Fleetwood Meadow

Are you planning to race it?

I agree with you about the transmission. Everyone said that the 2-3 is rough but this one is pretty great. It doesn’t snap my head or anything. And the downshift to 1 when stopping is almost nonexistent feeling.

Before I sent the car out it had seafoam trans tune in it. But as he was working on it he replaced some of the fluid so it’s probably not really in there. It got pretty cold and the windows don’t go up so I have to wait until March or April and then I’ll take it out more often and see if it gets better as it gets used. Then I will try to put some stuff in it. I’ve let the car warm up but it still did it. I am thinking I’ll start the car then put it in gear and keep it in place for a minute or so and then take off and see if the converter has filled up so it shifts.

I forgot that I had this thread open ended. In July I sent the car to a mechanic that deals with these cars. Instead of rebuilding it he took the time to look inside and figure it out. Unfortunately even after fixing a couple pistons that were backwards it didn’t shift. He called a friend of his who had a rebuilt control valve body and swapped it out. It then shifted 1-4. I got it back in October but the windows don’t work so it has been parked since November until it warms up. The only problem I have is that when the car first starts and you drive it, for the first 1/2 mile it won’t shift past 2nd. Then once it shifts to 3 it has no problem shifting correctly for the rest of the drive. I believe the fluid is draining out of the torque converter.

Curti, what is the title of that thread?

Aha! I found the leak in the tube. I decided in the my last warm day before the snow to tackle the window problem. I tried to move the front seat forward to get access behind it but it didn’t move. So I removed the cylinder/spring mechanism from the seat and tried to move it but it didn’t let me see behind it. So that’s when the bolts came off and the seat was removed from the floor. But Cadillac put this cute little piece of fabric from the back of the seat to the partition behind it so i couldn’t move it away from the area I was working. I ended up taking off the top trim on the partition and removing the nails holding the fabric on. Then it was time to take what someone else on this forum called a “fender” which covered the space between the partition and the back of the seat. I lowered a window to see exactly where it leaks and it’s about an inch from the bend. I’m not sure why they bent it to run towards the middle of the car to bend back to the same place it would have been if it had stated straight. I had to notch out the wood to get to the coupling. I haven’t decided if I want to go further with the disassembly and try to find the rest of the pipes and replace them or just replace this one and be able to use the car with it’s windows working. The other pipe goes up into the wood and then into the B pillar before turning and going into the rear door. While I was in there I cleaned the 50 year old mess that the mice made and out popped the mummied mouse in the picture.

I agree with you that replacement is easier but I want to know how to develop the skills to repair things so I can not only feel the pride of accomplishment for fixing the thing but also so I can pass that knowledge down through the generations. Being 32 years old I’m trying to have a greater appreciation for how things were done to make a car before my father and mother were even born.

So once it is off of the body how do I repair the breaks in the metal?

This badge is how I wanted to get the hubcaps to look. If you run your nail over the badge you can feel where the paint or whatever it is has been placed. The hubcap is curved so I’m not sure I can do anything that melts or flows because it would flow out of the sections. I had painted one of them with model paint but something dripped on it and it removed the paint in that area. I use this car a lot more than standard classic car drivers seem to drive. I drive in the rain and I’m driving it right now in the winter so the car gets a little more “abuse,” if you will, than cars driven only when there are 3 or less clouds in the sky.

What type of metal is this? I imagine it has been chrome plated. It’s the hubcap off of my ‘51 Meadowbrook and got damaged before I bought the car. Unfortunately it got split in several places where it got damaged. How do I fix the splits in the metal?

How did they do it from the factory? Was it the cloisonné method?

That’s the one I was thinking of. It seems like the one-shot enamel is getting the most positive feedback

I’ve decided I want to paint the hubcaps and emblems on my Dodge and I can’t remember what it’s called to do what I want to do. I remember seeing a video a while back about a guy that pours an amount of paint to fill the spaces. When it dries it’s almost like glass. I know I’m not explaining this right but I don’t know how else to explain it. It’s similar to the picture below. It’s kind of like a stained glass poured onto the medal.

I don’t normally just idle cars but this one has very little gas in it because the tank sending unit gasket leaks and I haven’t been able to get it to seal properly. There is a hole in the hydro-lectric system has a hole in the line somewhere in the wood they used to make the front seat so the windows are down and I can’t leave the car outside in case it leaks if I put gas in it so I haven’t been able to drive it. Also there is now a leak in the heater on the firewall. Come March I’ll be able to work on all of those easier. I say March but I’ll try working on them in the freezing cold. I have no idea how I’m going to replace a line that they installed before they built the seat into the car. There is wood used to make the back of the seat and the line is in it. I don’t believe there are any weep holes to let air through the thermostat. Besides the hole in the thermostat is there any good other way to help get air out of the engine?

I didn’t think it would be oil. I suspected that the sound might have been coming from somewhere else and echoing in the hollow space.

Oil is dirty but not milky and not watered down. Antifreeze looks good. It’s cold and i don’t have much gas so I couldn’t let it warm up fully but the “smoke” coming out of the back was the typical cold engine steam. It didn’t smell like anything was being burned in the engine.

It was a nice day today so I decided to start my 52 Cadillac. It started right up as it usually does so I let it run to charge the battery. When I shut it off and I was walking to the front of the car I heard a gurgling sound. Thinking it was the radiator I put my ear to the radiator and listened and the gurgling started again but it wasn’t coming from the radiator. It was coming from the oil filler neck. The gurgling lasted about a second and a half and then would stop and then did it again. This happened three times. What could possibly be causing a gurgling sound coming from there?

I checked the u-joints. They are fine. The drive shaft doesn’t wiggle at all. I took the end of the exhaust and jiggled it and it moved the entire system up to the header. I also could recreate the sound of the banging. The gasket has blown out at the header pipe. So I will have to put another one in and then tighten the pipe again.

My ‘51 Meadowbrook has started making a knocking sound under the car when I decelerate. It’s not all the time. It happens more randomly. It sounds like it’s in the middle of the car but it isn’t always when I’m hitting the brake. Sometimes I am just letting the car slow down on its own and it starts knocking. Where should I be looking for issues? It doesn’t sound like the clinking of a broken brake component but I haven’t taken them apart yet to rule it out. It’s not when the car is speeding up.

How do I get the fan blades to separate from the shaft? Obviously it’s pressed on so I can’t just pull it off.

Well based on what I see in here it’s all here. I don’t plan on putting it in the car because I like manually controlling my car, in an age where everything is done for you. It has the eye, the control box, the switch, that grey relay thing, and instructions. It doesn’t appear to have ever been in a car. Are these systems based on voltage (6 or 12 volts) or is it just a switch for a system that is already in the car like a battery disconnect switch? What i mean is can this work in both 6 and 12 volts or is it volt specific?

I can spin it by hand easy enough but if I try to flick it to get it to spin a couple times without me pushing it the shaft immediately stops. I wanted to take the shaft out and clean everything but how do you get the blower shaft to come loose from the propeller fan blades?

You guys are like detectives. I’m impressed. I did change some of it on the other site though to make it make sense for that site. I just couldn’t believe that someone would go from that site, take my post, then bring it to this site and pass it off as his own. I thought it was suspicious on the fact that this guy had a meadowbrook. I very rarely hear anyone talking about owning one. Bloo, I noticed the links added into the post and figured that was what he was adding. Curiousity almost made me click on one of them but I have no idea what is behind them.

Yeah I posted that one. I wanted to get the word out there too that my post had been taken from that site and put on here.

I was SO excited to learn that a fellow Dodge Meadowbrook owner was having difficulty that I was knowledged in. He was describing it so well that it was identical to an issue I had had this summer. I don’t know how to insert a connection to another thread or anything like that so I told him to look in my profile at things I had posted to find the thread I had on the topic. I remembered that I was on a Dodge forum as well so I went there and took a couple pictures of the thread I had made and put them on his thread. I felt so good that I was finally imparting my knowledge onto someone else that I was telling the people around me about it. Then I got home and reread the post that he had made and it made me think it sounded too familiar. And I found it odd that the name of the thread didn’t make sense. The second and third words were fine but the first one wasn’t even close to fitting the thread nor was it something that is used to describe the problem he was having. So I went to the other forum and looked at my original post. Sure enough, it was my post word for word. He had taken everything I had written and put it on here as if it was his. That made me very suspicious of his motives. Not to mention that he had created his profile on here less than 24 hours ago. So with all that being said, I have to wonder, what would cause someone to take a thread and copy it onto a new one as if it were their own? What is the motivation?