Bloo

It probably has bump steer because it is so far from original ride height. You need to have a good alignment tech look at that. It may not be correctable at that stance, but it is your best shot.

The current flows in a circle on any system, positive or negative earth. It doesn't really matter which post of the battery is connected to earth, as long as the rest of the equipment is designed to match. In the diagram above battery charging current flows from the generator, through the ammeter, to a connection at the starter post, to the battery, from the battery to earth (meaning the chassis, the body, engine, straps, etc., all electrically connected together) and from earth back to the generator again. On a negative earth system the current would flow in the same circle, just in the opposite direction.

On a metal plate tacked to the firewall, engine compartment side, left side of car. Not sure if they put it anywhere else.

Did anyone find the barn?

I know what you mean, 95 percent of that sort of stuff floating around is from a later time, and I wouldn't hold much hope of it being a period piece. Nevertheless Studebaker dealers were selling the EMF 30 and the Flanders 20 in 1912, that is a historical fact.

So, did anyone see the top half of the engine in those pics? I wonder where that is?

I've got a radiator.....

You are correct, however I took 10 crankshaft degrees of centrifugal advance and 10 degrees of vacuum advance out of my flathead Pontiac to stop it kicking back on itself from too much timing. It met book spec before, and I fought it for a very long time because I couldn't quite believe it even though all the symptoms pointed to too much timing. The factory specs for the car have gobs of tolerance, but I am definitely out of spec now on centrifugal and almost out of spec on vacuum. It was so much too much that the 5 degree retard trick I suggested above to figure it out did not work. It runs terrific now. I note with puzzlement that my current timing curve looks a lot like what the Flathead Ford gurus are recommending for flathead Fords these days. I can't explain it, as the gas was MUCH lower octane in 1936 when the car was made. Also others with different makes/models have had to advance the timing for modern fuel as logic would suggest. That is also correct. A modern car with an oxygen sensor will just richen the mixture to compensate and burn more fuel. Our old cars should logically wind up too lean. However, some of them were too rich in the first place, and even on cars new enough to have a pretty good fuel curve I have not run into one yet that I had to rejet richer. It surprises me and I can't explain it. The 1936 Pontiac is currently burning Ethanol laced fuel and I have it jetted 2 steps LEANER than stock. The leaner I went,the better it ran. I suspect I could get away with another step leaner. My advice is to stick with factory spec until it is proven wrong. I have a sneaking hunch that when it is all said and done the 303 will prove to have some other problem.

1946, what an odd year to pick. They missed Pierce Arrow as Grimy pointed out, but who were they referencing? Chevrolet got it in 1956. Nash still didn't have it in 51. Studebaker got it on the V8 in mid 63. I don't believe any Ford flatheads had it, and those went to 53. I don't recall seeing it on Hudsons. Buick? I don't think they had it in 46. Those external disposable cans on Chryslers were partial flow weren't they? Who adopted full flow filtering in 1946?

Well.... they SORT OF existed at the same time, and the same time would be 1912. The Flanders 20 and the EMF 30 were being sold through the Studebaker (horse drawn) dealer network with Studebaker script hung on the radiators. Studebaker gas powered cars would come along late that year as 1913 models. That doesn't mean it's period, It just means it's possible.

This changed every couple of years back in the 30s and varied by make and model. If you don't have a shop manual for that car get one and do exactly what it says. If you don't know where to get one (maybe Ebay?) send KornKurt on this forum a PM and ask. He has parts. If he doesn't have the book he probably knows who to ask. California Pontiac Restoration is another possibility.

Check EVERYTHING. Clean out and repack your wheel bearings and adjust them correctly. Check for kingpin play while it is up in the air. Many old cars need kingpin work. It's one of the first things to go. If they're OK, give them a shot of grease because they always need one. Spin the wheels too and make sure they (and the tires) are straight and round. Balance if possible. Make sure your steering box is full of appropriate lube (Penrite's might be about right for a 30s Pontiac, but check the manual). Adjust the steering box according to the manual. Rebuild if it won't adjust. Check all your tie rod ends, clean out and adjust. Replace any balls that are oval and causing slop when the car is pointed straight ahead. Regrease. Align the front end to the factory specs. If there's no shop that specializes in prewar stuff, go to one that does heavy truck, bus, and motorhome. Why? Because if camber is off you most likely set it by cold bending the axle, and a modern car shop wont have the equipment or know how. Toe is set by the drag link and caster is set with tapered shims (another thing only a truck outfit will have). Inspect your shackles for wear, stuck bushings, and slop. Grease any that have fittings. If they won't take grease, take them apart and find out why. Straight axles were prone to death wobble, and it is one reason they aren't used much anymore. The engineers of the time knew this of course and didn't send it out the door when new doing that. If you get rid of the slop and use their alignment specs it will be fine. Good luck and let us know how it goes.

The timing advances with RPM. It also advances with vacuum. If it should go too far for the compression, or the fuel, or the engine speed, or just too early altogether (piston isn't all the way up when the pressure wave hits) the engine will rattle or run rough. It might detonate, ping, or just try to kick back on some firing impulses. If less timing makes it smooth out, too much timing (at that particular speed and load) is probably the issue. Otherwise. probably not. Ideally, the centrifugal advance should track what the engine wants for maximum power at full throttle at any RPM. There is no vacuum at full throttle, so no vacuum advance. At part throttle, the fuel charges burn slower, and the engine would like the fuel lit sooner to get the maximum good out of it. This is what vacuum advance is for, additional advance for part throttle operation. Just like centrifugal advance, too much vacuum advance will make the engine ping, rattle, or try to kick back on itself. Since it is combined with centrifugal advance, but is a set amount of advance (20* in this case IIRC), there is going to be some problem RPM that limits how much total vacuum advance you can have.

All GM gas gauges of this period are the same electrically. It is zero ohms (or very close) for empty and 30 ohms for full. The sending unit therefore needs to be a 0-30 ohm unit for a GM car. If it isn't, it won't work with the stock gauge. Don't forget to zero your ohmmeter before you test. Short the leads together, and if its analog there will be a little thumbwheel to zero it. If it is a modern DMM there should be a "delta" button. If you test from the wire that goes to the gauge from the tank (use one meter lead) to chassis ground (use the other), with the gauge disconnected from the wire you are testing, you should have something inbetween 0 (almost) and 30 (or a wee bit more). It should roughly represent how much gas is in the tank, too. If it is way high try grounding the tank to the chassis better. Do it from a sending unit screw if you can reach it. If not, get a good connection to the tank somehow. If that doesn't get you something between 0-30 ohms, and it is still high, either the wire is broken somewhere between where you are testing and the tank, or the sending unit is bad. You may need to pull the tank at that point. If it is stuck low, and the tank isn't close to empty, either the wire is shorted on it's way to the tank or the sending unit has a problem, probably a sunk float. If you cant find a short, you may need to pull the tank. That should suss out the sending unit. The gauge itself needs power from the ignition switch on one terminal and the sending unit hooked to the other. It matters which terminal is which. In addition to the two terminals there is a ground for the gauge itself. The gauge touches something on the cluster (you can see the spot if it's apart), and the cluster gets its ground through the dash. Fresh paint can screw this up. The gauge itself must have it's own good ground. To test the gauge, if you disconnect the wire going to the tank, and the ignition is on, the gauge should peg full. If you short the gauge terminal to ground, the one you just took the tank wire off of, the gauge should peg empty. If it won't do this it wont work. Check power and ground to the gauge (most likely) or you might just have a bad gauge (less likely). I don't know what resistor you are referring to. As far as I know it shouldn't have one. Is this a 12v conversion? If so, maybe someone tried to use a resistor to drop the voltage. That doesn't work well because the load isn't constant. Some have used a "RUNTZ" voltage dropper. In various forum threads I have been in some swear it works for a gas gauge and others swear it doesn't. I've not tried it myself so I don't know. It does sound more likely to work right than a resistor.

To check total you would add the initial timing (whatever it is currently set to, as checked with your light) to the 30 degrees, and check that at 3700rpm. Vacuum should be disconnected and plugged. Look for the mark to be at TDC exactly. More likely you would use the buttons on the dialback timing light to line the mark up to TDC, and then read the actual number afterward off of the timing light. To check vacuum, you would make a second run with a hand vacuum pump and put a whole bunch of vacuum on the vacuum advance. Should add about 20 degrees to your reading in this case. OR- To check vacuum you could pull a bunch of vaccuum at idle with your pump and see how much the timing changes. Note the RPM. Now run the RPM up to the same level without vacuum. See how much the timing changes. Subtract your second number from the first. Should have about 20 degrees. Timing tape is another way. The tape has to be the right diameter for the crank pulley or harmonic balancer. MSD makes a kit with a bunch of different sizes. Then you can see advance with a regular timing light (no dialback). As mentioned by Joe, the best way is a distributor machine, but not many people have those. Don't hold it at 3700rpm all day with no load on the engine. Make a real quick check and let it back down. You can't compensate by just setting the timing if it is wrong at high RPM, at least no more than a couple of degrees. If it is wrong at the high end, and you reset it so it is right, it will be wrong at the low end. If it is way off, distributor work is necessary to correct. If you have heard of "all in by 20*" or something, that is done mainly with light cars in bracket racing and almost never with cars in more of a normal state of tune for the street. It doesn't work very well unless the engine has a huge cam and is running inefficiently at low RPM because of it. A "normal" American v8 usually has a "compound curve", advance goes up real fast until 2500rpm (or so) and then slows way down for the rest of the trip. On older ones that don't rev real high, the first half may be a little slower or lazier, and the second slower half of the curve may not be present or necessary. If I suspected that, before doing anything else I would first set the timing 5* retarded and see if it improves massively. Only pay attention to what happens at high RPM where you were having trouble. Then, set the timing back to the factory setting and disconnect and plug the vacuum advance and try again. It might run horrible, stall or bog at idle and/or low RPM but you can ignore that. If neither helps it is probably something else.

I wouldn't put too much stock in that. Some of Consumer Reports choices of the 1980s and 1990s would make great entertainment today. Likely not much different in the 1950s. As for the 1955 Willys engine mentioned, it's just the Kaiser 226, also known as the Continental Red Seal, also known as the Graham Six before the war. Graham ran them with superchargers in the late 30s. Kaiser may have as well after the war. It is 226ci vs what maybe 161ci for the Willys engine? They called the 226 an "older, long stroke design", and admittedly it is dated as a car engine in 1955. You might want that extra torque though if you are going to have a Hydra-Matic behind it, and the car mentioned did. Personally I would much rather have a stick and a Borg Warner overdrive. If I am not mistaken, Willys offered it. I imagine that would be derided as an older design as well, dating from several years before the war. Those engines were used long before and long after 1955 in industrial applications where reliability is greatly valued. Nobody else thought it was a bad engine.

How does the pipe attach? Is there packing in there or something?

If you run the battery ground cable to the frame, then there also needs to be a another cable just as big and just as good from the frame to the engine/transmission. Some cars were wired this way. Think of the electrical current for the starter (which is huge) running in a circle from the battery to the starter through the positive cable and back to the battery through the ground. As far as I know, Chevrolet didn't do that in the early 30s, they ran the ground cable right to the transmission so the starter current has a direct path. The chassis and body still would need to be grounded, so that lights and accessories attached to them will have a ground, but those would not need to be huge cables. I don't know where the body or chassis grounds were located so I can't answer that part of your question. The people on the VCCA forums would know for sure. http://vccachat.org

Not an upgrade but not a downgrade either. Running the wires parallel, or through steel parts of any kind is asking for trouble. Buick for instance got away with it for years but that does not make it a good idea. If you are having driveability problems, I suggest running without steel covers or looms until you get it sorted and THEN put the wires back in them. Make sure the wires are tied out of harms way in the mean time. You can get shocked getting close to a good wire, but probably not that much. I make it a point to avoid them. If energy is jumping through the insulation, and the insulation is not damaged, the problem is likely that the voltage is too high. The resistance of all wires and parts between the coil tower and the plug set the voltage level. I know that's counterintuitive, but it's true. Check all wires with an ohmmeter (a cheap DMM works). Resistance should be really low on solid wires. On carbon, maybe a few Kohm, with the longer ones being higher than the short ones. Also check that the carbon button in the cap is present, and make sure it is touching the rotor. It might be spring loaded, or the rotor could have a spring steel blade that touches it. Whatever it has, make sure the two touch and there is not a gap. If there is a resistor in the rotor, check it with the ohmmeter too (center to tip). A few Kohm at most, and you probably will just have solid metal and not a resistor on an antique. Gap your plugs. If you are getting shocked by the distributor, check that it is well grounded to the block, and look the cap over real good for cracks and carbon tracks.

Discs will only really improve things if the brakes are FADING after use. DIscs do tend to feel a little better because they are linear, and do not have the servo action of the drums. That also means that they are harder to push, so if manual they are going to have a harder pedal (or a much higher and mushier pedal). If power, they would probably require a more powerful booster. If the booster doesn't have enough power, you will run out of boost on hard braking when you need it the most. Dual master cylinders are a very dubious "improvement". They are necessary with disc brakes usually just because they were ubiquitous by the time disc brakes really got sorted out and widely used on American cars. You do need a huge brake fluid reservoir and that's how you get it. The fluid level goes down on disc brakes when the pads wear, and you need to not run out. On drum brakes fluid capacity isn't a problem, and you have several seals that can cause failure, where a single master cylinder has only one or maybe two depending on how you look at it. On a rear wheel drive car, the brakes are split front to back. The idea is that if you have a failure you will still have the other 2 brakes. If the two you have are the fronts, the car still stops pretty well. If they are the rears..... well... they don't do much. Also you could get those 2 rears by just stomping on the parking brake. In order to take advantage of the 2 remaining brakes you have to have more pedal travel because if one set fails, the pedal will be low due to the loss of fluid pressure in the other 2 brakes. You have to have enough travel to bottom out the dual master cylinder (or nearly so). Otherwise it wont matter if you still have those 2 brakes because you cant reach them. If power, the booster has to have enough travel, too. Often it doesn't. Lastly, when looking at any disc brake brackets or kits, know that "bolt on" usually means that they will bolt to the spindles, nothing more. Generally speaking the engineering is up to you. Enough about discs. You asked how to improve the drums. I feel particularly qualified to comment on this part because I drove a drum brake C-body Mopar almost like this up to an absurd mileage. It had nearly 400k miles on it when it got totaled (150k when i got it), so I have a lot of seat time. There were 2 things that made a massive improvement in the brakes. The first was "blueprinting" them (more or less). The original brake shoes have a sharp kinked edge where the shoes contact the backing plate. They dig in and cause the shoe to sit not quite square, as well as possibly drag or get stuck on the way out. Newer shoes automatically fix this to some extent because they have a flat pad on the shoe instead of the kinked edge. It tends to bridge the damage. Mine were quite bad. I took the backing plates off and chucked them in a lathe. Using a dial indicator, I ran them around and checked the height of all those pads. I straightened the plates as needed, and then welded up the damaged pads (the bottom two on each plate were worn almost through). I then ground them down flat, and checked them on the lathe to make sure they were all the same height. Then, I turned all the drums and arc-ground all the shoes to match the specs in the manual. An .006 feeler gauge at one end I think it was but don't quote me, check the manual. That made an obvious significant improvement driving the car, and eliminated all the pulling to one side, spongy pedal. etc that used to plague freshly done drum brake jobs until the shoes wore in back in those days. The second thing that made an even bigger difference was modern brake shoes. On the next brake job the car got after that, some years later, I replaced the linings with Non-Asbestos. I had them arc ground to match the drums, as before. These were just some middle of the road brake shoes from shortly after Asbestos was banned. They came from a warehouse that supplied a local brake-muffler chain, although I doubt they were any different than what NAPA was hawking. The difference they made was huge. They were harder, so had less servo action feel, and gave a lot more control with the power brakes, but would dig in and pull down better in a panic stop. They were more fade-resistant coming down the mountain passes around here too. I noticed similar improvements on other cars after that, some of which had manual brakes. One caveat, those non-asbestos shoes, at the time (maybe still?) would expand when they broke in. You had to break them in and get them hot with the brakes adjusted a little loose, other wise you might get stuck with wheels that wont turn, and have to come back home on a tow truck. I had already heard the horror stories about that from other mechanics, so I disabled my self adjusters, left the adjustment a little loose, and went out and got them hot. Then I took them back to the shop, enabled the adjusters, and adjusted the shoes.

So it is broken at the engine end? Or the heater core end? If it is broken at the heater core, just loop it temporarily. Either make a loop with a new piece of hose from one of the engine connections to the other, or even easier, you could take the two ends of the two hoses that went to the heater core and splice them together with a cheap flushing tee, and just tighten the clamps. Be sure to tie it all out of harm's way. If something broke at the engine end, it will have to be fixed.

In my experience, it is less the number of turns, and more how far you have to wind the spring around before hooking it (manual generally has this). If the spring is a random one, you might have to fudge this, because god only knows which way it might point at rest. If it is really wrong, it will just open at the wrong speed. Generally speaking, heat risers should have some fairly good tension cold, and not open instantly. However, when the engine is fully warm (just barely, but fully warm), and the choke is fully open and on slow idle (if automatic), the heat riser should be all the way open. I am not sure if you could really tell with a heat gun, You could tell if the spring pulls the right direction though. The weight should be "helping" keep it open. On most inline engines the weight is up high cold, and falls down as the spring releases, usually toward the engine. It is pretty easy to get the spring backwards if you aren't looking close. Still better to get the right parts if you can. Hope this helps.

It is desirable to have the correct spring, however a cheap local spring beats the pants off of having an inoperative heat riser.

This never ends well. Brass is fine further down the pipe, but up there it is just going to fail. Always better to replace if you can, exhaust manifolds are such highly stressed parts.

1) I have no idea. I'm running tubeless radials on my 36. The rivets don't leak air, so must be really tight. I imagine looseness would cause tube chafing, but then you would have more to worry about than tube chafing. Collecting good condition wheels was the hard part. For what its worth, none of the tires I took off of used wheels I bought had flaps inside. Flaps couldn't hurt I guess but would add weight. Are you in Early Times Chapter? The club president has a well-sorted 1937 Eight that he and his wife have driven cross country multiple times. I know he runs Lester bias-ply tires with tubes in them, and has driven enough to wear out 2 sets in fairly recent years. I never thought to ask him about flaps. PM me if you would like his contact info. 2) A fan blade must be perfectly balanced or it will tear itself and the water pump up, often with catastrophic results. I don't know about the 37 blades. If you believe someone has been bending on them, just replace it. There are fans on some cars that have the arms sticking out at uneven clock positions around the hub. It is to reduce fan noise. They are still balanced. I don't think this is what you meant, but throwing it out there just in case. 3) Like jdshott, I think it is just to reduce the chance of shorts. The ring terminals will probably be bigger around than the posts. This much I do know, it is just a switch. It makes no difference which wire goes on which post. 4) Probably not, because the usual setup in those days for many makes and models had you removing the nose piece, front fenders and radiator as an assembly to do work on the engine, pulling a water tube out for instance. It was supposed to be fairly easy to remove the whole nose. All these years later, with rust etc, it might not be that easy. I have not had to do it to the 1936 yet, but it looks like there are blind bolt heads everywhere, and taking the nosepiece off without the fenders would be a non-starter. It sounds like jdshott has better ideas about how to get the radiator out.