Bloo

If you have what i think you have for bleeders, it is a fairly common prewar setup on some makes. The screw just keeps crap out of the bleeder. It is analogous to the rubber cap used on modern bleeders. Just take the screws out. Bleed as normal. Put all the screws in when you are done. A nipple to thread into the bleeder where the screw was would be handy, and probably exists, but I have never seen one. Maybe you can cram a hose or the boot of a vacuum bleeder over the outside of the bleeder. If not, you might have to let them squirt when you bleed. If the car is restored, and it is pretty under there, you may need to make a nipple adapter.... or change the bleeders to modern ones, because brake fluid removes paint.

The water will contract when it cools just as surely as it expands when it heats.

I don't know who did pressure caps first, Pontiac did it on their eights in 1936, and I think that is pretty early. Just to clarify, I don't think a pressure cap is needed to make an overflow tank work. The radiator cap would have to seal. The only path to the atmosphere would have to be through the overflow tank, otherwise it would not siphon. The water has to have some place to go when it expands, as others have noted. That space is typically the top tank of the radiator. Sometimes it is a "surge tank", as seen on some Packards and early 60s Fords. In that case the radiator stays completely full and the airspace is still under the radiator cap, but in the surge tank. Cars with an overflow tank are the only ones that get filled all the way up.

Speedometer as a tach. That's either second and high, or high and overdrive. I think the latter.

Have you seen a jump starter like that for 6 volts?

For what it's worth thats a 1966, and probably doesn't quite interchange with 1965 (but it might with a change of the plastic trim).

And just a few posts back this thread was so great...... This right here is what it's about, at least for some of us. Here's one of mine... And one I stole from C Carl, I hope he wont mind too much... Matt, at the risk of telling you a bunch of stuff you already know, and I suspect that is what I am doing because I have seen you explain to people in these forums time and time again the right way to sort out a car. You do a much better job of it than I could. So, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, it was FLOODED! That is something you just had to deal with now and then when nearly all cars were carbureted. Yeah, nobody has odd sized 6 volt batteries. Yeah, most jumper cables are speaker wire with a half inch of insulation on them. Yeah they don't work on 6 volts, or cars with completely dead batteries. I'll bet you have seen all this before..... Patience is what it takes, and patience is in my opinion the toughest thing to get. Tougher than money or repair skill by far. When I was young I was on a mission to be a real life Gus Wilson. Like a lot of young guys, I got pissed off pretty easily. Even when I understood what a stumbling block that was, and what needed to happen, it seemed damn near impossible to do anything about it. That had to change if I was going to be successful, and eventually it did. How you react when adversity strikes makes all the difference in how much fun you have. So many people think it is gonna be like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, when the reality is something more like a mashup of Groundhog Day and The Perils Of Pauline, where you wake up every morning and get run over by a train. I often tell new people to read Beemon's "Me and My Beautiful 56 Buick" thread. That is EXACTLY how I, and I suspect most of us in here, learned the ropes. When things go wrong, and they will, you just have to step back and look at it like a puzzle, or maybe a game of chess. It's not easy to do, I know! Any emotional reaction just slows you down and ruins the day. Imagine you are Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple trying to figure out how the murderer locked the study from the inside, and how you will prove it. Sleep on it. It will be fine. The Buick is sorted and proven. You have posted about it many times, and had many trouble-free trips. In the morning you will be looking at your choke unloader settings... and whether the new headers are closer to the fuel pump body than the old manifold was, and so on.

Welcome! You can get wiring harnesses from Rhode Island Wire or YNZ. http://www.riwire.com/ https://www.ynzyesterdaysparts.com/ Fuel pump repair kits are available from Then n Now, and I think they also have a rebuilding service. http://www.then-now-auto.com EDIT: I see a source for a fuel pump has already popped up while I was typing this!

Wanted some 34x4 (or possibly other 26") tires. Tubes and flaps also if available. Will consider any condition from good to really old. I just need tires good enough to hold air so I can push a chassis around the shop. I need 4, but if you only have one or two please don't hesitate to respond. Thank You.

This cannot be repeated enough.

As I understand it, ZDDP is the actual chemical used in oil. Zinc are Phosphorus are the elements used to make it.

High compression head will have a different casting number. i don't have a new enough parts book to look yours up.

Nothing wrong with those, although plain rubber boots (especially with a little silicone dielectric grease) will do a little better job of keeping the spark in where it belongs. At the voltage level your ignition will be running at normally, those Champion things will be just fine. Any ignition cables can shock you if you get too close.

That isn't really how it works. The voltage the ignition runs at is mainly set by the spark plug gap and the resistance of the spark plug wires and plugs. This is a secondary ignition pattern on a scope for a four cylinder engine, just a graph of voltage over a period of time. Let's just look at the first cylinder. Imagine this line being drawn from left to right. The spot where the points open is 2.5 milliseconds in. The circuit is open (because of the spark plug gap). You could also look at it as having an extremely high resistance. The voltage rises instantly to 12 kilovolts. In this particular cylinder, 12 kilovolts is what it took to ionize the fuel/air charge inside the spark plug gap. The spark jumps. Once the fuel/air charge is ionized and the spark jumps, the resistance of the gap is MUCH lower. Since the resistance is so much lower, the voltage drops A LOT. You can see it dropped to between 4 and 2 kilovolts for about a millisecond and a half while the spark is happening. Then, when the coil runs out of energy the spark goes out and the voltage goes negative for a little bit. About 7 milliseconds in (on this particular diagram) the voltage is back to zero, and we are ready to start the process over for the next cylinder. The pattern repeats four times here, but would repeat 8 times on your 8 cylinder engine. It takes more voltage to ionize the fuel and air with a wider plug gap, and that will make the spike (12 kilovolts in the diagram) go higher. A problem in the wire will also make the voltage go higher, due to the higher resistance in the defective wire. Electricity always takes the shortest path. As the voltage rises up into the kilovolt range, if it can blow through the insulation somewhere easier than ionizing the plug gap, then that is what it will do. Also, as the voltage rises, if the resistance is too high for the coil to overcome, then the voltage will continue to rise until the coil runs out of energy, never making a spark at all.

For what its worth, I am not running boots at all on my 36 at the spark plug end (as original). I do have them on the distributor end, but that is mainly to keep water from getting down inside the towers and making a corroded mess. Of course it is better to seal things up with boots. I have been out driving in the rain and no issues yet, despite reports of it being a problem when the cars were new. Boots or no boots, it doesn't necessarily have to arc over to miss. It there is an open circuit or extremely high resistance somewhere, like an open-circuit plug wire, or a missing carbon button in the cap, the coil will run out of energy before it establishes a spark at the plug.

If you can find someone who did an insert conversion on the same type engine, and it held together, great. It is probably cheaper. Otherwise, I would stick with babbitt.

Some suggestions: 1) Do a compression check. All spark plugs removed, throttle open. Pay attention to the second puff, and also what it tops out at. Don't get too hung up on the actual numbers, you're looking for one that is WAY different than the rest. 2) Measure your spark plug wires with an ohmmeter. One of those cheap/free little red Harbor freight digitals will do fine if you don't have a VOM or DMM. I wouldn't even remove them from the cap unless you find something wrong. Measure from the terminal under the cap out to the spark plug end. It is kind of fiddly because you will have to scrape around on the terminals with your probes at both the terminal under the cap, and also at the spark plug end, to get a good connection for the test. You are again looking for something radically different. For instance, if the wire is copper or metallic, the resistance will be really low, it could even be as low as a couple of ohms, or maybe a few hundred if they are spiral core wires. If they are resistor wires (probably), they will have maybe 2k-5k ohms (or more on cars with longer wires than yours). The resistance is spread over the length of the wire, so the longer ones should be higher. A shorter wire with a higher resistance is EXTREMELY suspect. If you find one with way too much resistance, replace it, and replace the rotor in the distributor too. 3) Inspect your distributor cap under a bright light, looking for anything that looks like a carbon track (or crack) either between terminals, or down to the edge where it contacts the distributor housing. Look on the outside of the cap as well. Look at the the carbon button that contacts the rotor. Make sure its there. It needs to touch. If it is spring loaded, make sure it moves. If it is the sort of cap that does not have a spring under the carbon button, then the rotor will have a flat springy part at the center to contact it. Just make sure the two are going to touch, and you are not going to have a big gap up there when it is assembled. 4) Disconnect the line going to your wiper system. Plug the end that goes to the intake manifold. I am going to guess you have a vacuum booster pump, but either way, plug the line going to the manifold and make sure it seals. A leak in the pump diaphragm, the wiper motor itself, or the hoses can cause a huge miss. 5) Try different spark plugs. A cracked insulator can cause all sorts of havoc, and the plug will look just fine.

Hi all, Around 1959-60 my late father restored a 1924 Studebaker Special Six touring. In the early 60s it was dark blue, and probably had black fenders and running boards. Sorry I have no pictures to post. There are slides of it on a tour in 1959, but I cannot find them. Last week I found an old registration. It appears that it was titled to the number "16758" in Washington State in 1959. Are there any Antique Studebaker Club members in here who could check and see if it is in the roster? Or anyone who might know what became of this car? Thank you.

Whats an FA?

Does Buick specify SAE50? Pontiac does. It caught me by surprise. I believe other makes I have owned just called for the same oil as the crankcase. Oh well, I bought a quart of SAE50. I need to service it again. Thanks for reminding me.

The main failure mode of an oil bath air cleaner is a reservoir that wont hold oil due to rust pinholes. The filters take on water from the air, and it settles down and causes rust down at the bottom of the reservoir, underneath the oil. The main reason we service these is to get the water out and prevent damage. Removing the trapped dirt is important, but secondary. I doubt they ever clog or even stop filtering, until all the oil runs out the hole.

The corn head grease DOES flow, doesn't it? I have put in the Penrite stuff with a funnel. It is incredibly slow. you may as well go away for a few hours, and it was a hot day!. I have also put a pointy lid on and squeezed the bottle, but that really didn't work like you would think. The funnel was far better. The main thing is you don't know how much to put in. It might get full with grease still in the funnel. I didn't make a huge mess, but the possibility was sure there. Once full, I cranked the steering back and forth, and may have even forced a little extra grease in with my thumb. There are 2 roller bearings on the worm in many of these old GM boxes, and I wanted to make absolutely sure that top bearing got wet. In retrospect, after seeing a box apart, I think the extra caution was unnecessary. On the other hand it wasn't much trouble. I have heard that others heat the bottle in water. That might be a really good idea. In any event, I wouldn't sit there and watch it. It's going to take a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment Be sure to let us know how you make out with the grease gun.

What she REALLY looks like:

If you really can't decide, go through the ratings and pick the tallest tires. Those cars are geared a little on the slow side. Every little bit helps.

Can you tell us more about this? What sort of chassis and drivetrain?