Bloo

1949 Pontiac. EDIT: No it isn't. Note the split grill bar along the bottom of the hood. What country is this car located in? EDIT 2: 1949 Pontiac Fleetleader (Canadian). These had Chevrolet bodies. See second pic.

Literally everything is on the wrong side. Exhaust, fuel, throttle linkage, etc. I don't know if you could get it connected to the transmission easily or not. I suspect not.

I was researching those 360 horsepower 352s back in the mid 80s, because of an ambiguous 1960 Sunliner I owned. No internet then, and though I recognize some things in your list, it sounds like you have already found out more than I did back then.

Kickdown for overdrive.

There is no brake light relay. Follow the wires on the diagram. A wire will come from some power source to the brake light switch, and then from the brake light switch to the turn signal switch.

First manual 55 I have ever seen. A manual 56 did turn up out here in WA a couple of years ago. Very unusual to find a stickshift in a Desoto from this period.

Keep a lid on, maybe not tight, but water evaporates out of the stuff, And with winter coming, keep the bucket inside. The warmer the better. Apparently the reaction completely stops below 60F or so, but room temperature is OK. Years ago I was trying to derust wheels outside in cool or cold weather, and was getting nowhere until until I arranged a heater. The container got up to about 85F and that went like gangbusters.

Thinness of the spark plug wire is a non-issue for the timing light's inductive clip. You may need a better timing light. I have had issues with digital dialback timing lights just locking up and refusing to work on 6 volt cars, apparently due to just too much electrical noise. Buttons wont respond, gibberish on display, etc. Is that what is happening? In this case a simple light with no functions connected to a 12v battery got the job done for me. I used to use an extremely cheap 80s Sears Craftsman light for this. If it just won't trigger, I would find a different light. Every now and then though, there is some car that just won't trigger the light reliably. It isn't the thickness of the insulation on the wires. As I recall, 6mm wires on old Alfa Romeos were not ever a problem. You could try widening the gap maybe an extra .010 on a spare spark plug and putting it in cylinder #1 just for timing. That might work. You didn't mention the make and model. I assume a Buick of some sort. The advice above is for a standard points ignition. If you have something early and weird like a magneto, or Atwater Kent Unisparker, or buzz coils... all bets are off.

What he said.^^

That was normal on early sealed beams. Some even had metal reflectors. It is still sealed to prevent reflector degradation.

30-35MPH is normal for the time. Roads were very different. I definitely would not have wanted to go smaller on wheel diameter on a car of that era, bigger if possible, But I know your options for tires can be very limited. I've not looked at the 19" situation lately. It might not be as big of a change as you think, and can be easily calculated. What is your original tire size and your current tire size? A four speed transmission won't help, or probably won't. On almost all old transmissions high is direct. In the early 30s some manufacturers flirted with four speed transmissions, but declined to put in what would be more useful gearing, because it would have required more shifting. Ability to pull hills in "high" was a measure of a car's worth in those days because people did not want to shift. Thus, 4th gear was high and first was more like a granny gear in a truck, and generally not used at all. The idea quickly disappeared. What you would need is an overdrive fourth (or fifth), and those transmissions almost all come from a much later era. Another thing that can be done is put a second gearbox in the driveline to add overdrive. People have converted Borg Warner or Laycock overdrives removed from the back of other transmissions. There is also the Mitchell if you do not have a torque tube. Torque tube versions are only for Ford. You could adapt but would be on your own for the engineering. Gear Vendors is the current owner of the Laycock design and can provide parts to install in either an open driveline or a torque tube. If you speed it up, I'd try to hold it to an extra 10MPH or so, make sure your steering and suspension is tight, and nitpick your brakes so they work as good as they possibly can.

Time to pull the head. The head gasket is blown anyway if oil that you put in the cylinders is getting outside the engine. What is vac-test? Is this a normal compression test made with a pressure gauge in a spark plug hole? 35 pounds of compression is unbelievably low for worn rings. That is a big leak, probably indicating a broken or holed piston. A head gasket could do it on some engines, especially overhead valve ones, but offhand I don't think there are any ports to the crankcase in a Pontiac Eight head gasket. Normally compression that low would indicate burned or stuck valves, but then the pressure would be escaping through the intake or exhaust, not the crankcase. The next step would normally be a leakdown test to see where the pressure is escaping, but it sounds like you already have the answer if you have a rhythmic puff from the oil filler neck and the draft tube.

If it connects to the light switch for sure, then anything on the hot side of the switch. They usually leave an extra screw or two for accessories, but you could pile a couple of terminals up if you needed to. I suspect all that protrusion at the top of the switch in the picture is hot.

I think so.

Borg clocks (and others with a similar mechanism) are notoriously trouble. They don't draw much, so don't run the battery dead quickly. They have a solenoid that pulls a half turn or something on the mainspring every few minutes when it gets low. It is in intermittent "BJEEP!" and then nothing for a while. It is a draw though, and left sit a long time, that plus the natural self discharge of the battery will run the voltage low, and eventually it wont be able to wind. Since it didn't wind, it's points wont open, and the coil inside, being an intermittent duty coil, is a huge draw, but can't handle all that current. It runs the battery completely dead at that point, usually ruining the battery by sitting dead for days before you figure out what happened. It also uses the remaining energy that was left in the battery to burn up the coil and points in the clock. The clock is partly shorted at that point, because it's coil is burned and it's points are stuck shut. If you are lucky the coil might survive, but the points are still stuck. When the battery gets replaced, maybe the owner does not notice, and it runs the new battery dead overnight, over and over again, until someone figures out the clock is doing it. If you drive the car a lot it probably wont happen. If you religiously keep a tender on it anytime the car is going to sit more than a couple or three days it should be fine. The points can still stick and burn the coil up, but that is less likely. Old ones like yours are much higher quality than the ones of the 60s and 70s, so you've got that going for you. Is this it? https://www.riwire.com/Catalogs/sup/pages/junction.htm

Am I missing something? It sure looks like black goes into a bulb socket. I cant see for sure because we haven't seen that side of the clock, but I am thinking yellow has to be the ground.

Yes. It's a unibody, and the "frame" members are loaded in tension. On some of these cars you might see the top and bottom of the boxes gone in and under the front floorboards where the windshield leaked. Thanks to the tension loading, it's not a death knell as long as the sides are solid. If the "frame" isn't sagging, its probably very repairable.

No. That connector came along with sealed beams in late 1939. The original setup would have had separate bulbs, reflectors, and would have used "american prefocus" bulbs, but not the ones you most commonly see. It would be bulbs with a number ending in "1" like maybe 2331, 2531, etc. in a Chrysler product. They look almost the same but will not interchange with the more common bulbs having a number ending in "0" as used in Ford, GM, etc. The sockets would be specific to the "1" bulbs too, I believe, because a "1" bulb has the connections rotated 90 degrees in the socket when compared to a "0" bulb like a 2330. The original lens probably wouldn't have even been perfectly round. Many weren't at that time. If you have sealed beams in there, you probably have part of a sealed beam kit, maybe with the wrong bezels? Kits were common after sealed beams came out to update older cars. They had to be specific to the make and model, and they had all the parts to mount a sealed beam bulb, and a bezel with a round hole that fit the sealed beam. Basically the entire headlight assembly would have been replaced. Pictured below is a 2531 bulb that should fit in a mid 1930s Chrysler product. And the following pics show "american prefocus" sockets. These sockets below are GM stuff, and technically not the right sockets for your car, but they do look right, almost. The holes the wires go in and the contacts would be rotated 90 degrees from what you see here if it were a Chrysler socket for the bulb above. The 3 little pins and springs are what hold the socket to the reflector, and also what hold the bulb in via its flange, it's a twist-to-lock affair.

I would imagine one wire goes pretty directly into a bulb socket at the clock end. I am not quite seeing it. Is that the black? How do your dash lights work? If you had a Buick or a Pontiac of that year, there would be a switch for the dash lights hanging through the lower lip of the dash just barely to the left of center. If you have a switch like that in the Oldsmobile, I imagine the bulb wire connects to it. If you really do mean the power wire for the clock (not the bulb) then it needs to be hot all the time. or at least it did in 1936. I'd leave the clock power disconnected. Good question. Could it be half of a "GM connector"? https://www.riwire.com/Catalogs/sup/pages/bullets.htm

It's not screwy at all once you see what is really happening. Electronic photos have a right side up. They were taken in some orientation that might sometimes be unrelated to the actual content of the photo. They still all have a top. I cannot speak to the Iphone specifically, but many VIEWERS have a rotate mode that allows you to view a photo in a way that makes sense. Most if not all of them do not actually change anything. If you upload the photo to a forum or some other website, it will display with it's top side up. The photo still has a top. If the car in the photo is upside down or sideways, the web server will not know or care. All it has is the photo, and it will display that photo with the top of the photo (not the car) up. The only cure I am aware of is to open the photo in an EDITOR of some sort (not just a viewer), rotate the photo and save a new photo while rotated. You can save it on top of the old file if you don't want to keep the upside down or sideways version, but it has to be saved after editing. Now you have a new photo with the top where you want it to be. Otherwise you haven't changed anything and you are just viewing the upside down or sideways photo in a more convenient way on your device. I understand this is inconvenient, especially on a phone. Nevertheless, understanding the problem goes a long way toward avoiding it. Hope this helps. Hey @alsfarms, great photos! Thanks for posting them.

It depends on when, but historically their automotive tools were way above homeowner grade. I have some things from the 1950s and 1960s that are on par with Snap-On of the 50s and 60s, or very close. By the 1990s, Craftsman quality had dropped a little, and they would not honor the lifetime warranty if you were using them in a professional setting anymore. At this time, they were still very high quality tools, but a couple cuts below Snap-On. You could no longer directly compare them. In a professional setting, the warranty was the biggest issue. If you do this for a living, occasionally you break tools. That's just how it is. The Snap-On (or Matco or Mac) dealer will be around within a week, and if you are in a pinch will often drive way out of his way to come sooner. When you could no longer exchange broken ones at Sears on lunch hour, mechanics stopped considering them serious tools. I mean yeah, theoretically you could go home, take a shower, get in street clothes, go to Sears before they close at what, 7PM? All mechanics are overworked. Nobody had time for that. I've bought two portable Craftsman tool sets since they moved production to China, and the quality took a pretty serious drop. They are still good tools, several cuts above no-name tool sale stuff from the 70s or 80s. They aren't made of cheese, for instance. Nevertheless, I am not impressed. The portable kits I bought were badly thought out and badly engineered. The drawers fall out of one of them constantly. I can't use it as a portable set. Sockets seem to be of random thickness and chamfering. If you look at these tools closely, they just look bad compared to Craftsman of the 90s. I haven't managed to break any of them, so there's that. Craftsman seems to push gimmicky tools now like ratchet wrenches, tools that are supposed to fit both metric and standard fasteners, etc. There are better looking tools at both Harbor Freight and the home improvement stores, also made in China. It has become impossible to take Craftsman seriously anymore. The last time I bought a portable set, incidentally to replace the Craftsman set the drawers fall out of, I bought Kobalt. They look and feel better, and so far I haven't broken any. Time will tell if they are any good.

Usually a cylindrical thing a couple or three inches in diameter made of some soft dark gray metal that appears to be zinc or lead. They typically plug into a tube socket, and since this one is synchronous, I am guessing a 6 pin tube socket.

Stray resistance on the way to the headlights or back through the ground. It is a big loop, and the missing voltage will be found somewhere along the way. Ohms law and Kirchoffs laws are laws of nature that make that always true. Without going in too deep, 6.1-2.3 is 3.8 volts, so a total of 3.8 volts is being dropped across unwanted resistance in the wires, connections, switches, crimp joints, etc. Literally everything the current flows through on the way to the bulb and back to the battery has resistance. Some resistance is inevitable, but that is way too much. Start by splitting it into halves to see where the worst loss is. With the lights on, measure from the hot battery post (with one meter lead) to the hot side of the light (other meter lead). Now measure from the grounded battery post to the grounded side of the bulb. If you get any negative numbers, just consider them as positive. Add both up. It should be about 3.8 volts. Now go looking at the side which is worst, the side that had the highest measured voltage drop. You can check individual components or connections the same way, to find the worst ones. For instance with the lights on you could put one lead on the hot terminal of a dimmer switch, and the other lead on the terminal that feeds the lights that are lit (high or low). The voltage you measure is the voltage being dropped in the dimmer switch. The same trick could be used on a light switch, or really any part of the circuit containing one or more possible failures. It isn't only things like switches that can be bad. Any spot where something connects to something else on the way from the battery to the bulb and back could be bad. It is hard to measure the spot where a wire bolts to the body all by itself, for instance. By testing sections and process of elimination, you can usually figure out where the worst problem is. Once you fix the worst problem, If you still don't have all the voltage that you think should be there, the process starts over. Another thing guaranteed by Ohms law and Kirchoffs laws, which I am not going to delve into deeply, is that once you fix something in a circuit everything else will appear to get worse. You can't assume that if you measured 0.5 volts at the second worst spot before you fixed anything that it will still be a 0.5 volt drop still after you fix the first thing. It will not. It will be worse. So, fix the second worst thing (which is now the worst thing) and recheck. Continue until you have enough voltage at the lights that you can live with it. There is always some voltage drop just because of the nature of wires, switches, and connectors. The trick is to get it as low as possible.

I don't have good enough books to figure out the exact model. As I mentioned, there are 3 body sizes. Two of them were parked next to each other at the 2022 Flathead Reunion. In all cases, look closely at the quarter window and the shape of the back of the roof. Unfortunately I do not have style numbers or any underhood pictures that might show the style number on the body tag. The small one (third car) in the first pic is an A body, and the middle one is apparently(?) a B body. Here are pics I found online that claim to be a "Torpedo" (C body) .

Are you REALLY SURE it is timed on the COMPRESSION STROKE? It has compression on all cylinders, so no reason to believe an intake valve might be stuck open. No reason for a backfire. When you are 180 degrees out (timed on the exhaust stroke rather than the compression stroke, the engine will alternately backfire (through the intake) and afterfire (through the exhaust). Most mechanics never see a car 180 degrees out often enough to catch on exactly what this sounds like when you crank, but once you do, and realize what you are listening to it sticks with you forever. POW!......puhh......POW!......puhh......POW!......puhh...... It might not be nice and and even popping like that but the sound is still unmistakable once you know. With the marks at TDC, the rotor needs to point at number one or the opposite cylinder in the firing order. Since the firing order is 1-6-2-5-8-3-7-4, the opposite is number eight. That is two ways it could be pointing by just looking. The two possibilities alternate every other crankshaft turn. They are either both right, or both wrong. You can't tell which is which by sight. That takes either a thumb on a spark plug hole, or a hiss from a compression tester hose, or the side covers off so you can see what the valves are doing. Of course if the rotor is not pointing at either of those cylinders with the marks at TDC, it is definitely wrong. I guess your timing chain could have jumped, that would explain low compression, but I don't think the numbers would come up much with oil if that was the problem. I don't think that happened. Anyhow, I wouldn't worry about low compression too much right now. Where's the condenser? You need it. Make sure the points are actually opening. If you think the timing is way wrong, a Pontiac typically has 3 marks close to each other. The first 2 to come up to the mark are 6 degrees BTC and 3 degrees BTC if I remember correctly. Pontiac expected you to be normally running between those two. The last mark to come up is TDC. Connect a test light between the points lead and ground. Get the rotor pointing almost to number one. and watch the light as you crank the the rest of the way to TDC on number one. The light should come on right around the timing marks. Don't go backwards or timing chain slop will screw up your results. If you go past, go on around another turn. Get it set so the light comes on either right at the first mark (6 degrees) or somewhere in-between the two (6 degrees and 3 degrees). That will be close enough to run, and maybe even perfect, but once running you can check with a timing light. But before you do that, make triple sure it is not 180 degrees out. Maybe do the thumb test again.