Happy Thanksgiving!
We had a great time visiting with our friend Elisabeth from Munich. We toured some of the local sights, but mainly kicked back, relaxing and catching up on what has been going on with each other.
Shortly after we got Elisabeth on a plane to Honolulu we headed back down to the valley for the Goodguys Southwest Nationals at West World in Scottsdale. The weather was excellent and we had a great turn out of cars with several that I had not seen before. Best of all we had a chance to visit and go to dinner with many of our friends.
I am happy to report that Judy Nolte is doing quite well with her breast cancer treatment. She just had her 4th of 6 chemo treatments and was feeling quite well with most of the normal side effects well under control. We will be planning a cruise next year when she finishes her treatments next spring!
I have spent most of the week building a home server and getting it up and operational. It will allow me to have access to all my photos and files from anywhere on my LAN and also from the internet so that I can upload and process photos while on the road. I also set up an account for my fellow club members so that they could easily send me photos for our website www.othg-phoenix.net
As soon as I finish rearranging all of my files and folders and getting everything backed up, I will start converting all of the computers over to Windows 7 for maximium compatability. After that I have some photo projects and web updates to finish then we will be back down to the Valley for our club Christmas Party. With luck I should be able to get back to the Dodge by the second week of December.
Rethinking My Build Plan
We had a great time visiting with our dear friend from Munich last week. It was actually quite nice to take a break from the Dodge project for a few days and have some down time. While on break I did give some serious thought on how to best move forward with the project. I have been concerned about removing the rust from some of the tighter interior crevices. Sand blasting is clearly the way to go, but I would have to do it outside the shop on my driveway which will create an unacceptable mess. I had several mini sand dunes piled up against the shop when I tired my sand blaster out earlier this year.
My neighbor took his ’38 Chevy to a local powder coating company and had them sand blast it to remove the paint and rust. He was quite pleased with the result and it was quite inexpensive. After talking with the powder coating company I think that I will take the following course of action:
- Complete the installation of the A/C drier on the core support.
- Remove all A/C equipment, radiator, transmission cooler, inner fender panels and core support
- Remove seats and seat tracks
- Remove shift cable, break pedal and gas pedal
- Remove sway bar and cats
- Remove drive shaft
- Remove fuel tank
- Remove dashboard
- Remove engine and transmission
Once everything is removed, use the pneumatic descaler to remove all of the under coating on the bottom of the car.
Load the wagon along with all the sheet metal that has been removed onto the trailer and haul it up to the powder coater and have everything media/sand blasted. While the wagon is out of the shop, expand the paint booth to full size and move the ’39 into the shop.
When the wagon returns, paint all exposed metal with epoxy to prevent further rust. Then repair the floor and smooth the fire wall before begining the body work.
For the rest of this week I will be working on building and installing a network server for my office and updating my computers to Windows 7.
Ich muss eine kurze Pause.
Not much to report today in moving the Dodge forward. I really needed to clean the shop up after all the cleaning, grinding and welding that I have been doing on the Dodge in the past month. I am at the point where most all of the major fabrication work is done. Other than fabricating a new firewall its time to start on the body work and getting everything ready for paint.
Before swamping out the shop, I did fit the the head pipes and cats up to the exhaust manifolds, other than having to repostion the cat on the passenger side to gain some clearance between the O2 sensor and the rear transmission mount, everything should fit well. I also bolted up the Oldsmobile sway bar to check all the clearances on the the new front end. Everything looks good to go!
We are having a very dear friend from Munich visiting us next week so I will not be doing much work on the Dodge or updating this journal for a week or so. As it turns out, November will be a short month as far as work on the Dodge goes. After our friend continues on her journey to Hawaii, we have the Goodguys show and then Thanksgiving.
My goal is that between now and the end of the year that I will be able to get the floor patched and the drive train and front suspension pulled so that I can send the sheet metal and other bits and pieces to the powder coater.
This also would be a good time to have the steering column and box rebuilt along with the third member which needs a major gear change as well. The 2.50:1 Cougar rear gear set isnt going to make it with the 545RFE 5th gear of 0.67:1 With 27 to 28″ rear tires I am thinking that a 3.89 rear gear would work pretty well.
Once the seats were located and mounted I could finalize the mounting of the Durango’s drive by wire throttle pedal. As it turns out the mounting location for the original ’56 throttle linkage was in an ideal spot to mount the pedal from the Durango.
I started out by cutting a 3″x4″ plate from some 3″x1/8″ stock and transfering the 4 stock mounting holes to it. Once the plate was drilled I welded 4 – 5/16″ x 3/4″ bolts to the mounting plate. I then drilled 3 – 1/4″ holes to match the mounting points on the Durango drive by wire throttle pedal and welded in 2 – 1/4″ x 3/4″ and 1 1/4″ x 1″ bolts for easy mounting of the drive by wire pedal assembly
I tacked welded the pedal plate to the mounting plate and then attached the pedal so that I could test fit the pedal assembly to the firewall. The tack welds allowed me to bend the pedal mount until it was position where I could easily move my foot from the throttle to the brake pedal and have my foot comfortly positioned with the throttle around half way open.
Once I was happy with the position of the pedal I removed it from the firewall and cut a 3″x5″x1/8″ plated to triangulate the mount. To lighten the mount up a bit a cut 2 – 2″ holes in the gussset and another 2″ hole in the pedal mount plate.
After I did the final welding on the mount I bolted the pedal to the mount and then bolted the assembly to the firewall. Both Michelle and I then rechecked each of our driving positions for control and comfort. We both were happy with the fit, so it’s now on to patching all the soft spots and holes in the floor!
To ease the installation I tack welded the spacers to the bottom of the seat mounts. And then hauled the seat assembly over to the tail gate opening in the back of the wagon. After struggling 4 or 5 times with pulling and pushing the heavy seat assembly through the rear passenger door it dawned upon me that it would be a whole lot easier if I used the back opening… DUH! Sometimes I amaze myself with how dense I can be…
When I went to do the final fit-up of the rear seat I discovered that its mounts had been tweaked when the Durango rolled over. After a bit, well more than a bit, of beating, prying, adding spacers and doing a fair amount of cursing, I was able to get the three backrests to line up fairly well. Hopefully it won’t move again when I get to repairing the floors.
With all of the seats finally fitted and installed I can check off a major milestone on the project plan!
Next up will be mounting the drive by wire foot pedal and patching all the holes in the floor – including some of the new ugly ones I added during the back seat install. I really hate spot welds!
Fabricate Rear Seat Mounts & Spacers
Since I had forgotten to pull the outside tumble seat latch mounts from the Durango, I had to fabricate some new ones. As previously mentioned my eyeball estimate of the diameter of the rod used in the mount was wrong. Rather than mickey mousing the latches, I went back to the hardware store and found some 7/16″ rod which was close enough to the 12mm rod used by Chrysler in the original mounts. Knowing how to estimate the bend allowance my O/A torch and my benchvise was all that was needed to form the latch mounts. All that was left to finish off the latch mounts was to drill a couple of 7/16″ holes in each 3/16″ plate and doing a little welding and grinding.
After fitting the rear seat, I found that the recess in the floor was going to create a problem with the outside tumble seat latches. For the seat to work properly I needed to either lower the outside latch mounts by 3/4″ or raise the rest of the seat mounts by 3/4″. The easy out would be to lower the two outside latch mounts, unfortunately the top of the chassis frame was directly under where the latches needed to be mounted.
Soooo, I had to raise everything else, which turned out to be rather easy to do. For the front seat mounts I constructed four 6″ long by 3/4′ high spacers out of two pieces of 3/4″ 16 ga steel tubing. The spacers needed to be 2 1/4″ wide so I used a 6″ long piece of 3/4″ x 1/8″ strap welded between the two pieces of tubing. To finish off the ends of the spacers I welded a 3/4″ x 2 1/4″ piece of strap across each end of the spacer. The front seat mounts had 1/8″ spacers welded to the mounts at each attachment point. To level the spacer out, I welded a 1/2″ flat washer to the front of each spacer.
The two rear mounts were realtively easy to fabricate, they were identical to the front mounts except that they had to be 8″ long and they didn’t need the 1/2″ washer spacers. 3/8″ mounting holes were drilled in each of the spacers to align with the seat mounts. To ease mounting the seat to the floor, the spacers will be tack welded to the seat mounts.
One other modification had to be made… because of the offset of the transmission tunnel to the passenger side, the seat had to be offset by about 1″ – same as the front passenger seat. The downside was that the outside seat latch didn’t really have enough floor to attach to. To fix the problem, I welded another 2″ of 3″ x 3/16″ strap to the mount and ground it down and reshaped it to fit.
All in all, it turned out pretty well! I can seat up to three passengers in the backseat, and I now have two large concealed storage spaces in the former 3rd seat foot wells.
Next up fabricating a mount for the drive by wire foot pedal! Then we get to patch the holes in the floor!
