Bloo

One traditional name for them, probably a brand name(?), is "U-Drive".

I am still a little confused about how this is going to happen without taking the headliner edge down, but I'm not going to tell you you can't do it. Keep us posted on how it goes.

If they stick through the body at all, try pushing on them from the inside with the blunt end of a plastic screwdriver handle. One of the old clear or colored clear handles is the sort of plastic I mean.

It looks like it runs over. Either the float is sunk, or the needle and seat is bad, or the fuel pressure is too high. The new needle and seat will come in a carburetor rebuild kit. While it is out, you can sink the float in hot almost boiling water and look for bubbles indicating a leak. No bubbles, no leak. This assumes a brass float. I don't think I have seen a plastic float in a Stromberg WW. If it is plastic it is probably responsible for this mess, so just replace it, preferably with a brass one if you can get it. High fuel pressure could to that too. Disable the ignition somehow so you don't get another fire, hook the fuel line right to a pressure gauge and crank. Pressure/Vacuum gauges are the ones usually used for this on carbureted cars because they can read fairly low pressure. You'll need to check the service manual for the fuel pressure. Offhand I think a Stromberg WW wants about 4-1/2 PSI, and probably nothing over 5 PSI. If you have 7 PSI, as a lot of replacement mechanical fuel pumps do these days, you'll either have to find a properly freshly rebuilt pump somewhere, or add a fuel regulator. Getting a pump with the right pressure is the best answer if you can do it. Regulators that actually work are expensive, and it is a bit of a kludgey fix, but some people find they have no choice.

Some professional tools: And the more common style. This one lays the blade down, about like you would do with the antique knife, except with the antique knife the hand holding it would be more out of the way of the hand holding the material edge. Not quite sure what this guy is doing in the picture. There's no alligator strip under a rubber gasket, and he's not holding on to the edge of the material. Maybe he's related to this person: Or this one:

They make a special tool, but the knife, specifically the kind I pictured, works just as well. The removal method I posted *is* the installation method. The only difference is it's easier when the headliner is new and hasn't been trimmed off yet. There's a lot less edge to hang on to on a used one. Once you have done it a little., you can hook and unhook at will. When installing one, you adjust the tension to get rid of wrinkles. On a new headliner, with the headliner already centered in the car, and most of the front and back attached so the bows are standing up in the right position, you would do the spots at the seams first. Ever notice when looking at an installed headliner there is a spot where the direction of a seam makes a slight but sudden change as it comes down to the edge? It's not showing well in your pics, but in @EmTee's.... Especially look at the bottom of the dark spot, its most visible on the first two starting at the left of the picture, and sort of lost in the shadows on the rest. That direction change is the end of the sleeve that goes around the bow, and on a brand new headliner the new sleeves are usually a little bit too long and the breakover point a little too low to not wrinkle. When you install a headliner, you generally cut those back a little to move the breakover point a little higher so you can get the seam to have no wrinkles all the way down to the edge. Don't cut the sleeve too much though, there's no going back! Once the spots at the seams are attached to the alligator strips, then you do the areas in-between. Look at @EmTee's picturre again. See how it bulges nicely between the seams as it follows the curve of the roof, and they all look the same? You adjust the tension on the cloth to get that. It pulls and moves way easier between the seams. Once you get those right, maybe a little work at the corners of the headliner to make sure there aren't wrinkles. The edges aren't cut until you are done. This is why it is technically possible (but not always practical) to take an old headliner back loose from the alligator strips. Once a newly installed headliner looks good, the edge of it is trimmed, then you cram the last little bit hanging out up into the void with the "tool" (knife). No telling how much that little bit was, but its probably not .030" or something, because who wants to risk cutting something important just to trim that edge? If it's 1/4" inch you can probably get hold of it with a duck bill pliers and if it's 1/2" or more your fingers can probably do it. Being able to hang on to that outer edge is what makes hooking and unhooking work.

Well... thats not quite what I expected. Those aren't the teeth. Those are just steel to hold the impregnated cardboard(?) that the windlace tacks to. The alligator strip is still hidden by the headliner in this picture. Wondering if I can do this without downloading the pic and drawing arrows and reuploading.... That looks pried back. Starting at the "tooth" near the top of the picture, and moving to the right.. 1) The raw edge of the headliner, that you would have to get hold of somehow and pull down on a little or just hold. Typically your only hope of getting hold of it is at an end. You might have to tease it down with something. 2) The black line is the highest part of the tuck. This is where your antique table knife goes. Normally you wouldn't be able to actually see it. because this is all tight against the roof. You push up while holding back on 1) 3) The alligator strip, still hidden by the headliner. It's teeth point up toward the sky, and very slightly to the left. You can see one of them poking left through the headliner material and crossing the black line. If you continue looking down toward the bottom of the picture from there, you will see a bunch more teeth, evenly spaced. The trick is to hold down on the edge 1) while pushing up with your antique table knife into 2) unhooking the material from the teeth of 3) and then it will just come down. It is a bit of a trick. Sometimes your hand that is pulling down on 1) will move up slightly with the antique knife as you unhook a hook, and then you tip the far end of the knife toward the outside of the car slightly so the headliner does not re-hook as you move it downward.

I doubt you would have anything to attach it to on a 56. I doubt you would get away with taking the edge of the headliner down, just because I would expect it to be old and rotten but... Fisher bodies of that time frame are pretty conventional as steel bodies go. There's probably an alligator strip over the thick cardboard that the windlace tacks to along the edge of the headliner. Technically it is possible to take it down. You need a wide blunt and dull blade like an old early 20th century table knife. You have to get hold of an end with your fingers, then you hold down on that end while you push up with the old knife between the end you are hanging on to and the alligator strip, and unhook the headliner from each tooth. Afterward you can take the strips off (phillips head screws if I remember correctly), and untack the windlace. On a GM car, the windlace might be sewed to a piece of cardboard going down the door post. That all comes off. No big deal. This is no different from how the headliner is put up and adjusted for tension in the first place. Here is the kind of knife blade you need. They also make dedicated headliner tools if you are so inclined but I don't see much of an advantage.

That ain't right for a standard bead, and I would expect your 255/70-16 radials have a standard bead. Back in the 60s and 70s a lot of 3/4 ton pickups had a weird wide tapered bead. This may have been at the switch to tubeless radials on 3/4 ton, or more likely just the switch to tubeless on 3/4 ton. Maybe 1 ton too. The details escape me. I think those were half inch sizes. In any event you don't want to mix 16" and 16.5". That's a recipe for disaster. Here's a graphic of a similar change on bigger trucks.

That one is harder to interpret, but on first glance it appears that it was hanging by a thread.

My guess is they didn't. I'll bet that compartment does not in any way lead to the interior. Think of a Chevrolet truck with the spare under the bed. It completely sucks if you have to actually use it, but what else are you gonna do?

I'm gonna repeat what @Jeff Spear said. You are on TDC, but are you absolutely sure you are on TDC of the compression stroke? The correct spot only comes up every other turn of the crank. It might be on TDC and firing #1 when it should be firing #4. I'd take the plugs out, except #1, but loosen #1. Crank by hand (only way I guess in 1913) with the ignition off, and when #1 hisses, run it on up to your TDC mark and stop. Your timer should be firing #1.

Are the rims missing completely? Tires went for the war effort? Nice project. Keep us posted.

WHOOMP! There it is. Have a good close look at @Professor's second picture from his last post.

The Reo bodied Franklin is the Olympic, not the Airman. I think this really is an Airman like the ad claims, but I'll wait and see what the Franklin enthusiasts say.

How sure are you the pump is turning? Is the drive gear on the distributor or the oil pump? Is the distributor turning? Could there be some sort of a drive spring in there that is missing? Taking that a step further, how sure are you the camshaft is turning? Maybe you can see moving valves through a spark plug hole? If that's all ok, it definitely should have primed by cranking once you had vaseline in the pump. Did you have the spark plugs out when you were cranking? That helps it happen a lot faster. If it is turning, and full of vaseline, about the only thing left is an air leak in the oil pickup somewhere on the way to the pump. I'd check that very closely, then load it up with vaseline and try again. How are you measuring pressure? I wouldn't trust the gauge in the car. A mechanical oil pressure gauge doesn't cost much. I keep one in my toolbox for times like these. One more possibility I guess is that it is moving oil, but still not building pressure. I would temporarily disconnect that oil filter and plug the ports that supply it. Sometimes those bypass oil filters are found to be missing an orifice. Have you looked at the blow-off valve for the oil pump? I don't know where it is located on this Olds, but it is probably in the oil pump. Make sure it isn't stuck open or missing the spring or something like that. EDIT: Does this car have plugs driven into the ends of the oil gallerys in the crankshaft? If so, you'd better make sure one hasn't fallen out.

I doubt other GM cars would use that except maybe LaSalle.

Is it cheaper? Please keep us posted on how well it works.

That was nice of them, I wish more manufacturers were thinking ahead like that. I do prefer the "stop" method (like the ziptie in my example above) because with the piston on the way up there is a lot of movement and there can be no doubt about where it stops. Right at the top, the piston comes to a stop and reverses, and it is still a little hard to tell exactly where TDC is. With that hole over the piston though, you could still use the "stop" method with an immovable object screwed in the hole if you wanted to. That is how it is usually done on OHV engines using a spark plug hole.

Except that most of them don't run on any more voltage than they did with 6 volt systems. There is a ballast resistor (or resistor wire) that cuts the voltage down to about 7.5V, which is about the same as a 6v coil gets when the generator is running. There is one advantage though, and it is called a starting bypass. On most 12v cars, the resistor is bypassed during cranking. This is a real advantage because the voltage of the whole system voltage gets pulled way down on any car while cranking. It is worst on a compression stroke of course when the starter load is highest, and that is exactly when you need a spark. On 12v cars with a bypass, the coil voltage goes higher instead of lower while cranking. This is the only major advantage of a 12 volt system I can think of, and most 12 volt conversions don't bother to implement it. In fact, out of all the 12 volt conversions that ever passed through my service bay, exactly none had it until I got hold of them. The disadvantage of conversions of course is that a bunch of stuff usually doesn't work afterwards, and the guy doing it thinks he has done the hard part by making an alternator bracket. "But it worked before" is something I have heard a lot. Just about anything can be done if you have the persistence to see it through, one problem at a time. There is usually at least one leftover though. I never had a single 12V conversion land in my bay with 100% of everything (gauges, accessories, heater, etc.) working. Some guys have to change them over to 12v because there is some 12v accessory they can't live without, like air conditioning or fuel injection or something. Having a good reason to do something doesn't make it less work though. Does this car have a semi-automatic transmission? Absolutely go back to 6 volts if it does. I'd go back to 6 volt anyway personally. @1954royalhemi, There's plenty of knowledgeable people around here to help, especially if you keep it as originally built, because that's what we do around here mostly. We can help you sort it out. Welcome to the forum!

I have been meaning to post a thread about how to do that, but unfortunately I don't have time to do it right now. Super short version: 1) Take all the plugs out, disconnect the battery 2) Make a fixed pointer adjacent to the harmonic balancer if there isn't one. Put it where you will be able to see it with the timing light easy. If there already is one, paint a line or paint its tip at 0 degrees, whatever is appropriate. 3) Get a giant plastic zip tie. Important: Long too. It's tail needs to be too long to get lost in a cylinder. Put it head first through the spark plug hole on number 1 cylinder. You might have to file on the zip tie a little to get it in. The spark plug holes are not over the piston in a flathead usually, so you are reaching over to the other side of the engine, all the way. 4) Crank the engine SLOWLY with a WRENCH. Hang on to your zip tie, and you should be able to feel it following the piston up the cylinder until the crank stops, with the head of the zip tie caught between the piston and the head, way over at the far side of the engine. Make a mark on the balancer that lines up with your pointer (or 0 if its a scale). Use a pencil or something else you can remove later. 5) Now crank the engine with the WRENCH backwards. Feel the zip tie follow the piston up again until it stops. Not much force. Don't unscrew the balancer bolt or anything, just hold it at the stopped point like you did before and make a second mark. 6) Make a mark in the center exactly between the 2 marks you just made. This is TDC. Red paint might be good. 7) Get rid of the two pencil marks, crank the piston back down with the WRENCH, pull the zip tie out and put everything back together.

That and GM's desire to save money on wire. It was the right decision in the long run as the horsepower race heated up, and engines got bigger and compression got higher. I doubt anyone suspected in the early 50s that would turn out the way it did. 12V systems were nothing new. They existed in the teens and 20s, various models of Hupmobile, Studebaker, and Dodge come to mind. They were used on some big trucks and buses throughout the whole 6V era.

Someone has put those alligator clips on to use it as test gear. Ammeters are a dead short internally. They measure current flow, in amps. They are not grounded, and don't care about 6 or 12 volts, only amps. They don't care very much about positive or negative ground either, as they are not grounded. They just read backwards if the polarity is wrong. If an ammeter reads backwards, reverse the leads. An ammeter has to be connected in series to work. On a car, that typically means it goes between the charging system and the battery. The charging system output is the "BAT" terminal on the voltage regulator if you have a generator, and the big post on the alternator if you have an alternator. The battery connection is the not-grounded side of the battery. Keep in mind that when you are driving, and the charging system is working and keeping up with demand, the charging system is the source of current, not the battery. A car from 1948 would typically be wired something like this: A wire from the "BAT" terminal runs from the engine compartment under the dash. It then connects to one ammeter terminal. It may first go to a light switch or a key switch, but will get to that one terminal. Another wire runs from the second ammeter terminal to the ungrounded post of the battery. Usually on an actual car, it doesn't run quite all the way. It goes to a post on the starter or starter solenoid where it connects directly to a battery cable. The current then flows through the battery cable to get the rest of the way to the battery. Most electrical loads (lights, ignition, heater, radio, etc.) are connected to the charging system side of the ammeter. This is because you want the ammeter to only read whether the battery is getting charged or discharged. The current source is the charging system. If an accessory like a radio was connected to the battery side, the ammeter would read charge current plus whatever the radio was drawing. You would never know exactly how much charge the battery was getting. You can't just hook up an ammeter to test something with everything still connected normally. As test equipment, you have to break a connection somewhere and connect the ammeter in series, so that the current flows through the ammeter. An ammeter is a dead short internally, and can only measure flow (Amps). This is in contrast to a Voltmeter, which has extremely high resistance internally. A voltmeter can be connected between a current source (like a charging system or a battery) and ground. It just measures "electrical potential" (as a textbook would call it) in Volts. Voltage is something that just sits there and can be measured, like how much gas is in your tank can be measured, or how much pressure is your tires can be measured. It is not flow, and so nothing needs to be disconnected to measure it.

Get all of that out that you can now with the power wash and anything you can find to poke with. Put a sock in the upper hose to catch what comes loose later when you run it so it doesn't plug the radiator. Evaporust can be used to get the rest of the rust out later. Details here: