Bloo

I have an old Victor oxygen regulator that needs some work. I had both regulators rebuilt about 8-10 years ago at Hansen & Miller in Seattle, but the oxygen regulator needs help again. I have been using the torch a lot lately, and didn't really want to be without it while it was away getting worked on. I discovered you can get an oxygen regulator for about $25(!) on Amazon. I had a plan. Buy a cheapo and send the Victor off to Hansen & Miller for rebuilding. That was thwarted when I found out that Hansen & Miller is closed up and there is a paint company in the building now. So what now? Is there another good shop out there I can mail it to? Do it myself? This being oxygen, I am sort of inclined to let an experienced person do it. On the other hand I found parts kits online, and apparently acetone is the correct solvent to get rid of any fingerprints, etc. This was my dad's torch set, probably bought in the late 50s. It seems to be high quality, and when it's working right it works better than you would expect from a single stage set. I'd really like to fix it or get it fixed. Any thoughts?

It's been snowing for two days straight. I don't even know how much came down, but there is at least a foot of accumulation in my front yard. I spent all of yesterday morning digging my car out after the city plowed it in solid. I think I see another storm rolling in. Bah. Let's talk about water pumps. These are the 3 victims, as posted earlier in the thread. The one on the right is all done. It was the rusty mess with a bolt glued in it that I found in the trunk when I bought the car. It is probably 1950s vintage, but made to fit 1933-1936. It uses a modern cartridge bearing and a carbon seal. I had no intentions of rebuilding it ever unless the original type pumps proved too troublesome to use, but time ran out and it was the easiest. With a rebuild kit from ebay, and a new impeller from KornKurt it came right together. It is on the car now and stored for the winter. The one on the left came from Ebay, an old NORS rebuild. It matches the pictures in the service manual, and it is what I intended to use. It uses oil for lubricant, and has 2 flip top caps like you might see on a a machine tool. The oil soaks through sintered bronze to get to the shaft. After a teardown, It looks a bit hacked up. I've pushed it to the bottom of the list for now. The one in the middle came off of the car. It had zerk fittings on it. I thought it was the same as the one on the left, but hacked up to use grease instead of oil. As it turns out not very much of that is true. Hacked up? Yes. Not the same as the one on the left though. It turns out this is... well was... a factory needle bearing pump used in the last half of 1936 production. The factory pushed these hard for replacements on 1933-1936 cars as well, but sometime before 1940 they were superseded by a pump similar to the one on the right, using a cartridge bearing and carbon seal. When you get these apart and laying next to each other it is clear something is up and they are not the same. The pump on the left has the oil cap holes tilted toward the driver's side. This is sensible for good access. The oil cups for the generator and starter are on the driver's side as well. The pump in the middle has the holes pointing straight up, and a tall threaded boss around the rear hole. This is what it looked like coming off of the car. At the rear, that simply shouldn't be a zerk. As it turns out it should be an oil reservoir cup, and a big one. No doubt that is why the factory re-cast the body with it sticking straight up. I was expecting maybe the rebuilder had made some changes inside, but no. It was just full of grease that couldn't go anywhere. At the front, when you have both pumps to compare, it is also clear something is up. On the earlier pump that used an oiled sintered bronze bushing in front, there is a massive reservoir encircling the bushing. But, on the pump in the middle, no reservoir. Not only is there no reservoir, but the bore is stepped at the back. The rebuilder used a bronze bushing and drilled a hole in the bushing for grease to get through. That much worked fine. Unlike the rear bushing, it had lubrication. Progress on this pump ground to a halt when it was discovered that some previous rebuilder had reamed this outer bore from 3/4" to 13/16". There was no bearing to fit the hole that would also fit the original shaft size. In fact, the shaft size is non-standard, neither SAE nor Metric, and there is apparently only one bearing that fits. That bearing has an O.D. of 3/4". There are no sleeves commercially available this thin. @Bhigdog came to the rescue. He made me a repair sleeve. In fact, he made two of them with a slightly different fit. These were intended to be held in with loctite sleeve retainer, so they would not distort from pressing. Meanwhile @37_Roadmaster_C made me a "plug" to check concentricity of the bores. Not knowing who reamed that bore oversize or how, there was some doubt. They are concentric! (Whew!). Now the only holdup is waiting for the Loctite 640 to get here. More to come when it arrives. It may already be here.

Nice!

It's fine. If you don't like it, do it again. You are limited in how big the heads can be. Even after I learned how long to make the rivets, about one in three split. Make a few extras if you are going to pursue it, but it would be ok the way it is. What could it possibly hurt? Does the resistance get nice and low with the float arm hanging?

Cutouts are not regulators. A rectifier diode is what is commonly used. Usually some sort of alternator diode. Those are completely normal Silicon diodes, with a voltage drop of about 0.7 volts. Since these replacement cutouts are used with third brush generators, and there is no voltage regulation anyway, the generator just runs 0.7 volts higher than the battery and never knows the difference. Know why alternators don't have cutouts? Because the diodes are already there. In my opinion, most of these cutout conversions I have seen are not heatsinked near well enough for the current they are expected to carry. If you want to get fancy, you could use a big Schottky diode. The voltage drop is much less, maybe 0.2 volts, so you would have less than half the heat to get rid of at the same current. Yes, and that is exactly what the electromechanical cutout did, and all it did. Third-brush-and-a-cutout systems have some real downsides. Voltage regulation would improve things a lot. How to add voltage regulation to them is a bit of a rabbit hole.

There was one improvement I did make. I added a sock filter. Initially I thought one of the round Ford or Mopar types would be perfect. Most are meant to slide over a 5/16" line. There is even a half-length version as pictured. That did NOT work. No matter what you do there is no way it is going to fit through the hole into the tank once installed. Plan B was a GM flat style sock, Those are available in 5/16" as well as 3/8", but 5/16" is whats needed here. It will go in the tank, just barely, but there is a problem. The sock is so long that it might walk up the pickup tube far enough to get caught in the gears. One approach might be to solder a ring on the pickup tube to stop it. Another is to shorten the sock. I shortened the sock to about half it's original length. The mesh is plastic, and is melted together at the bottom. You can cut the mesh with a big scissors, but melting it back together was pretty challenging at first. I tried all sorts of methods. I could not help but think of Thomas Edison telling some reporter that he had learned 700 ways NOT to make a light bulb. I discovered the secret though. Unfortunately I don't have a picture. Take a piece of brass shim stock a little more than twice as wide as the melted seam. Fold it in half. Crimp it over the cut un-melted end. Heat up the shim stock with a big soldering iron until the plastic inside melts. After it cools, peel the brass off.

They didn't try to seal it. Apparently it isn't that important. Mine has been working fine for a couple of years now. Leaking around the fuel pickup tube would matter more because it would be out on top and you might smell it. They soldered the fuel pickup to the hole in the top piece originally, although that might not really matter either because the little egg shaped gasket would squeeze around it. The threads around the mounting screws could seep. GM apparently made the holes in the sender-tank gasket fit really tight around the screws to seal it up. In the 50s I believe they added copper washers under the screw heads. I made the holes in my sender-tank gaskets extra tight. That makes it a little fiddly to install, but really not that big of a deal. I used low-strength purple loctite on the screws to be sure they sealed. Blue would be fine too. I did not use copper washers. I agree with @EmTee about the silicone. That and teflon tape don't belong within 100 yards of a 30s car. 😛

Both you and Rusty are correct, more or less. It might work fine as 6v. It's not even the same brand of generator. How much current draw at 6v to run the field? Also, you might need to connect the new coils in parallel instead of series, assuming the old ones were in series. Or not. If you can get the current draw at 6v about the same, it will probably work. If it's less, it might still work, but you'd have to try it.

I used ball bearings, both to make the rivets and to put them in. I doubt anything else homebrew would work. I think anything with a bolt would just sort of squish and make a mess. One caveat is that there is just barely room for the rivet. It would be really easy to wind up with a hole too small if the brass was too thick. I formed the heads with ball bearings and then did the last hit with a pin punch. Then, because the rivets were a little tight around the screws, I forced in a philips screwdriver, a #1 Snap-On I think, but whatever could be forced in to insure the hole was big enough. Then I Hit them with the pin punch once more to make sure they were still tight. I used tubing from the hobby store. I did not know of the .22 possibility at the time. The rivets were made in a tool made by @37_Roadmaster_C that was just a hole like the OD of the tubing in a piece of steel, with a nice chamfer at the top. I have no idea how he figured out how deep to make the hole, but it worked. I cut the blanks with a mini tubing cutter. It took a few tries to figure out the length. Then I formed heads on them using the tool and the ball bearings. I do know that one rivet is shorter, and I am not sure how that can be, but my three rivets were most likely all the same, as there was only one forming tool. I must have split the difference on the length.

Heat em up to dull red with a torch. Either quench them or let them cool. Despite common wisdom, it doesn't matter which. Brass turns into a wet noodle when you do that. That will solve most of the splitting problem. Get 2 or 3 different size ball bearings to beat on to help form the rivet heads. You can't have huge rivet heads, or yeah they will split, but as big as they were before is very doable. You may have to experiment with how much brass you let poke through the holes.

I'm no T expert, but I think several years are represented there, and not much 1927. It could have a 1927 engine though. That might determine it's identity for title purposes.

Here are some small bits from a book called "Presenting the 1936 Silver Streak Pontiac Sixes and Eights". I don't think these even began as photographs, but here they are anyway.

For anyone following along who doesn't realize it, 1936 Pontiacs have two owners manuals. The "owners handbook" is a fairly abbreviated thing that has a pocket in front containing warranty info for the tires, battery, etc. and a folded up lubrication chart. It has basic owners manual info. The "user's guide" is a longer much more detailed owners manual that also delves into the philosophy of driving. Here is a picture from the "owners handbook". There is quite a bit less wrong here than that factory photo I posted earlier with the big open hole around the parking brake, no speedometer cable, a Chevrolet transmission, ignition key cut on a trunk key blank, etc. etc. This mat does look very similar to that one. I am inclined to believe this is what it should look like, at least at the beginning of the year. Note the correct transmission in this picture, and also a boot around the parking brake. What boot though? Here's the factory photo again. That oval hole might even work with this Buick boot for the last cars Buick made with the brake in the floor. Available from Steele in brown only, for about $100. Maybe that is what they intended? It might even be what we are seeing in the owner's handbook picture. On the other hand, to me it looks like they might have hastily crammed a second shift boot over the parking brake lever for a photo op. That would have taken some real stretching. It is notable that there is no parking brake boot for these Pontiacs in the parts book. As I recall there is something called a "felt". Pontiac were pretty good about plugging up holes. I don't really believe they closed up that giant oval hole with a piece of felt. If it was a tiny hole then maybe. I'd sure like to see an original mat or some remains. On a side note this owner's handbook pic also has horizontal tread on the pedals. Maybe another of Pontiac's mid year changes?

That 37-40 "with modification" one might work. I would get them to measure it carefully. In particular, the tunnel cut at the top of the mat in the middle looks way too low. Maybe not. 37 anything GM is wider than our cars by a lot. You'll be cutting a lot off the sides like I did what that unpunched 1937 Roadmaster mat. Speaking of that, when I bought it, Bob's still had one in stock in brown. I imagine it's gone by now but it might be worth an ask. Worth the call anyway to see if any 1936 unpunched mats are in the works.

I was hoping someone would jump in here with specific Packard Super Eight knowledge, but since no one has, I'll throw a few ideas out there. Good to have that potential problem out of the way. I don't know, but on most gas gauge systems the voltage on the wire to the tank isn't something you would know or care about. If that turns out to really be AC, it will work on the same principle as a GM gas gauge, and I have a lot more ideas. That is going to have to come from a service manual, or from someone who just knows. If it happens to use the same resistance range as some common GM, Ford, or Mopar gauge, or an aftermarket standard like Stewart Warner or VDO, then maybe. Even then it would most likely be a 12 volt gauge. I would bet against this happening to work out on a Packard, but until you know what the resistance is, it's hard to tell. Most electric gauges will swing all the way one way or the other with the wire to the sender disconnected. For instance an AC (General Motors) gauge swings high with the wire disconnected, and low with the wire grounded. The range on those is 0-30 ohms at the sender, 0 being empty and 30 being full. Some other brands of gauge may go the other way. Some types might not use 0 as an end point. Using 0 as an endpoint was in my opinion a really bad idea.

I don't remember now. That might explain it. Or more likely I might have been using google, limiting it to this site, a few keywords, etc. @carbdoc I think hes referring to my inability to find a thread I was sure existed.

Wow. I thought it was you, but all a search came up with was some thread where you said you were thinking about tackling it.

Those chokes are infamous. I believe Buick had that forced on them by GM Corporate, and in about a year it was clear to everyone they were a problem. Buick had replacement carbs available that eliminated the Delco choke. That said, SOMEONE on this forum successfully rebuilt and/or modified one to work properly. As I recall there were pictures and details. A quick search did not find the thread though. Does anyone remember who that was? Or know how to find the thread? @EmTee @dibarlaw @DonMicheletti @MCHinson

I would look into bushing them in oilite bronze or maybe 660 if it is practical to do so. I don't know if it is. Are those standard GM hinge pins? If so, replacements are easy if you stay to standard size. Steel on steel is just asking for a failure. It gets a tiny bit of rust going and then just grinds. I realize it was steel originally. I keep putting oil on the steel on steel hinges in my "modern" cars, and they just keep spitting more ugly powdered rust out and keep getting looser.

I woudn't expect brand new leather to need anything, but a saddlemaker would know. Neatsfoot oil would be the answer for old dried out leather. My 110 year old cone clutch is drenched in neatsfoot oil.

Just like back then. They were always telling you to "get a hoarse". .....I'll show myself out

I don't think it should match. Good catch on the "b".

1990.

Hinckley-Myers (early), Kent-Moore (later on).

Vacuum deposited aluminum covered in glass.