Bloo

Anyone who thinks they are a bad idea should have a go at driving a prewar car in city traffic while hand signaling. I suspect you will leave with a different outlook. No, I don't use one on my own car, but it isn't real tough to imagine why you would want one.

When researching what wood to use for my Pontiac doors, I discovered that White Ash is the preferred wood for bodies, and not just for ease of forming. It is also lightweight, resistant to splitting, flexible, somewhat rot resistant, etc. I have however encountered folks who wont use it in modern times because of it's attractiveness to powderpost beetles. I came to the same conclusion you did about Black Locust, it is probably the best domestic wood for rot resistance, but destroys tools. I might have been willing to try it, but never found any for sale or any evidence that it was ever a commercial lumber. Have you seen any for sale?

I wouldn't fault you for using grade 8 studs, I probably would. If your manifold assembly is not perfectly flat, get it machined. It really does matter. The whole thing needs to be able to move at it heats, especially the exhaust. It will grow with heat at a faster rate than the block does. Look down your stud holes to make sure as the manifold gets slightly longer, it wont hit the studs. Ideally with the engine cold the studs should be near the outside of the holes out at the ends of the manifold. Most cars use slightly coned washers with the high outer edge down against the manifold, not sure about flathead Pontiac, as I have not had my manifolds off. Above all don't use soft washers that can squirt down into the holes and block motion. Also make sure the washers themselves will not block motion by getting trapped between the something hitting the washer's outside edge and the stud as the manifold expands. The expansion will happen. if something blocks it things will break, Maybe studs, but usually the exhaust manifold.

Probably an AACA Forum member. It wouldn't be the first time. The moderators here are wise to this sort of crap, and usually jump all over it. One still must be vigilant. Someone will be the first target.

Worthpoint is a service that archives old ebay auctions and cruddy low resolution versions of the pictures from them. If you pay them, you can see what things sold for long after they disappear off ebay. Possibly useful to some people. Not a selling platform as far as I know.

I have not used my acetylene lights much, but when I did, they were super effective. As long as you have good mirrors inside, they will make electric lights of the period look like toys. I just looked and mine are plumbed in acetylene welding hose. Nothing unsafe about that. It is made for the purpose.

The lights on the car in the black and white picture do appear to be acetylene. They look bigger than typical sidelights, but much smaller than car headlights. I wonder if they could be motortcycle headlights?

The situation outlined in the original post is a classic scam. A hallmark of it is someone telling you he knows who has it, please call my friend at (xxx) xxx-xxxx or whatever. Wanting Western Union or some other transfer service that has no recourse is another. Having a payment address in a location that is not the same as the parts is something that comes up time and time again. The number of excuses that have to be made up to justify that last one must be huge. Another common thing said is "I'm working on an Oil Rig, and the parts are at home so I can't take more pictures", though I think people are finally getting wise about that excuse. This particular scam, as described in the original post, is rampant right now in every online vehicle forum. Lots of good advice in the thread so far, however don't use Western Union or some similar money transfer service.

Obviously I missed something. Is there another thread? That could be on motorcycles. The headlights-as-an-option idea was a bit earlier on cars, it was pretty much standard equipment by 1913. In fact, by 1913 quite a few cars had electric lights. My 1913 Studebaker 25 has acetylene headlights and a Prestolite tank. Bigger Studebakers already had electric lights in 1913 as did many other cars. By 1914, acetylene lights were pretty much extinct on cars, though some trucks had them through 1921 or so. What is a 1914 Princess? SIdelamps are a whole separate issue, and typically burn kerosene (or "lamp oil" today) on cars that have acetylene headlights. They are typically electric on cars with electric headlights, and a 1914 car would almost certainly have electric headlights. I think the lines on my Studebaker are some combination of copper(?) tubing and rubber acetylene welding hose (I'd have to look), but welding regulators and torch bodies for acetylene are made entirely of brass. I can't imagine them doing that if it was reactive. Has anyone else heard this? .

I am a former 53 Chevy sedan (with original equipment visor) owner. I can't answer but I do have some thoughts and know what I would do next. Regarding the hardtop visor, it is WIDER than your car? How can that be? I can imagine a Pontiac being wider than a Chevy, but not the other way around. GM reused some stampings and bodies across divisions, but there are only about 3 different "sizes" of GM car. In 1940 for instance, Pontiac offered all three. Your roof looks exactly like a 53 Chevy hardtop to me. I would be willing to bet it is the same stamping, and anyway Chevys are smallest and the only way to go is up. That wider visor must be for a some car that uses a larger GM body, maybe a Buick or Olds. Regarding the sedan visor. It looks exactly like what was on my 53 Chevy sedan, and yes sedans are different, so that one isn't what you want. That curve approximates the curve of the sedan's trim, but it does not match quite perfectly even on the car it belongs on. Also, they are tilted down more than your picture shows. From inside the car they cover more windshield than you would expect. I would start by looking up windshields for your car and seeing if the 1953 Chevy hardtop takes a different windshield than the 1953 Pontiac hardtop. Be sure to leave Canadian Pontiacs (Pathfinder, Laurentian, etc.) out of your search as they really did use whole Chevrolet-type bodies from the cowl back, and that will confuse the issue. Good luck. .

Vacuum advance is used because at part throttle the mixture in the cylinders is less dense and burns slower. Therefore, with mechanical advance only, the pressure from the fire occurs late after the piston is already going down. You can get away with only mechanical advance, and many cars have (like some versions of the rear-engine Volkswagen Beetle), but it is not ideal. Since the fire occurs late, some of the energy is wasted. It reduces fuel economy and part-throttle throttle response. It also puts more heat into the exhaust than necessary, because quite a bit of the fuel is still burning when the exhaust valve opens. Intake manifold vacuum is fairly high at part throttle and at idle. It is highest coming down a hill on compression with the throttle closed. Conversely, manifold vacuum is zero or extremely low at full throttle because the manifold is open to the atmosphere. You can use this vacuum to advance the timing at part throttle to a more ideal setting, and that is what is generally done. The amount of vaccuum advance needed at different speeds and loads could vary, but generally it is something on the order of 15 or 20 crankshaft degrees on a more modern OHV engine. There will be some limit to how much you can have before too much advance at some particular RPM becomes a problem. Usually it is right around the breakover point of the centrifugal advance. This one spot limits what you can have everywhere else, but usually it doesn't limit you very much. The vacuum advance will be shown as a straight-ish curve, as shown in the graphic below for an adjustable vacuum advance can. In reality, that curve is pretty steep, and vacuum advance is almost more like a switch, on or off. If you want to see why, drive your car with a vacuum gauge attached and watch how sharply vacuum drops when you go from part throttle cruise to acceleration. When you step on the throttle hard, the vacuum advance goes away, and sends you back to the only the centrifugal curve, and that is what you want for acceleration. Vacuum advance can be triggered by either manifold vacuum or ported vacuum. Manifold vacuum is connected directly to the manifold and is on all the time. Ported vacuum comes from a port right by the throttle plate. The port is above the throttle plate at idle and there is no vacuum. As soon as you crack the throttle, the port is below the throttle plate, and there is manifold vacuum. The only difference, is that with manifold vacuum the vacuum advance is "on" at idle and with ported vacuum the vacuum advance is off at idle. Example: if you have a 20 crankshaft degree vacuum advance, and the static timing is set at 5 degrees, with manifold vacuum the engine will be idling at 25 degrees, and with ported vacuum it will be idling at 5 degrees. Everything else is the same. Ported vacuum is typically used on street driven engines that idle smoothly, as massive amounts of extra advance at idle just wont work on most of them, and would cause you to have to compromise the advance curve elsewhere. To avoid any confusion, I will repeat that any Ford or Holley Loadomatic (venturi vacuum) systems as used on some specific Fords in the 40s-50s-60s need to be left completely out of the discussion, and have their own separate discussion. Otherwise the water gets too muddy. .

To get a grasp on this, centrifugal advance and vacuum advance need to be thought of separately. Also, any Ford or Holley Loadomatic (venturi vacuum) systems as used on some specific Fords in the 40s-50s-60s need to be left completely out of the discussion, and have their own separate discussion. Otherwise the water gets too muddy. To get the most power out of an engine, you must light the fire while the piston is still on it's way up. This is because the fire takes a little while to get going, and you want the maximum push to take place just past top dead center. Light it too early however and the engine may try to kick back on itself, or slam the rod straight down right at TDC. The centrifugal advance should be arranged to meet the engine's needs under full power and full throttle. This is the least advance the engine will ever want at any given RPM. Typically an engine needs the advance to rise quickly with engine RPM at lower engine speeds and then advance more slowly at higher engine speeds. The breakover from the fast part of the curve to the slow one often occurs somewhere around 2500 rpm. This is called a "compound curve". An example is shown below: In this example there are 2 curves shown, indicating tolerance for manufacturing. The actual curve should fall between the two curves shown. Also note the change from the steep/fast part to the slower part occurs at 1000 crankshaft RPM, much sooner than the 2500-ish RPM of a typical car. A common way to achieve this is with 2 springs. One lightweight spring acts on the advance weights first, then a second stronger spring with a big open loop becomes tight (at 1000 RPM in the example above) and both springs act until the mechanism hits the end of it's travel, 6000 RPM in that particular graph. That is higher than most cars. The breakover point, the strength of the springs that set the slopes on the graph, the total travel of the advance mechanism. etc. are all chosen to make the engine make all the power it can under full load and wide open throttle. Any less advance at a given RPM would make the engine weaker. Any more would create a situation where you could give the engine more throttle and cause the engine to need less advance and try to kick back on itself, reducing power, making pinging noises, and possibly causing permanent damage. In older cars, sometimes due to engines that turn slow, or flathead engines that typically want less advance than OHV engines, etc. the second half of the curve can become completely unnecessary and is often omitted. The second half of the curve is also sometimes omitted in hotrodded engines, but that is for different reasons and is beyond the scope of this post. This post mainly applies to street driven engines that will idle smoothly. I'll tackle vacuum advance in my next post or in an edit of this one

I am not convinced putting the sending unit on the side is a terrible design. Ford got away with it for decades (Chrysler too IIRC) using a locking ring and a square cut o ring. They still leak when the sender is up on top. The gas sloshes all over when you drive, comes out the bad seal on top, and the whole car stinks like gas. It's just a lot harder to see where it is coming from. By the time you get the tank down, the gas will have evaporated. Hopefully there's a tell-tale stain or something. It is also hard to tell whether your repair really worked. I hope you don't really mean sheet metal screws. If so, that is a terrible design. I would expect machine screws. They are screws in name only, having bolt threads. I have a hard time believing Buick sent it out the door with sheet metal screws. I can believe it with aftermarket parts though, as they are often crap. Look at your original tank and see if it has a flange with real threads. I'll bet it does. Gas will just come up the threads, which are not sealed, and are a spiral path from inside the tank. If it has real threads, there are some things you can do. 1). Make your own gasket out of cork/rubber gasket material that fits tightly around the threads. This makes it a bit of a pain to install, but worth it. 2). Put purple (low strength) Loctite on the threads. Blue will do in a pinch. It seals the threads, and also allows you to decide how much you want to squish the gasket (to prevent splitting it), with no worries about the screws backing out. Tighten evenly as if you were torquing a cylinder head. 3). Use copper washers under the screw heads as a seal. This is the old fashioned method, and likely what they did in 1958. I might use more than one of these methods, maybe even all three. That sounds like a terrible idea. A dry cork-rubber gasket with undersize screw holes is the way to go. I don't know what you mean by Permatex, as they make a bunch of sealers now, but if you mean old fashioned Permatex like #1 or #2, or Indian Head, they are Shellac based. Alcohol is the solvent for them, and modern gas is laced with alcohol. They were never ideal on gasoline in the first place. If you mean a silicone-based compound, gasoline destroys those even if there is no alcohol. The only sealer I have ever seen that will stand up to gasoline long term is Seal-All, and it is a bit brittle. I would only use it as a last resort. If those are really sheet metal screws (not machine screws), I guess I would put Seal-All on them and pray.

That never existed.

Does this mean the sills were still wood (and subject to rot) or just the floorboards? If the sills still were wood, how is replacement done? Is the rest of the steel structure stout enough that you can just lift the whole body up from the door holes or something like that?

That is a "threaded sleeve" fitting. They are available at Blackhawk Supply online.

Does this have only one small wire connected to the coil and an armored cable going to the key switch? If so, the whole point is to prevent you from jumping it. Here's how you jump it. Get another 6 volt ignition coil off some other car (or from NAPA) that has 2 terminals. Any modern one will, as the one for the armored cable setup is no longer made. Bolt it to the engine close to the other coil. Hook the small distributor wire to the (-) terminal on the coil. Plug the coil wire in the top, and run 6 volts to the (+) terminal. Best to rig yourself up a temporary switch for the 6 volts so you can shut the engine off.

I don't think its a car battery either. It is from the description a UK product though, and I am not nearly as familiar with early UK cars, or whether they may have had any 10 volt ones. I agree it was most likely for a lighting plant or something. Maybe rural telephone. Glass battery jars in cars did exist though. I just received copies of a bunch of sales and service bulletins from the Hupp Club about the 1915-1917 Hupmobile model N. The subject of cracked glass battery jars comes up again and again. The glass jars were inside a wooden box. .

36 is wood. 37 depends on series or model.

I believe the glass jar (or jars) went inside a wooden box on the type of storage battery used in cars. Cracked jars were a common defect.

Welcome to the forum! Did you mean 1940? I believe that engine displacement was used 1937-1940. I would send a PM to KornKurt here on the forum, as he is a good source of parts and if he doesn't have anything he may know where to look. You could also check with California Pontiac Restoration http://www.pontiacparts.net Early Times Chapter is a good club for these cars, and if you aren't already a member, I recommend it. http://www.earlytimeschapter.org/About_ETC.html If I remember correctly 2 or 3 of those engines have passed through the classifieds in the last couple of years. .

Do it like torquing a head. Tighten the center bolts first but not all the way. Work your way out from the center in a criss-cross or snail pattern until all bolts are about the same amount snug. Make a second pass, starting in the center again moving to the outside, bringing the bolts up to about 2/3 or 3/4 of full tightness, but evenly. Make a third pass from the center out, bringing the bolts to full torque this time. If it were me, I would make one last pass still at full torque to recheck that all bolts are at full torque. This is good advice for any large piece with a bunch of bolts in it, if there is no factory procedure or torque pattern to follow.

It's the same tire size 30x3-1/2, but Ford, as far as I know, never used the setup pictured in this thread from the factory. On a Ford, if you had wooden felloes the rims were not demountable, USA Fords had 30x3-1/2" only on the back (all 4 were 30x3-1/2" in Canada). If the Ford had factory Demountable rims, they were 30x3-1/2 all the way around but the felloes were steel, and the parts do not quite interchange with any wood felloe Stanweld/Perlman/Jaxon stuff. There were at least 4 demountable rim suppliers to Ford, and the parts did not even interchange with each other until Ford standardized it sometime in the 20s. Stanweld however, like many other wheel builders offered aftermarket demountable rim kits for Fords. It is likely that Perlman and Jaxon would have as well. Model T collectors are a good place to start looking for anything 30x3-1/2, even if it isn't Ford.

I have a 1913 Studebaker that takes 30x3-1/2 tires. My wheels are Stanweld, and while searching for wheel wedges I learned that in this size (only), Stanweld, Perlman, and Jaxon are all almost the same thing and the parts interchange. There was a big lawsuit, I am not sure if it is the same lawsuit referred to in this thread, but it rendered Stanweld more or less unavailable by 1914. My Stanweld wedges look almost exactly like Ben P.'s Perlman wedge pictured a few posts back. A couple of them have the name "Stanweld" where Ben P.'s say Perlman, but most are blank. Jaxon wedges for this size are narrower and do not have a captured nut but are physically interchangeable. The rims are physically interchangeable too. Jaxon rims have the block that keeps the rim from rotating on the wheel embossed, while Stanweld (and probably Perlman) have it tack welded on, but that makes no difference in actual use. I believe Chevrolet used Jaxon 30x3-1/2" around 1918, so those parts may be easier to find. Tires would have been 30x3-1/2 that actually measure 31x4 at that time. There is a bunch of wedge information in this thread, as well as a pic of one of my Stanweld wedges. .

As I understand it, The disappearance of true 30x3-1/2 tires, and 31x4 clinchers, was part of the standardization for the war effort in WW1. Under the new system, Tires marked 30x3-1/2 were clincher tires, but measured 31x4. Tires marked 31x4 were 31x4 straight sided tires, not clinchers. After WW1 the true 30x3-1/2 never resurfaced, and probably not anything marked 31x4 clincher either, only "30x3-1/2 oversize" clincher tires that really measure 31x4. If Buick had been selling cars that took 31x4 clinchers before WW1, they might have updated their books to reflect that the tires that had been called 31x4 clincher were now called 30x3-1/2. It's not just something close that fits.... It's the same size. .