Bloo

How about a whole parts car? Toledo, WA USA. https://portland.craigslist.org/clk/cto/d/toledo-1939-pontiac-dr-sedan/7377635663.html Not my car, no connection, contact owner in ad if interested. Look closely, there's a lot wrong here, but it looks like a good pile of parts.

They get better when you drive them!

An overdrive would definitely be more versatile. In particular I am a huge fan of the later Borg Warner type with the electric controls. It isn't period though, and I am doubtful it would fit due to frame interference. Maybe. I know some people put them in the middle of the torque tube. I'm skeptical because you lose the reverse lockout, and a few other small issues. We have several members here who own those and rave about how great they are, so I am probably getting wound up over nothing. There is always gear vendors. They are 12 volt units but I'm told they will work on 6. They are really expensive, but to be fair, so is everything else when you get down to actually doing it. Changing ring and pinion in the axle on these particular cars to a more useful ratio is not cheap or easy. A Mitchell overdrive could just be left in high on a car geared this low and you wouldn't even need a linkage. On the other hand, a chrome BW overdrive cable under the dash (to shift the Mitchell) wouldn't look out of place at all, and would be fine as long as you weren't trying to split gears. The peak horsepower of the engine is rated at MPH rather than RPM, but I believe it to be about 3200 RPM, so it should be able to do a little less than that indefinitely. Common wisdom among the Pontiac folks is "keep it below 3000 and everything will be fine". Some of them will tell you the advice is just for eights though. The Pontiac Six (after 1934) and Eight are of the same family more or less. The six has theoretically perfect balance, a shorter crank, and a relatively short stroke, so the piston speeds shouldn't get insane. It also has insert bearings and full pressure oiling. The only fly in the ointment is the the cast iron pistons, which are likely to be heavy. I think on a fresh rebuild, balanced, with aluminum pistons and modern pin retainers you could probably spin one as fast as you want, but that idea needs more investigation. My guess is it couldn't breathe well enough to hurt itself. My engine is old and a little tired though, I baby it.

I was happy to find out that those frontage roads exist along many interstates, especially out in the flatter sections of the country. Maybe some of them can be documented in this thread. In Washington State, they typically don't exist or don't go through. Certain areas of the country are "bottlenecks" as @ply33 mentioned in the original post. You can get to them without using interstates, but probably not around them. If it is a city that is blocking your way rather than a mountain pass, maybe you can just drive through it if you can figure out a reasonable route.

I considered all sorts of things. Like a Buick, my car has a torque tube and that makes things more difficult and expensive. I found some NORS 3.82 or so gears, and have just not finished building the new third member yet. It is close, but if I had finished it and installed it I would have not have had time to break it in before the trip. In retrospect, a homebrew Mitchell overdrive conversion looks very tempting. As for 5 speed overdrive transmissions, I love T5s and I have one in my truck, but it is sort of the wrong aesthetic for this car. It's not impossible to get one hooked to a torque tube, but it's not trivial either. A similar situation exists for those early 80s Ford transmissions (cant remember the name or model) that people shove in Model A's. They can look "period" but have a tall transmission tower that sticks up through the floor, and a stock Pontiac transmission has the Buick Special top cover, so there is little or no tower sticking through the floor. The change will be completely invisible with my new third member. Whether it was a good choice or not remains to be seen. Pontiacs like mine came standard with 4.44 in sixes and 4.55 in eights. They offered 4.11 "Plains" gears and 4.89 "Mountain" gears as options. Tires are 600-16. My radials are 195/80R16 and the O.D. is the same as 600-16. I have heard that Pontiac may have just chosen the gears based on where the car was to be delivered, but I don't quite believe it. I suspect someone paid extra for this back in 1936. It is really busy at 53 mph.

I like seeing those "WASH 63" license plates. They were on everything December, 1965 or older from 1963 until the 90s unless the plates got changed for some reason. They were usable as regular yearly plates until 2000, so we Washingtonians got very used to looking at them. You can use them as YOMs now, and I suppose those could be from Ebay or something, but if it was off the road even for a year or two there is a strong possibility that those license plates could be original to the car. The seller says he got the car from the original owner. The "FB" prefix means the car came from Whatcom County (Bellingham area) if the plates are original.

That sounds like a good idea, but I don't think I have that feature. I will look when I have the generator apart. Mine has a fixed position third brush, and a vibrating voltage regulator. One end of the field is connected to the third brush, and the other end to the voltage regulator. Grounding the voltage regulator end made no difference. When it's bad, it still charges a tiny bit. Sometimes it even catches up if you drive long enough with no lights. I was discussing this with @37_Roadmaster_C the day after I got back and he suggested it is just running on residual magnetism. I think that's right as I can easily believe the field could fail open. Having the field fail intermittently to high resistance, while not impossible, is a lot harder to believe and I can't imagine how an armature defect could be the cause. I have not had time to dig in yet. It works normally for the first 40 miles or so. It has probably been broken for years and nobody noticed.

About the same thing as what they called a "touring car" in the teens, but of the same era as your car. Typically there might be some side curtains but no roll up windows (although the Buick phaetons of the mid and late 30s did have roll up windows so I guess that isn't set in stone).

The best way to do it is to take longer and longer longer trips and just keep fixing things as they crop up, rather than jumping from occasional 150+150 mile jaunts on holidays to 4500+ miles like I did. I had been daily driving it in town for years though, and It has been reliable for about 2 or 3 years. I was planning on doing a lot of testing of various things on the trip. That all went out the window after I left the road in Montana. From that point on I was not thinking about any scientific analysis of the car. I was just looking for hidden damage. The problem with the brake cylinder and the problem with the generator were definitely things I did not expect, and they were both things that the last guy had done at a shop if I remember correctly. 90+ percent of the things I have had to fix to make this car reliable have been due to old shoddy workmanship rather than age or wear. Unfortunately the highways immediately surrounding the town I live in are not really appropriate for slow cars, and the Pontiac has optional 4.89:1 gears. That is not conducive to frequent road tripping, at least not on 2 lane roads with a bunch of trucks going as fast as the law will allow. You would have no such limitation in a Buick Century. Go for it!

Thanks for checking.

Sorry too that it is turning out like this, but take a step back. Give it a rest for a day or 2. 0 psi Is almost impossible. If the crankshaft didn't break, then valves must be open. They couldn't have hit the pistons because it is a flathead. Whatever is wrong, I doubt it is super serious. Tomorrow is another day.

Check with @Kornkurt here on the form. There is a very good possibility he has internal engine parts for that engine. Of course, what oversizes or undersizes you need will depend on how bad the wear is.

Me? Tooth sizes vary. Degrees per tooth would be the important factor. Nevertheless one tooth is typically enough to make any car undirveable.

Yes. But, you shouldn't have to knock GSJ158's taper loose from the spindle to adjust it. You can unclamp the outer end of the rack boot and just rotate the shaft of 120981 instead. Either way you are screwing the threads in/out of GSJ158 to make the adjustment. It makes no difference how you accomplish that.

It sure looks like a Plymouth from the back. It could have fooled me.

That is not the commonly seen rotor for Chrysler products of that period. It is most likely for an optional Autolite/Prestolite dual-point distributor.

I don't know. The Flathead Reunion next year is being planned for Pennsylvania I'm told. I might do it in a modern car using the freeways. Maybe. It is a bit too far for the Pontiac. I'm sure it would make it but it would take way too long. I have some high speed gears for it that would help, but they're not installed yet. I am plotting an engine overhaul now, as the oil consumption is pretty high. It might be all apart this time next year.

Do they fit in your car?

I was navigating entirely with paper maps, except for a little bit on the laptop while I was in motels. I can't stand the idea of of a synthesized voice squawking all the time while I drive. Yeah, I made a couple of wrong turns but it wasn't really a big deal. Most states have an official paper map that is free. The trouble is most of the places they are available are at state borders along freeways. If I hadn't made a few long jaunts in a "modern" car, I wouldn't have had them. AAA is a possible solution, and they also have good paper maps.

That one in the picture should definitely be disengaging the gear. There is no solenoid, and that is pretty normal for something from Ford at that time. There must be a Bendix behind the gear. The sudden increase in speed when the engine starts should be disengaging it.

I have never had the luxury of thinking about this one too much, as other factors have eliminated most possible routes. The 1936 Pontiac has especially good brakes for it's time, but on my recent trip I definitely found myself on some hills I wouldn't want to descend in a Model T, and that goes double if it did not have Rocky Mountain Brakes. This bears consideration, however it is not as big of a problem as I expected it to be. If you look on a map. and find some long stretch that has no towns, or only ones with tiny dots, 170 miles doesn't look like enough. Not knowing my exact range, I was figuring on more like 150 or 120. Initially I was planning on hauling about 2 gallons, but some quick math said I needed 5. This allowed for towns with no pumps, or closed on Sunday, or closed after 6PM, or whatever. In practice, I carried 5 gallons of gas to Wisconsin and back. You can check google for gas station locations along a given highway. They might not still all be there, but sometimes it flags something that is only a couple miles from the main road too. If you are looking for information online, do it before you leave home or at the motels along the way. Don't expect your phone to have service in places like this. The good part is that ALMOST everywhere now, if there are pumps, they have card readers and work 24 hours, and you can use a credit or debit card. There might not be good lights. There might not be any lights, but there are usually some. You might not get a receipt. but you can get gas. Now a word or two about gas cans. The new ones suck. Plastic in general sucks, but unless your car is old enough to haul gas on the running boards in Boyco cans or something like that, you are probably stuck with it. I did not like having all that gas in my trunk. The first thing I did in the pitch black after the incident where I went off road (see the thread @ply33 linked above) was to run my hands under the back of the car to see if the 5 gallon gas can had ruptured. Two years ago, my gas gauge didn't work and so I hauled a little 1 or 1.5 gallon gas can around in the trunk. They don't put vents in them anymore, due to VOC laws or whatever. This one would swell up like a dead cow along the highway. I let the pressure out petty regularly, but it would swell right back up. One day it exploded. I came out of the house to find the back of the Pontiac soaked in gas, and gas dripping out on the ground from every hole. The can had split wide open. It was only 2 months old. Plastic gas cans do rot, and eventually the plastic gets so bad you can poke your finger through. I can only assume that they get more hazardous as time goes on. Fun Fact: You can buy those little yellow vent lids that every plastic gas can used to have on Amazon, and put them in yourself. Another fun fact: Powersports gas cans are better than the regular ones. They usually have a valve you can hold open somehow on the spout. Some are easier than others. On the cans intended for cars they either seem to have a spout that is stored upside down IN THE GAS so it gets all over your hands as you assemble it, or is has some stupid valve that is supposed to open when you hook it on the filler neck. Both kinds are guaranteed to get gas all over you, and the one that hooks on the neck will teach you how to swear if you didn't already know. They don't have vents either so they might explode. My 5 gallon powersports can does not APPEAR to have a vent, but maybe that is built in the valve somehow(?). It never swelled up like a dead cow, and it never leaked a drop. I have it stored in a plastic tub, so I can tell it didn't spill. It is a more expensive model, $10 more than the closest contender, but that choice was made because the spout and valve can be oriented parallel to the ground. That let me get 5 gallons in the trunk without running out of headroom, where the cheapies would not. It is made of really thick plastic. A lesser traveled freeway might not be too bad. 46 miles on I-94 from Miles City to Forsyth, MT was not bad at all. On a freeway you have the right lane and if there's little traffic it can be pretty relaxed. 3 miles on I-29 just south of Sioux Falls SD was a white knuckle ride. Some 2 lanes, actually quite a few, are places you might not like to be in a slow antique. Highway 6 (191) through eastern Utah and highway 212 through southeastern Montana are a couple that come to mind.

I doubt it could be right, but I'm not going to rule it out. Do you have a picture of that starter when it was off of the engine?

I can't tell much from those pictures. If that is all of it, it probably isn't bad at all. On the other hand, if it is coming from the inside it could be really bad. As others have mentioned, buy the best car you can afford. I would modify that to say buy almost the best car you can afford. Any work that is already done (and done correctly) to the car is going to cost you MUCH less than even the materials to do it yourself. It has been true for years now, and with the values of old cars dropping, it is not likely to change. I say buy almost the best car, because if you intend to use it right away, you will find that they ALL need work, and the shiny perfect looking ones aren't much better than running driving stopping "projects". Money will need to be spent right away, so don't spend every last dime buying the car, even though that would be a better "deal" in the long run. You will probably be thinking as you are driving home about what modern conveniences you can't quite live without, or what accessories on the car aren't working quite right, and be thinking about buying "A", "B", or "C". I do this. Everybody does. Don't get in a hurry because sooner than later the car will be screaming for money for "D" and "E" and "F" instead. All old cars that are for sale need work. Shiny ones too. It takes time and money and DRIVING to make them reliable, and driving them might mess up the pretty paint and upholstery, so you can probably imagine where this is leading. The money spent making a car reliable does not show, and does not have much affect on the value, so it rarely gets done. The ones that are completely sorted out are not for sale, because it took a bunch of money and time to get the car to that point. There is one potential way around this. Join a club for the marque, be active, and let everyone know what you would like to have. So, lets say you want a 1940 McBlatt 3 door sedan. You join the McBlatt club, and get to know which cars are completing tours with no trouble and what they all look like. Maybe, after a while some member who has several cars decides to downsize due to age. Maybe he/she has arthritis and doesn't want to push the clutch anymore, or god forbid maybe he/she passes away. Everyone in the club knows you are looking for 1940 McBlatt 3 door sedan, so maybe you get first shot before it gets advertised. If not someone else in the club will probably buy it. This is literally the only way to buy a fully sorted reliable old car. Otherwise, make sure you have some money left over to fix things. The clubs for Pontiacs like this are Early Times Chapter http://www.earlytimeschapter.org/ , for all flathead Pontiacs and Oaklands (through 1954), and Oakland Pontiac Worldwide, for all flathead Pontiacs and Oaklands plus early OHV V8s through 1958. https://www.oaklandpontiacworldwide.com/ I envy the talents of people out in the rust belt states, like Minnesota, who can fix unbelieveably bad rust. I am constantly trying to acquire skills like that. I am, after all, the master of hopeless causes. That said, they are fixing things that no one would bother with out here in Washinton state. I mean... structural frame rust? Really? Body mounts gone? Washington didn't use corrosive substances on the roads at all until fairly recent times. As far as I know we still don't use rock salt. Washington cars typically have rust where dirt piled up and kept the inside of a panel damp. I've never seen anyone replace a frame because of rust. I understand cars from the deserts of Arizona and California are better than ours. So, while there are people in the midwest and east who can repair really rusty things, it takes time and talent and it does not come quick or cheap. If the car has serious rust, in my opinion you would be money FAR ahead to get a better car that came from the PNW or the SW. It's cheaper, even if you have to include shipping to some other region. Easier too. I hope the streamliner works out for you!

I'll see what I can do. My tires are the only concession to the modern age. They are tubeless radials. Maybe I should take a closer look, but I don't believe they are showing significant wear yet. At some point we really need to have a long detailed thread on this forum about how to find old fashioned low-traffic 2 lane roads, and more importantly how to connect them over long distances. One would think since we are spread out all over the country, and also the world, that some good information could be compiled.

Thanks for responding! Unfortunately 1939 won't fit. I understand several years can interchange, but as near as I can tell, only 1936 fits mine. 1935 should work, but an old forum post I found says it won't. As much as I would like to, I won't be making it to Hershey this year.