| Re: 1950 Silverstreak
hi guys! just thought i'd tack this post on to the string of 50 chieftain posts already running rather than start a new one. just found this site and registered today. my 50 chieftain 4 door deluxe is taragon green... a repaint about 20 years ago, i gather from a show brochure written by the original owner. he states the original paint formula is no longer available and provided the one he used to get a close match. she's a beutiful car, one-family-owned for 58 years!! i've been going through all the electrical, just cleaning the terminals and repairing a few bad "twist and tape" jobs on a couple of wires. other than that, the car has no issues and drives great! i spent a couple of days de-musting the underside of the dash, with pine-sol to get 58 years worth of dust out of there, rubbed out the dash with polishing compound, and polished all the chrome first with turtle wax chrome cleaner/polish, then a second pass with a polish called maas, which i got at the hardware store. this stuff comes in a toothpaste tube and works great on chrome, stainless, brass, and copper. the original hood ornament was solid chrome and in perfect condition; but i found a nicely rechromed light-up one and put it on. now i'm looking for the lamp socket and wire to illuminated it, though i did make a nice one with a single-wire socket from an auto parts store. i modified this socket so that it has a better ground than that provided by the mounting clips which catch the hole in the stainless hood panel ( i believe that is stainless, and stainless is rather resistive ) to make a better ground, i drilled into the side of the socket just below the contact disk and attatched a seperate ground wire using a sheet metal screw. i made one other improvement in a ground for the hydromatic shift indicator lamp, which also relies on good continuity through the indicator housing to the steering column tube. i took a short piece of brass strip and locked it down to the indicator with the lamp housing mounting screw. the other end of the strip runs down 1 1/2" and brushes against the inside of the indicator housing plate. this is a better ground than the factory set-up, which relies on current to pass along the plated indicator needle body. i was getting about 4 ohms across this plated piece and of course now almost 0 ohms across the brass strip. i could tell that the original circuit was resistive because the spring-loaded contact was pretty green compared to most the other terminals and contacts i've been over--even the ones under the hood looked better than this one. anyway, blah-blah-blah!! just wanted to say hi to everbody and offer what i could as a newcomer. from what i have read, the name silver streak refers to the engine, not to the body syle. i think i read this on the wiki site, thought i know those contributions are not always athoritative. markss8 | 
July 27th, 2008
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