ply33

Yeah. Orange County basically has Ortega Highway, Santiago Canyon Road and Live Oak Canyon Road and nothing else. At least nothing else I am aware of. There are lots of nice roads in the hills and mountains of San Diego County but from where I am in south Orange County those are only accessible via Ortega Highway or, as you call it, the conveyor belt (freeway).

Angeles Crest Highway. California Highway 2. It runs along the high country in the San Gabriel Mountains (Angeles National Forest) from La Cañada/Flintridge to Wrightwood. California 2 also runs into downtown Los Angeles but that has a different name. A favorite of motorcyclists, etc. as it is long and winding. As a hiker, both convenient and annoying. Convenient because it gets you to a number of trail heads. Annoying because many of the trails are on the ridge parallel to the highway and in most places you can hear the noise of the motorcycles winding out their engines, which carries for miles, regardless of how far you are from the trail head.

It is my understanding that it varied from state to state and wasn’t standardized until after the automobile era began. I believe the New England states were generally keeping to the left while the mid-Atlantic and western states were generally keeping to the right. One legend/hypothesis is that left vs right side of road depended on the coaching and/or freight traditions. If the driver rode on the coach (English style) then it made sense for them to sit on the right side of the carriage so that the whip had a wide range of motion. If the driver rode on the rear horse (French or continental tradition) or walked along side the freight wagon (early Conestoga) then they wanted to be on the left of the vehicle so they could reach each horse/ox with the whip. Once you got the driver position settled then it made sense to have the driver toward the middle of the road, so right hand drive meant being on the left side of the road, etc.

By the mid-1930s there were factory service manuals for some other makes. Did Lincoln not produce one? Are reprints available (I am too messy in the shop to have original vintage documentation there)?

He is 21. If one has the resources (time and money) that is a good age for this type of adventure. From time to time I think about doing that type of trip again (drove my 33 across the country when I was in my mid 20s). But the thought of all those miles without air conditioning, cruise control, etc. is much less appealing now in my late 60s.

My profile shows I joined on January 3, 2000 so I have both of you beat on longevity. I lose out on number of posts and how interesting they are though so I defer to both of you. I don’t recall finding the forum until after we got DSL. And I am now trying to remember when we transitioned from dial up to DSL. It would not surprise me if it was in 1999 so my guess is my join date of January 3, 2000 is accurate.

Your roof insert construction looks nearly identical to that in my 1933 Plymouth. After I got everything together on my car I found that there is at least one vendor that could have sold me a reproduction wood frame: N/C Industries in Pennsylvania. (After the founder passed away they started specializing in windshield frames but I think they still have/make a bunch of 1933-34 Plymouth and Dodge parts.) Not sure if they could or would make that piece for you but they might. At the risk of exposing a short cut I took. . . I had one corner with rotten wood, much like yours. I found a liquid epoxy that was advertised for house restoration for filling in the voids and stabilizing deteriorated wood in old houses. Then for the areas that were totally gone, I used an off the shelf two part epoxy filler that had wood filler as one of its labeled uses. It has been together now for over 20 years and my epoxy stabilization/filler seems to be doing an adequate job: The top still seats down nicely around the edges and it still seems to be leak free (not that I drive it in the rain very much, most of the water on the roof is when I wash it).

I too much prefer driving an antique car that has its original drivetrain. But . . . when I visit the local “cars and coffee” I see very few older/antique cars with original drivetrains. Nearly all have been “updated” with newer running gear. In many (most?) cases it looks like far more money was spent on replacing the drivetrain than it would have cost to rebuild/renew the original. So it is quite easy for me to imagine someone “who owns a valuable antique car would ruin it (and its value) by substituting an electric motor for its original engine and drivetrain” as I see it happens all the time but with a SBC instead of an electric motor.

Looking at new car sales, I think you will find the average person considers shifting, engine sounds and needing to downshift for corners as bugs rather than features.

I hid this 6v+ to 12v- converter under the dash of my old Plymouth to power/charge my cellphone charger and to power my dashcam. I can’t remember the vendor I got mine from so the link is to first vendor I found with a quick web search.

If I am reading correctly, it is not a matter of gears grinding but rather that the lever gets stuck in direct. Do I have that right? The 1933/34 have a funky design where the shift tower and lever is mounted to a frame cross member and the lever extends into the transmission. I can’t tell from the image in my parts book and I have no service manual for the 1932, but it looks like it might be a similar design on your car. If so, then I think things could jam up if the rear engine mounts are sagging. But I don’t see how that could be related to how long you’ve been driving. If the clutch is not releasing then it could be very difficult to move the shift lever out of gear. That can be tested by matching the engine speed exactly to the road speed so that there is no loading on the gears. Does your transmission have freewheeling? If so another way to remove all force on the gears in the transmission it to engage it. With freewheeling engaged you should be able to shift freely between gears while moving with the engine idling regardless of the clutch engagement or condition. With respect to gear lube, the stuff in my garage is Sta-Lube 140 gear lubricant and I got it at my local hardware store a while back. The stuff I have is for hypoid gears and says it is safe on yellow metal. Not sure about the PB, but there is no yellow metal in the PC or PD transmission or rear end/axle so I figure hypoid is safe in my car regardless. Edit: The 1933 owners manual calls for “Freewheeling lubricant No. 110” in the transmission for temperatures above +40°F. I believe but have never been able to verify that SAE 110 would be the same viscosity only that the freewheeling specific lubricant would have had either some additives or be a higher grade lubricant than the off the shelf standard gear lube of the era. Since my local store did not have SAE 110 gear lubricant but did have SAE 140 and since I was having issues with gears grinding a little with SAE 90 despite my best double clutching efforts when the transmission was warm, I switched to the 140 and have been happy since.

Looks very similar to the linkage on the 1933 PC and PD cars. For 1933 the pins are just clevis pins so easily replaced. The bars are pretty simple bar stock that could be reproduced at home with not much more than a jigsaw with metal blade, drill and file. But it seems a little strange that it shifts okay when cold but not hot. I would not think a linkage issue would act that way. When it “won’t go into any other gear” do you mean that the lever simply doesn’t move or that the gears grind a lot? Looking at the nth generation illustration in my parts book, the late PA and PB transmission looks fairly similar to the one in my PD in that is uses constant mesh gears for 2nd and a sliding “dog clutch” without synchronizers for engaging 2nd & 3rd. I know that in my '33 the use of lightweight gear lubricant makes it hard to shift without grinding especially when it is fully warmed up. If grinding is your issue and it only occurs when fully warm you might want to try a heavier lubricant. If I recall correctly I am using SAE 140 in mine.

Good or bad, it doesn’t look like I will be watching it.

Interesting comments about remembering numbers. I recall some phone numbers and addresses from my childhood but I can’t say for sure the memorized numbers are correct after all these decades. Back to the OP's vehicle ID number: I don’t see it in any of my references for Dodge or Fargo trucks. But I don’t have exhaustive records so I can’t rule it out.

Seems a rather uncivil attitude. I have a few parts that I packed and shipped off for free simply because I knew I’d never use them and someone else needed them for their restoration. In one case, a few months later I received a nice hand carved wooden car model in thanks. And in a couple of cases I was given parts I needed by others with the same attitude about being helpful as I. If/when I decide to sell my car, you can be sure that my inventory of spare parts will go with the vehicle for no extra cost. Just seems the right thing to do. Paying it forward as it were.

Outside of possibly some corridors in the northeast, I think passenger trains in that era probably only averaged 25 to 35 MPH. Their competition was horse drawn wagons and carriages that were far slower. Given a powerful enough car and a driver brave enough to push it on the roads of the day it doesn’t surprise me that a car could beat a train between LA and SF. By the middle to late 1920s it was apparent that railroads had to improve to remain competitive so by the early 1930s you started seeing high speed and streamlined trains with much faster speeds. I believe that by the mid 1930s AT&SF was averaging nearly 60 MPH between Chicago and LA, a feat that would be very difficult on US66 going through small towns (and I am not even sure it was paved the whole way until the late 1930s).

Maybe they have an ICE vehicle at home but didn’t want to waste the gas getting it to the filling station. Or they are getting it for a friend, neighbor or relative. Makes no sense otherwise.

It had never occurred to me to check the vehicle requirements for the driving test to see if they were different from the equipment requirements for having the car on the road. Turns out they are slightly more restrictive for the driving test. Thanks for getting me to look it up! Apparently seat belts are only required if “if the vehicle was manufactured with safety belts”. The requirement for two mirrors is actually in the equipment section of the motor vehicle code for all cars so that should be met by any street legal car. Looks like the only requirements hard for a stock older car to meet is the turn signals and dual brake lights (both of which lots of old cars have been retrofitted with). From https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-education-and-safety/educational-materials/fast-facts/preparing-for-your-driving-test-ffdl-22/ And from https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/driving-test-criteria/pre-drive-checklist-safety-criteria/ Interesting they call for demonstrating “arm signals”. I’d always called them “hand signals”.

I know nothing specific to this incident other than what I read in the news. And the last time I had any technical dealings with SCADA or SS-7 was in the 1990s and one hopes things have changed a bit since then. That said, the networks that control industrial processes (SCADA) or route phone calls (SS-7) were developed back in the utopian days of networking when it was assumed that everything on the network could be trusted. They were assumed to be closed networks where all the elements were from trusted vendors, etc. and no significant security or authentication was designed in. Retrofitting security into networks that never had it in the first place is expensive and very disruptive. Even just getting all the industry actors to agree on revisions to the protocols that improve security without breaking older equipment (whose manufacturer may no longer be in business) can take a lot of time. So on the one hand updating for security is disruptive and costly, assuming there is even an industry agreed upon improvement available, and risk adverse managers are unlikely to approve security changes that will hit the bottom line with no anticipated improvement in sales or long term business efficiency (at least until something bites them hard). On the other hand, there is strong incentives for ease of management and adding useful system features that induces companies to interconnect these specialized insecure legacy networks to the Internet thus exposing them to hacking. End result is that we suffer from computerized spam calls that can’t be easily stopped (lack of authentication in SS-7 coupled with Voice Over IP (VOIP) Internet gateways). And “bad actors” can disrupt industrial processes (SCADA insecurities), even to the point of destroying equipment. But from a couple of the news items I have read, it seems the target was the Windows computers and servers in the company’s business network that manages things rather than the SCADA network they undoubtedly use for actually running pumps and valves, etc. on the pipeline. Yet another “attack surface” for someone to work with. If you are worried about national security then you can be very worried about this: Normal business pressures mean that companies will select options that improve cost/efficiency over those that improve resilience/security. And huge pyramids of interconnected systems are built up with inherent weaknesses in the whole foundation waiting for a trigger that collapses the whole. And collapse might even be due non-human triggers (e.g. weather cold enough that lack of dewatering in Texas natural gas pipelines meant freezing pumps leading to lack of gas for heating and power). Some other posts wondered about state actors like Russia or China. Yes, nations including Russia, China, North Korea and even ourselves (SCADA controlled uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran come to mind) engage in these activities. But it is also a profitable field for just plain criminals. So it isn’t a matter of Russia OR China OR North Korea OR criminals OR whoever. It could be any of them on any single attack. I don’t worry as much about who is doing the attack but that it is it relatively easy to pull off attacks on the systems we make. Given the nature of business pressures I don’t see that changing and that is the scary part.

If it is the same pump as on Plymouth (original Chrysler part number of 1064750), then as @JFranklin noted, NAPA should be able to get you a new one.

Near as I can tell, service cut offs due to demand exceeding supply or potential wild land fire issues is being done at the grid distribution level not at the individual customer meter level. The state and utilities have programs were larger users of electricity can either voluntarily or automatically have their use reduced or turned off. All the programs I have heard about work by incentives (lower electrical charges) rather than being forced on anyone. 5G has been implemented and is being rolled out by T-Mobile, Verizon and ATT. Not sure about in the US, but there has been push back about 5G in other parts of the world based on what I believe to be superstition and ignorance. Some associate it with cancer (no evidence that non-ionizing radiation would have any effect on cancer that I can see). Some associate 5g with COVID despite zero evidence and no plausible causation mechanism.

Source for this? I was in the PG&E service area when they swapped out the meters and there were complaints about higher bills due to higher readings. Near as I can tell, while some of those were due to faulty units from one supplier, many were due to the old meters being out of calibration and reading low. There was no change in power readings for my house nor for anyone I knew. I am currently in the SDG&E service area and I have not heard or read about problems with smart meters here. When I do a web search the more authoritative sources listing problems are all from when the meters were first being installed 15 years ago. Current (or undated) articles all seem to be on sites that have as much credibility to me as ones claiming 5G wireless and COVID are related.

Current efficient EVs get around 4 miles/kWh. The boxier compact SUV designs seem to be between 2.5 and 3.5 miles/kWh. No doubt the soon to be introduced pickups will be much worse. But taking 3 miles/kWh as a guess at average and going off the US average miles/year for a car of a bit under 12,000 miles you get 334 kWh/mo.

In the beach resort town that I live in there are lots of neighborhood electric vehicles (NEV) and repurposed golf carts (mostly but not entirely electric) that are on the roads. Some have license plates on them, most don’t. Many are being driven by children, or at least individuals who look like children too young for a driver’s license to my aged eyes. Apparently if electric they are classified as “low speed vehicles" (LSV) and many states have specific rules for them. Looking at my state’s motor vehicle code, they can only be driven on roads with speed limits at or below 35 MPH and must follow all traffic laws but are not required to be registered. Near as I can tell from the legalese in VEH-21251, the operator of a NEV/LSV needs to meet the same requirements as an operator of any other vehicle (i.e. needs to have a driver’s license). Whether the law requires it or not, I sure would want to have sufficient insurance. The recently announced Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 can also take advantage of the higher charging rates. Availability in the US has been promised for late this year and they look interesting for someone who takes longer trips several times a year. At the federal level the gas tax “trust fund” has been empty for years (taxes collected less than money spent). The difference being made up by transfers from the general funds as Congress is loath to increase gas taxes. The whole rational behind gas taxes started way back when cars were a luxury that could only be afforded by the well off. And those car owners wanted roads to be improved. The political compromise was that fuel taxes (not paid by poorer folk who didn’t own cars) would be directed to road construction and maintenance. That political compromise makes less sense when everyone has a car. Maybe charging from home will cause this to be rethought and highway funding would be straight from the general fund. After all, we don’t collect specific taxes for the military or most other “discretionary” spending, why should transportation be different? It will be interesting to see how this works our in the long term. At present California has a $0.35/gal tax on gasoline so that $150 represents the equivalent purchase of about 429 gallons of gas. The 1990 to 2010 corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) for light duty vehicles is/was 27.5 MPG which would work out to a bit under 12,000 miles/year for the same tax paid. All taxes are in some way unfair. Paying for roads out of general funds means carless urban residents are penalized compared to suburban residents. A gas tax penalizes owners of inefficient vehicles. A fixed fee per year penalizes vehicles driven only a few miles a year. Anything you pick will have winners and losers so there will be political fights. If you look at highway maintenance data, I think you will find that vehicle weight and speed are highly correlated with damage to highways. It would make sense to figure out a scheme where distance driven per year and vehicle weight were the factors in setting the fee/tax. Weight is easy but getting miles driven in a way that preserves liberty and privacy is not so easy. Many states have required periodic safety or smog checks. Vehicle mileage could be checked at those times. Since modern odometers are not as easy to turn back, etc. as they once were maybe that would be sufficient for determining mileage. I could seen an automatic assumption of some high miles driven per year for any vehicle with a broken or tampered odometer.

That is one thing I don’t like about DC fast charging for EVs: Needing to have an account with a charging network or with multiple charging networks. I am not sure, but it seems that you might be able to use a credit or debit card to charge on some networks but it looks like the price is significantly higher than if you have an account so if you do much road tripping you will need an account with one or more networks like Electrify America, Charge Point, EVgo, Tesla, etc. So as you write “signing up with Electrify America is also pretty much a given.” But it shouldn’t have to be. Only saving grace is that many/most people will be able to do all of their local travel by charging at home and will only need to use DC fast chargers when on longer trips. I don’t need to sign up with Shell, Chevron, Arco, Mobile, etc. to buy gas. I can do it with any debit or credit card or even cash. This is not a technical requirement but forced on EV owners by the business models of the charging networks.