Bloo

Even some car manufacturers have occasionally called that thing a Bendix. It isn't. It is an overrunning clutch, sometimes called a "starter drive". Bendix did make some of them. Bendix also made radios and carburetors. A "Bendix" is a mechanical device that engages and disengages the gear for you. When you have one, there is no need for a starter mounted solenoid (or a pedal linkage) to move the gear so that it engages and disengages with the teeth on the flywheel. The Bendix does that. Why "Bendix"? I assume Bendix held the patent. The Bendix is an older design and GM dropped it entirely sometime before 1935, probably to avoid royalties. Ford continued using it into the early 60s. There is no way you have one on a 63 Oldsmobile. If it is going "Zing!" and not engaging, and then you keep trying and once in a while it catches and works correctly, just replace the starter drive. It's that piece @EmTee has been talking about and posted a picture of. That is where the problem lies. Was "Zing" the original problem? The symptom of a bad solenoid is usually just a loud "Click" or "Clunk" when the gear engages, but then the starter motor does not spin up. The cause is copper bolts under/through the black bakelite cap that have lost enough copper from their heads that they no longer reach the copper disc they must make contact with. They can be replaced separately in these old GM solenoids. There is almost never anything else wrong with the solenoid.

Because you are cranking it.

But think about how long fuel injection has been standard. When were the last of the last US market carbureted cars? 1991? That's 32 years ago. In the 80s and 90s we were teaching people to not touch the pedal on fuel injected cars. It's still second nature to me to set the choke, but you just can't expect people to know that anymore.

The 90s are the new 60s. Coming out of the malaise era, no one was ready to believe those 90s cars were any good, but quite a few of them turned out to be exceptional.

The 1937 GM/Fisher small bodies were all steel (Buick Special, Century, many other GM cars). At least some of the large Buicks remained wood in 1937, probably all of them. I once took pictures of the inside of the doors of a 37 Buick 80 Phaeton. All wood.

No.

I doubt the 353 was ever imported to the US. Maybe Canada? I'm pretty sure some older Wartburgs were, maybe the 311. Wartburgs were never common in the US even when still available. The 353 is a 3 cylinder 2 stroke.

Yes. Probably a different manufacturer for the same thing. If you want to know what's best, try both and measure the voltage at the headlights with the lights on. There may be no difference, but circuit breakers are lossy by nature because they have to produce heat to trip. Everyone accepted that downside because they were reliable, and at the time relays and fuses were really not. If there's no difference in headlight voltage, I vote for the one with the box. Why? Because the box looks like a generic circuit breaker, and you could probably easily adapt a generic circuit breaker if it failed.

I think you may be giving too much credit to those handle springs....

I had a 53 with a PS unit like what is shown on this wagon. The whole system must have changed for 55. It had to. The steering box and associated parts on the 53 were huge. No way would the 55 V8 engine have fit.

The black one is a 53. I have a sneaking hunch the blue one might be too, but there is so little difference between 53 and 54 it is hard to nail down.

Dodge28 has the right idea. Use rosin core or other electronic solder. Don't use plumbing flux. Yes plumbing flux works well and makes the job super easy because it is so active, but it does *not* make good long lasting electrical connections. Acid core solder and acid (plumbing) flux is the biggest no-no in electronics, and has been since the late 1920s. You do need to keep any flame far away from rosin flux. Rosin burns, and when it burns, it won't do it's job. I like @dodge28's idea of putting the solder down in the hole. Then just don't let the flame get in there. Professional materials to do this consist of pellets made of electronic solder that drop in the hole. The only reason I can think of to crimp is if you are really cheap or in a hurry. Years ago Ford made a good example of this. Ford, on 12 volt cars, used to use spindly little cables that looked ridiculous. I used to make fun of them until one time I replaced some originals and checked the voltage drop before and after. The new cables that had bigger copper wire inside and looked 3 times bigger due to thicker insulation performed worse. A closer look revealed the spindly little original Ford cables were soldered. The new cables, despite having bigger wire were more resistive. The new ones would have deteriorated over time and got even worse because as a cable ages, each strand of wire tarnishes and the resistance in a crimp increases. Current has to travel through several layers of tarnish to get to the center strands. Solder on the other hand alloys itself to the terminal and to every strand. There should be no deterioration over time. Now to be fair, the new cables weren't *that* much worse, but they were measurably worse and they were brand new. I put the old cables back on. Anyone who doesn't believe this is welcome to measure it. Measure with a multimeter from one end of the battery cable to the other end, disable the ignition and crank the starter. The reading should be zero, and it would be in a perfect world if we had room temperature superconductors. In the real world, there is always loss. You are measuring loss, so lower is better. At the end of the day it doesn't matter how the ends are attached, all that really matters is getting the loss as low as you possibly can. Bigger wire helps. So does soldering.

I don't think 23" vs 25" enters into this at all because I don't believe the engine you have is what is called a 25" engine in the Mopar world. Even if it does measure 25", I don't think it is related. I could be wrong about that, and I hope someone will correct me if I am. I can see all the way from here that the engine is quite different than what I would expect a 25" engine to look like. The commonly referenced 23" and 25" engines are basically the same thing. They are so similar that people are often advised to measure the cylinder head to see which they have. 23" was often Dodge/Plymouth and 25" was often Chrysler/Desoto. There are exceptions. In Canada, 25" engines were debored/destroked and substituted directly for 23" engines in production. I suspect there is at most, 2" difference and everything else almost fits. None of that helps you at all. If I were you, I would study how that 23" engine was mounted originally and copy that. It sounds like the location of the pedals etc. is going to cast the rear mount positions more or less in stone. If you have an extra 5" in front, that is actually a good thing. I don't know what those newer mounts look like, but I suspect you need to make a crossmember, and 5" is plenty of room for one. That is way more stout than individual mounts. With all that room you can probably run a brace forward and tie it down to the spot the old engine mounted to, wherever that was. I'm just speculating though since I haven't seen it. You can probably get a starter for that engine that will work with the button if you want to.

I'd be suggesting Mopar Rust Penetrant (heat riser solvent), but I recently heard it is discontinued. Drat. I am also going to agree the bolt has probably rusted and expanded inside the bearing. Assuming there is nothing else up top, and it is open to where the bolt exits the bearing now that the nut is gone, Maybe you could heat the crap out of the bolt from the bottom with something. Maybe an inductive heater, and then touch a little stick made of candle wax or sealing wax from the top so that wax can melt on the hot bolt and get between the bolt and the inner bore of the bearing.

I think it's an Austin A-40 of some sort, and there are several. Maybe a Devon. I am going to guess late 40s to early 50s until someone nails it down closer.

I'd love to hear more about your finger joint cutter. I've not seen cutters available anywhere near that deep.

I think it is an ohmmeter like the meter scale says. That tracks with the markings on the front panel. and the presence of an internal battery.

I'd just solder a wire on it and run it to a good ground. The closer to the socket shell the better, like on the outside of the socket shell itself if you can. It is hard to tell from the pic if that's possible, but the closer you can get to the bulb socket the better. Anyplace where the metal is stamped/crimped together can get resistive. If you can solder to the outside of the socket shell you have eliminated all of those places.

The shell should be grounded. It isn't. You just found the problem. 👍 The flash proves the switch and the wire are OK. The shell, if grounded, would have no voltage. Since you are getting voltage between the shell and ground, that proves beyond any doubt the shell is not grounded.

Oh man are you in for a surprise... I mean, taking the industry as a whole you are not wrong, and that method just works as expected, but we are faced with the possibility that this might be a 50s Buick. GM did some things back then that cannot easily be explained. Maybe the engineer had been wandering in the woods around Seattle during the Mad Season, or just returned from a Vision Quest somewhere in the deserts of the Southwest.

The left front signal is disconnected from the system someehow. Usually that's because of a bad ground at the socket. The left rear flashing quickly indicates that the left front is not present. That's just plain weird. I'd ignore it for now. The LF dark and the LR flashing too fast will point you to the real problem. If this persists, we can troubleshoot it later. I don't understand what this means. Make model and year would help, and a wiring diagram if you have it. Nevertheless, making the wild assumption that these are fairly normal postwar Buick turn signals, your bulb should have 2 contacts on the bottom, and 2 filaments inside, one big and one small. There are 2 contacts in the socket. 2 wires go to the socket. One is park light (connects to small filament) the other is signal light (connects to large filament). Make sure this is all true. Both filaments ground through the socket. The socket can't be hanging loose to test, it must be attached. The big filament is the one we are interested in. Not sure what you meant about the yellow and white wire. Is there a wire missing? That would sure do it. If both wires are there, try adding a ground. Either solder it to the socket and run the other end to a good ground, or for a test you could hose clamp a wire to the socket and run that to a good ground. If everything above checks out, and grounding the socket does not fix the problem, one of 2 things is the cause: 1) The wire that connects to the big filament of the bulb is broken, unplugged, corroded, squirrel-eaten, cut, or otherwise disconnected somewhere between the LF bulb socket and the turn signal switch. Follow the wire from the front of the car to the signal switch and look for damage. 2) Or... The signal switch is bad. Since it shares the brake light bulbs in the back with the signals... well it probably does, you didn't say what car.... the left front signal has it's own contact in the signal switch. That contact in the switch could be bad with everything else still working. In that case, there is probably a plug where the turn signal switch exits the steering column. Maybe you could check there with a test light. Test with the clip of the test light grounded, and the probe stuck in the backside of the connector, touching the brass terminal for the wire that goes to the left front. Turn left signal on. If the test light flashes fast along with the rear signal, the switch is OK. If the test light stays out, the contact in the switch is probably bad.

What's the blue stuff? Is the Pertronix grounded?

What size is the tube? Could you just make one? It's probably some standard US size. Maybe brake tubing or modelmakers tubing? You sure don't want it falling out. I'd use loctite. They started putting those diagonal tubes in carburetors in the late 30s. The bowl is vented inside the air cleaner so that the carburetor's fuel in the bowl is referenced to the same atmospheric pressure as the air entering the carburetor. Otherwise, dirt in the air filter, or even a different brand of air filter could cause a pressure difference that would change the mixture. I don't think they would bother to keep putting the diagonally cut extension on the bowl vent after all these years if it didn't matter. Maybe the air is less turbulent out in the middle where the tube ends? Not every design has a diagonally cut tube. The Autolite/Motorcraft 2 barrel for instance doesn't, but it has twin stacks in the casting sticking up about an inch. It still references the bowl to the atmospheric pressure inside the air filter. Presumably the tall vertical stacks accomplish the same thing the diagonally cut tube did in the 2GV. You can see the twin stacks (bowl vents) in front of the choke plate in this pic.

You didn't mention what wiring company. You could check with Rhode Island WIre and/or YnZ in California. Maybe one of them makes the right one. If you send your old harneess, I suspect either of those companies could make it. I think you would need to make some minor wiring changes for a car with no Startix. I wouldn't want to do it If I were springing for a new harness, no matter how minor.

Thank you!