dis­trib­u­tor to keep it from turn­ing back.  When the dis­trib­u­tor is out, the shaft turns freely with no resis­tance so I guess I have no choice but to pull it out and dis­as­sem­ble it com­pletely, some­thing is bind­ing up and caus­ing the whole assem­bly to turn even with the hold-down wrenched down tightly.  I have no clue right now.…

After some seri­ous thought and because our goal is to have a reli­able daily dri­ver I’ve decided to scrap the gen­er­a­tor and volt­age reg­u­la­tor in favor of a one wire Delco 10 si alter­na­tor rated at 63 amps.  When I picked up the car, there were at least 4 new and used volt­age reg­u­la­tors in the trunk indi­cat­ing a con­stant and chronic issue with the sys­tem and frankly I want to enjoy the car and not keep tin­ker­ing with it when it is done.  I will how­ever have the orig­i­nal gen set rebuilt and put it on the shelf, should I decide to put it back in later.  This set-up should sup­ply plenty of juice to keep every­thing run­ning and fully charged even with long peri­ods of idle.

While run­ning the car today and with it up on jack­stands we ran the whole dri­ve­train for quite some time.  Every­thing checks out nice, with no noises or vibra­tions from the tranny, dri­ve­shaft or rear end, either in for­ward or reverse.  No exhaust rat­tles, leaks or issues of any kind

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All of the hard work came together this morn­ing when I once again pulled the dis­trib­u­tor and cor­rected its instal­la­tion, re-installed the plugs, changed her oil, gave her a shot of start­ing fluid and BOOM off she went sput­ter­ing and snort­ing, pop­ping, and back­fir­ing.  Nat­u­rally after sleep­ing for decades no one expected her to awaken with a smile, but she is awake.  Admit­tedly, I shut her down after about 20 sec­onds amidst the unex­pected noise.

I made some minor car­bu­re­tor and tim­ing adjust­ments, started again and she smoothed out dra­mat­i­cally but there are some weird and scary noises com­ing from the front end, so I shut her back down again.  I didn’t think any of the noises were com­ing from the engine itself so I removed the power steer­ing and gen­er­a­tor belts, re-started and the noises were now gone indi­cat­ing pos­si­ble bear­ing issues in either the gen­er­a­tor or power steer­ing pump.  Again, I shut her back down, because with­out the belts the water pump was not turn­ing and I was not going to take a chance of her overheating.

I put the power steer­ing pump belt back on, re-started again and this time she ran qui­etly at a fast idle for about 20 min­utes until she came up to nor­mal oper­at­ing tem­per­a­ture.  Seems like the noise was com­ing from the gen­er­a­tor and I will have to check it out later.  She ran smooth, solid and with­out so much as a hic­cup and over­all I’m just tick­led pink.…. Note to Santa, you can skip my house this year, today was good enough for me and besides I really have not been all that good anyway…lol.

After shut­down a com­plete inspec­tion showed a minor oil leak at the oil fil­ter result­ing from a loose com­pres­sion fit­ting and there is an issue with the dis­trib­u­tor hold down allow­ing the tim­ing to back off as the motor is run­ning.  All minor and eas­ily fixed.  I will try to post video of the start-up when I get a minute, but it is get­ting crazy with the hol­i­days almost here.

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Well we really did not do bet­ter this week.… I’m really pressed for time and have to fin­ish the rental unit so the ten­ant can move in for the New Year.  With that, the Hol­i­days and every­thing else com­ing together at once I really don’t have the time to prop­erly work my way through the start-up problem.

We have spark, fuel and com­pres­sion but still no go.  I stopped by Spring­field Auto Machine to pick their brain as I was stumped.  The guys there are really great and after some dis­cus­sion the con­sen­sus seems to be that the engine is prob­a­bly 180 degrees out of time.  All the while I’m think­ing, how the hell can it be out of time, I fol­lowed the man­ual explic­itly.  Brought the motor to TDC and installed the dis­trib­u­tor every­thing was per­fect until Dick asked me what the valve posi­tion was, it was about this time that the “light bulb” went on in my head and I’m think­ing “Holy Crap” I installed the dis­trib­u­tor on the exhaust stroke, not the com­pres­sion stroke.….. Dick and Brian were very patient and in fact did not even roll their eyes… they even offered to come to the shop and get it started for me.  I stopped to see them on my way out of town and for the rest of the trip sit­ting in the car I was rolling this stu­pid sit­u­a­tion around in my head.  Once back in town I could not stand it any longer, cleared my sched­ule, went over to the shop and once again checked every­thing.  Sure enough, when I brought it up to TDC on the com­pres­sion stroke and checked the dis­trib­u­tor it was point­ing 180 degrees in the wrong direction.….……

I could have put the plugs back in and attempted to start, but with all of the screw­ing around and the major flood­ing of the engine in our many pre­vi­ous attempts the oil smells like gas, not to men­tion the fact that we prob­a­bly pushed a ton of fuel into the exhaust.  So we are going to change the oil and let it sit for a while to dry out before try­ing to start, prob­a­bly this weekend…

I promised my wife I’d take a break from every­thing so we are off to the Mohe­gan Sun Casino for an overnight trip to see the Boston Pops and prob­a­bly have a dozen cock­tails while I stew about how dumb I really am.  I’m not sure this trip is a great idea with the way my luck is run­ning…  I have had that dis­trib­u­tor in and out of the car at least six times and I can­not believe that in all those attempts “blind luck” would not have allowed me to get it in the right way just once!!!  Geez…That would be like flip­ping a coin six times and com­ing up heads every time, with luck like that maybe I should’nt be gam­bling at all.

We’ll be back at it and try again this weekend.

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Time con­straints have just been insane, what with putting up the tree and dec­o­rat­ing the house, along with try­ing to get the rental unit ready for the end of the month.  Oh yeah, I also have to work for a liv­ing.…. Unfor­tu­nately, the “Gray Lady” has had to play sec­ond, third and even fourth fid­dle recently, but when time allowed I have been play­ing around a little.

My major prob­lem at this point is that I am get­ting no spark, so she won’t start.  I installed a Pertronix Igniter elec­tronic sys­tem under the cap think­ing I was doing a good thing, but what looks like a sim­ple instal­la­tion has been a real PITA.  First, the dis­trib­u­tor had to go out to have the slop taken out of the shaft, then with the new parts installed we had no spark, so I messed with it for a cou­ple hours, took it back out and after talk­ing to CB Per­for­mance, they walked me through bench test­ing the unit, which checked out OK.  Re-installed it and still no spark, appar­ently a ground­ing prob­lem, took it back out and cor­rected the ground.  Re-installed again, and still no spark, so now we swapped out the new coil think­ing it might be bad.… No Dice, still no spark.  So now the dis­trib­u­tor comes out once again, this time when I bench test it, it fails, so it has to be sent back for replacement.

It seems Murphy’s Law is work­ing over­time with this one and I am tired of wait­ing, so the points and con­denser will be going back in, so we can get her started.  I am about as frus­trated as I can be at this point.  With no other projects ready I began strip­ping the trim from the rear sec­tion of the car.  The tail light bezels, chrome trim on the fins, the Cadil­lac let­ters on the fins, trunk vee and emblem are now off the car and will be sent off for plat­ing and anodiz­ing, then put away to be re-installed once she is painted (hope­fully, next Spring).

It has really been an aggra­vat­ing and stress­ful week, hope­fully the com­ing week will show bet­ter results.…Till then..

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