Bloo

Is it the one that looks like this? If so, the distributor is usually the heatsink. Some models just have it mounted to a heatsink. It must have a good thermal connection to it's heatsink or it will fail. Sometimes dielectric silicone is provided, but that's mickey mouse. Use real heatsink grease. Either type used by electronic tech's will do, the old extremely messy white stuff, or the new runny silicone-based white stuff. Another thing that would work just fine is the type of "thermal paste" used on computer CPUs. Sometimes it is electrically conductive, but for this application it makes no difference, just keep it away from the pins.

What does the back of that sample look like? The cloth appears fibrous rather than woven in what little I can see from the front. I would not have expected that.

Resorcinol is fussy. It is also good enough to be underwater. Its historic use is in wooden boats below the waterline. Many things are water resistant, few are waterproof. Most glues will fail on fairly short notice if kept underwater. West System epoxy is good enough to use below the waterline if I remember correctly. There are probably a lot of glues that would be OK in a car. Resorcinol (oops I misspelled it in the other post) is still used in wooden airplanes, and aviation suppliers (Wicks, Aircraft Spruce, etc.) are where you find it now.

It does appear to be 1956 Mercury. .

How can you be sure the bugs are all dead? My (Fisher) body has laminated sills and many other laminated parts. It is probably necessary to control warping I guess, or maybe they were just using every scrap of wood. Don't sell hide glue too short. It has a better hold on the wood itself than most if not all modern glues. There is furniture from Tutankhamen's tomb built with hide glue that still has solid joints. The thing is it can't get too wet or too dry or too hot. It is certainly not ideal for cars, but they may not have had anything else in 1931. My 1936 Fisher body used something else for lamination. The mulch found in my doors, that crumbles in your hands, is still laminated. Obviously it is not the hide glue they put the pieces together with. There was no resorcinol until 1941, as far as I know. Maybe blood glue? I have seen a document from the mid 30s from some university in the midwest describing this new technology. If Fisher had it they must have been early adopters. It requires a kiln, so that could explain why individual parts like a latch pillar or a sill might be laminated with it, but the joints holding the parts together into a body were still hide glue. I laminated some of my Ash door parts with resorcinol. It is waterproof and has no known solvents. It is fiddly to use, but probably even tougher than epoxy.

Whats the make/model of the car in the pics?

Any high quality wheel bearing grease will be fine, but synthetic is hard to beat. I like Redline CV-2.

That size just sounds wrong. Do you have any more info? Maybe a picture of the old ones or the rims? Was this car sold in North America originally or was it exported somewhere else? If you mean it has 26 inch rims I am really surprised, as that rim size is from an earlier time, and wasn't even common then. When 26 inch rims were a thing in the teens, that tire size would have been called 36x5, assuming they are straight sided tires. Coker might have some if you have deep pockets. If they are clinchers, all bets are off.

Anyone else remember "Virus Warnings"? Be careful what you wish for.

This particular type of scam has been around for a long time, but is rampant in forums right now. The false names and locations change often, but the M.O. does not. Some other forums I visit have had big red warnings at the top of the front page, and sticky threads about it. People don't read. They get scammed anyway. It would be nice if you could effectively warn people somehow, but right now the warnings would probably outnumber car threads.

Don't do it. Converting a car to electronic ignition to solve a problem is a very bad idea. The car worked when it was new. Adding more levels of complication to a broken car is just digging a hole for yourself. This car is a perfect example. As noted above, the ground wire on the breaker plate is missing. The ground wire completes the circuit for the points, firing the coil. It may very well be the reason for no spark if the plate is not making contact some other way. If the plate is making contact, it may not continue to make contact when the vacuum advance moves it. The vacuum advance moves it a lot. The original-type Pertronix, (a common electronic ignition conversion for old cars like this), fires the coil by grounding it through the breaker plate (and it's ground wire) exactly as the points did. It also depends on that same ground to power the electronic ignition circuitry. Additionally, any defects in the centrifugal or vacuum advance mechanisms will still exist after conversion because it is the same distributor. I often wonder how much of the Pertronix hate I see in this forum and elsewhere results from situations exactly like this. In my opinion, fix the car first. If electronic ignition is wanted, add it after the car runs right. .

A hardtop will have no pillar. With all the windows down it should be wide open from the windwing to the back, like a convertible. .

What I have is so rotten there is no identification by color, or even really much clue what the joints looked like. It was all laying in the bottom of the door, resembling garden mulch more than wood. The Beech guess was made by slicing the end off one of the crumbly chunks and looking the end grain under high magnification. If I remember correctly, the grain structure was all wrong for Poplar. Initially I was sort of hoping it would turn out to be poplar because some is stocked locally. It is also possible not all of the rotten pieces were the same wood. The lock boards are different, they're Ash, and are up high and on the inside, so they are not rotten. Can you still buy Honduras Mahogany? It's been years since I have seen any. I may be more careful about keeping it dry than some former owners, but this car is no trailer queen or show vehicle. It gets used, and on road trips it is definitely going to get wet. It occasionally gets wet in my driveway if I fail to notice a storm coming. The top is steel and does a reasonable job of keeping water out of the main body structure, but the doors are going to get soaked sometimes. There is just no way to seal them up and still have working windows.

I get the "gangster car" thing all the time. It baffles me. A 1936 Pontiac has to be near the bottom of the list of things a 30s gangster might ever be caught in, just edged out by the American Bantam and the Schacht High Wheeler. I just smile and nod. I don't figure it's my job to correct them, and the last thing I want to do is spoil the fun. The gangster car: .

The only engine in the 318 "Wideblock" family I am aware of that came stock with hydraulic lifters is the 1959 326ci version, used only in 1959 Dodges to replace the then-discontinued 1958 Dodge 325. The 1958 Dodge 325 it replaced was another polyspherical engine, but of the same family as Dodge Hemis, not like the 318. The 1959 Dodge 326 was also the first use of this engine family in a car that was not a Plymouth. Engines before 1962 have an odd crank flange for the pre-727 iron transmissions. There are other displacements, 277 and 301 come to mind, and there was also a 313 in Canada for a while. I don't see any reason you couldn't put hydraulic lifters in if you want. IIRC the lifters are side-oiled just like an LA engine. I wouldn't want. Valve and lifter trouble is just non-existant on these engines, even at extreme mileage, unlike the LA. An LA cam will fit but won't work because the valves are in the wrong order. I can't remember the details about the cams and compression on the earlier 4v and 2x4v stuff. It was probably different but rare and pretty mild. To hop these engines up you had cams and pistons made. My foggy memory says the 2x4v cam was different, and the 1958 version 2x4v had 10:1 compression. My books are all packed away in a storage locker, so I can't reasonably look it up. Chamber volume varies by year, but not by much. The 9:1 published compression ratio of the 2 barrel engines did not change. DIstributors, oil pumps, oil pans, timing chains, timing covers, balancers, etc. physically interchange with LA. It is possible to have a post-1969 water pump setup. Cranks are forged and physically interchange with LA (except for pre-62 crank differences. Balancing might be different. .

Could you mean 207? or 216? If so, those engines don't really lend themselves to hopping up. The oiling system and the pistons limit the safe RPM, and raising horsepower almost always means raising RPM. Usually the gearing is more of a problem than horsepower if you just want to cruise faster. Changing the gearing is complicated because they have a torque tube drive. It gets a little easier from 37 up in cars and 40 up in 1/2 tons due to a change in axle design.

Was I the first one who brought it up? I mentioned that I considered buying rot-resistant (and extremely tough) Black Locust If I could get some for my 36 Pontiac rear door rebuild. I couldn't find any, and was a bit gunshy about using it anyway as I am not much of a woodworker and it is reputed to be an extremely difficult wood. I bought a some White Ash at that time as it was available less than 200 miles away, and was the preferred wood for bodies back in the day. I still need to rebuild those doors. I would not assume that Ash is what was always used. Fisher Body had contracts all over the US and Canada, even Washington State! Their volume must have been massive, and I suspect they used whatever they could get their hands on, especially if it was going into a cheaper car. Here in Washington we have mostly evergreen trees, and we certainly aren't a big Ash-producing state. We do have some Alder, although they tend to be small trees, better suited to paper than lumber. I understand Maple is often found in Fisher bodies in Canada, and although I believe Fisher claimed to always use hardwood, I have heard of Southern White Pine being found. The words hardwood and softwood don't mean what most people think, by the way. Those words have more to do with the genetics of the tree. Some hardwoods are really soft, some softwoods are pretty hard. Why would I concern myself with rot resistance? Because those doors will get water in them. It is unavoidable. They have drains, but since there will be a bunch of wood in the bottom of the doors, that isn't as much help as you would think. I will be using the White Ash I bought. The original wood was something else. Looking at the end grain under magnification is a fairly accurate way to identify wood. Looking at the mulch that was once my door wood, under magnification, the rot damage is so severe that a positive ID may not be possible, but it is definitely NOT Ash. The grain structure is not even close. I believe it is Beech, and Beech is a terrible choice for rot resistance. .

Poplar isn't very rot resistant, is it?

My 55 Firedome Special was 2-tone, pink and white. If there was ever a time 3-tone could have happened, 55-56 would have been it. The Firedome Special was one of the cheaper models though, so probably not likely. It sure looks good in that 3 tone blue though! I wouldn't change a thing.

It is probably not going to do that on it's own. I imagine something else is shorted. The power transistor would be a likely suspect but without the schematic diagram it is hard to even guess.

Wheel cylinder grease sounds like probably Sil-Glyde in the US.

What exactly do you mean by "sealed from the elements"? Sealed with epoxy? Consider something like a 1930s sedan door with roll-down windows. Water pours down the outside of the glass into the door. There will probably be some type of a piece of rubber or felt along the window glass to reduce the gallonage, but it really won't do much because the window has to move easily. The wood at the bottom of the door is going to lay there soaking wet and probably rotting. Yes, there are typically drains, but that only means that the wood wont be completely submerged. It sounded to me like a good location for Black Locust (or Osage Orange) if any were readily available.

I've not used it. When researching rot-resistant woods, Osage Orange came up as having similar qualities to Black Locust, but as I understand it the trees are small and tend to be crooked, so you wouldn't get very big pieces of it.

Battery charger? I missed that part somehow.

I don't know about the plate. It seems to be moving up and down? The vacuum advance rotates the plate around the shaft during normal operation, so it wouldn't be locked solid. It has been years since I have seen one of those distributors apart. As I recall, there are 3 ball bearings that hold it in place up/down but still allow the vacuum advance to rotate the plate around the shaft. Perhaps one is missing. There is also supposed to be a ground wire from the plate to the distributor case. It is a special wire made of copper and spring steel strands, because it gets bent constantly as the plate moves, and needs not to break. You need to add that for sure. Bob's Automobilia might have it, but if a real 37 Buick wire is not available, similar wires were used on GM cars and Fords up into the early 70s and you should be able to match something up. The insulated wire running from the post to the points is another similar special wire that needs to deal with constant bending, and it might make sense to just change it too if they are available. At the very least make sure it is not broken. The points should ground the coil as they close. You could connect a test light from the distributor terminal to ground (but fix the breaker plate ground wire first). It should go on and off as the points open and close. If not, does it stay on or stay off?