Bloo

A broken piece of old piston ring will do in a pinch.

There's a 62 Plymouth sedan floating around Washington State with a license plate that says XNRSXIT..... I like those too. It was the first B-body. Tom McCahill loved it, but nobody bought any. It was a huge success later on, so I guess old Uncle Tom was right.

See the two small terminals, missing their screws, just to the left of the battery cable? To make it crank, ground one and feed 6v to the other. So, to use a starter button you can either ground a terminal and feed 6v through the button to the other terminal, OR hook one terminal to 6v, and run the other terminal through the button to ground. The starter looks to be for Buick's autostart system. If it were all there, it would just start when you step on the gas pedal. When you put the metal cover back on that little relay, make sure it can't touch either of the two terminals and short. That battery cable looks too small. Good luck.

Best squirt gun EVER! Not only that, you can recharge it yourself, and call it "safety equipment".

Congratulations on the 2nd place VL! It really does stand out in a crowd! I do not subscribe to the idea that customer taste is responsible for that. The automakers are responsible for that. If you want to sell brightly colored cars, you have to actually MAKE some brightly colored cars. Look at a new car brochure sometime. Do you see any good colors? Probably not, and if there is one and you try to order it, the salesman will probably say something like "We have one in stock in Metallic Champagne" (that has been sitting on the lot too long) "And I can save you about $4000 and you can drive it away today". Sold. How do you think Chrysler sold all those beige-on-beige Darts and Sattelites in the 70s? It is pretty tough to believe anyone really ordered that. I suspect the automakers just pick colors that don't show flaws. They might put yellow or red or a nice bright blue in the brochure (once in a while), but then they only make a few.

Teflon tape has no place in a car engine. Teflon paste generally works fine, but it acts as a lubricant, the taper should seal the threads. It is slippery so don't overtighten and break something if you use it. Anaerobic thread sealer might be worth trying if teflon paste is not working. .

Just repair it. While you are in there look at how it works. If it is an inline engine, it is not a restriction when hot/open. More heat goes to the carb with the plate removed, not less, because there is nothing to deflect the exhaust away from the intake when the engine is hot. If you get back into the 1920s you may find some units that provide way too much heat. From the mid 30s on, probably not.

I have found that learning to do something yourself is usually the best way. Nobody else cares about your car as much as you do. Do a job once and do it right.

Hey Buickborn, don't take it personally. I doubt he meant it that way. Of all the things I had to do to sort my Pontiac, the overwhelming majority of it of it was redoing really bad work done in fairly recent times. It isn't always the hobbyist either, I have old receipts for a lot of it I got with the car from the former owner. Some people, both hobbyist and professional, simply can't be bothered to read up and do the job right. It's something we all deal with, and it's frustrating.

I wouldn't call it going cheap, per John Hess's comment. He is correct to be concerned about riveted wheels leaking. They might be fine and they might not. The main reasons to run without tubes are, the tires run cooler (a big deal if you don't want any failures), and the fact that tubes deflate suddenly if you get a puncture, while tubeless tires usually get a "slow leak". Tubes also add rotating mass to the wheel assembly. If it were me I would only run tubes if the riveted rims leak. On the other hand Tubes are period correct and authentic. To each his own.

And then there's Nash.....

Those "conversion" gearboxes are available for about anything, and cost about $100-$120. I doubt there is any situation you would need that on a late 70s GM car. Just get the right pinion gear for the transmission. You may have to remove the tailshaft and change the drive gear too, but that is almost never necessary in reasonably stock 70s cars.. Drive the car 10 miles and watch the odometer. See how much it is wrong, and in which direction. Change the pinion gear that percentage (or as close as you can get). More teeth turn the cable slower (to fix an odometer that reads high). Gears are all over ebay, or at your local speedo shop if you have one. Pay attention to the way the teeth lean on the gear, and make sure the new one has the teeth leaning the same way.

NTX5467 nailed it. Fix the odometer first, and then see what you have. If it's still wrong (it probably won't be), send it to the speedo shop.

While I think this shouldn't be a tough pan to find, and I'm sort of surprised one hasn't turned up already, it's just steel. Why not bang it out and braze up the cracks? (From the inside, so it won't show.)

IIRC the bearing is inside the end of the pittman arm, and the pittman arm has a taper that should lock solidly into it's tapered hole in the center link when the nut is tight.

Oh that ball joint looks fine, but that or any other quality ball joint will do. I was talking about upper control arm bushings. Those (special offset "problem solver") are not technically necessary, but if you use them, and install one backwards, it allows you to set more caster than was originally used. More caster gives a little more positive steering return, and a little better high speed stability. If you aren't going to do that, then get the stock-type bushings (assuming you are replacing them). The steering box has adjustments. Ordinarily they don't need overhaul. I haven't adjusted one in years, and don't remember what the exact procedure is, but it is in the shop manual. It is normal to feel a whole bunch of slop when the engine is off, but with the engine running you should see movement at the wheels almost instantly when turning the steering wheel (yeah, you can't feel anything). The lower control arm bushings are rubber. On a more conventional suspension you would just jack on whatever it took to take the load off of the bushings, and them pry around and see if they move. On Mopar torsion bar suspension there is really no way to get the load off of those bushings, so you can't tell if they are shot until you have the suspension apart. It is 2019, so I am assuming the worst (they were usually shot in the 80s when the cars were only 20-ish years old). This car should drive exactly like your 65 Fury.

You must mean uppers. Yeah, get the right socket if you can. I don't know where to get it, but it sure is easier if you have it. FWIW Moog makes (or used to) "problem solver" upper control arm bushings that are offset, intended for bent cars. Instead, you can put one in correctly and the other in backwards, and it increases the range of the caster adjustment (tip the upper control arm back). That along with about 3-4 degrees of caster, some radial tires, a bit less toe-in, and adjusting both sides the same, will make it feel a little more like a modern driver expects. Oh, and make sure the steering box is adjusted correctly. IIRC the lower ball joints are held down in the socket by torsion bar tension, and have some up and down play even when new (check the manual). Do your lower control arm bushings. Yeah, I know its a horrible job, but just do it. You can't tell whether they are bad or not without disassembly. Pack the torsion bar sockets with Mopar Multi-Mileage Lube (04897841AA). Accept no substitutes. I like the one-finger power steering, because you can just palm it when you want more steering fast, and also when parking. People who have been driving some other make often have issues with it. If you decide you absolutely cant stand it, a steering box rebuild is in order, using the reaction springs from a late 80s Diplomat/GranFury police car.

A couple of decades ago (or more) when whitewall tires were disappearing, and newer, higher performance stickier tires were starting to replace the old standby white letter radials (that were popular on musclecars), I asked a tire engineer why the new premium products could not be bought with white letters. He said that in order to make a white letter tire (or a whitewall for that matter), you had to use an older, lower performance rubber compound, and that the new higher-performance compounds would turn the white parts brown. I have a sneaking hunch that some replica tire manufacturers may just be using a standard run-of-the-mill compound of today, probably whatever the tire plant has in the pipe for ordinary street tires, and isn't paying attention to the compound. Maybe they can no longer get an appropriate one.

I have a "Pacific Power" group 1 that works very well despite being about 4 years old. I think that is a regional brand up here in Washington State. I have a 2 year old "Les Schwab" one that is also good, but never had quite as much ooopmh as the "Pacific" one. 6 volt batteries seem better to me today than in the past, not worse.

Isn't anyone going to mention the traditional method? This is a "Suction Gun": What you do is stick the hose into the bottle of gear oil, and suck some up inside the gun. Then, you put the hose into the transmission and push the plunger back in. Full disclosure: this will get gear oil on your hair, your armpits, the driveway, the floorpan, the exhaust, the paint, your kids, the cat, the neighbors dog, and any birds that happen to be flying overhead. If you are going to try it, buy extra oil.

Does this thing have a windshield? Even in open cars with windshields, anything with a brim will blow off if it isn't tied down, unless you put is on backwards. Hair gets used to that after a while, but mine sunburns and starts to resemble wire. I have to put conditioner in it on trips where I wouldn't otherwise. Wear sunscreen! I just did 1300 miles in a Miata over the last couple of days, top down, quite a bit of it on 80mph freeways. If there's no windshield, maybe get one of those close fitting aviation caps (with a strap) and some goggles like the brass car guys have.

Yep, sounds like somebody had the cluster out and got it hooked up backwards. I would probably just replace the bulbs. Check your manual, there might be a couple of different bulbs (maybe a dim one for high beam and a flashing one for the e-brake, or something like that). Disconnect your battery when you pull the cluster, you have "battery hot" back there on the ammeter. It feeds both. If one of them works and is accurate, the limiter is fine. If the gas and temp gauges want to read way high or peg when they shouldn't, the points inside the limiter are stuck. It typically melts the whole thing and sometimes melts into adjoining wires. If it's not bad maybe you can just clean and tighten it. Sometimes back in the day, I would crimp and solder on new spades (NAPA used to be able to get the correct kind, they're kinda odd looking, and you will see and also learn to release them if you wind up changing that turn signal switch). Those same terminals are used all over Mopars for probably a couple of decades. Sometimes you can connect them manually if the connector is too destroyed to hold them in place anymore, but still has enough plastic to keep the connections separate. On the worst ones, I would put a piece of wire through the hole (well, holes, the circuit goes through the firewall twice) and solder and heatshrink it on both sides. Downside of that is you can't unplug it anymore. There are more restoration parts available now than then. I suspect you might even be able to buy new connector housings.

It looks like it is attached to something. Do you have any more pictures?

Those are for skinny guys who don't have a refrigerator box.

Brakelight trouble is gonna be the turn signal switch. Wiggle the handle. It probably works part of the time.