Brian_Heil

Agree on the Nitrophyl. Only way to go. 1000s of Model T’s are out there running on modern fuel with some % of Ethanol with this same material. There are a number of T suppliers who make the part with Nitrophyl since the demand/volume warrants it. By a chunk of it from Snyders. Carves up easy. Wear a mask.

My windshield stanchions have a good original type seal where they meet the body/cowl so I did not want to compromise seal that by running a wire through there so my routing is similar to what you have in your pic but attached to the stanchion in two places.

I wired mine to the under dash floor light switch in my 1923. Seeing the floor light on reminds me the spotlight is on. Another option is to use the instrument light terminal on the combination switch. Same theory, seeing the dash light on will remind you the spot is on. No comment about leaving spot on and a dead battery here…..

High point restoration, what’s that? Ha. An inexpensive acid neutralizing battery mat is another good investment. They don’t last forever so keep that in mind. Hydrogen gas build up can be an issue especially in an enclosed battery box such as on a pleasure boat. Required by law but always thought of them as counter productive for this fact. The 100+ year old floor boards above the 6V don’t seem to mind. No comment about methane.

Invested years ago in a smart 6V/12V trickle charger I move around to the different cars. I get at least 5 years out of the Tractor Supply 6V batteries. Optima is a fine battery but their life is not worth the price.

PM sent 47buicknut

Yes, new old stock by Regal. Boxes have seen better days.

Parts still available gary blank never responded

PM sent yesterday

I like the trash can work bench extender. If I was attempting this project, that’s where my work would end up. Well done Admiral! Looking great!

$40 for the pair + shipping

Try the ones just forward of the front seat.

Remove the two rearward most floor boards. One of the two has the metal shifter bezel and you have to be careful not to hit the dash as you lift it over the shifter arm. Battery comes out from above.

Amazon has over a dozen in different sizes to choose from.

We all have a need for it from time to time, and I rarely if ever give a product recommendation but this stuff is really easy to work with. Gel so it flows slowly. Best part is the squeeze levers on the bottle to control delivery volume. See through capillary nozzle so you can see when the glue is about to appear Cap that seals the capillary correctly so you can actually use the product time and time again without a frozen in place cap. Just think, my fingers weren’t glued together either so I could type this!

A follow-up to this post. I did a compression test this past Fall on the engine cold. All six cylinders, all spark plugs removed, about 2 seconds of cranking on each cylinder. All six cylinders were 70 to 71 PSI. Not bad for stock cast iron piston and rings with more miles on them then I will ever know. At least I can feel good that the valve work completed has held up well for 6 years and -8000+ miles. I had a couple cylinders near zero and none higher than 40 psi before the work.

I had a great teacher and boss. Richard A. Miller out of Purdue Class of ‘62. He was an engine design expert at Buick. Most of us went home at night and worked on old cars or hot rods or race cars or something. His vice was golf. We joked he didn’t own a pair of plyers. Wonderful man. Memory like a vault.

I've heard Buick used an internal torsional damper on the straight 8s but I've never studied one to know how that design was executed. I've spent most of my time on earlier 1920's Buick engines (and 8 years as one of the original engineers on the 3800 and its variants). I still have people track me down and ask questions like how do I balance my modified 3800 supercharged race engine that I pulled the balance shaft out of? That one's easy, you can't.

So the next question is, did Buick bolt ring weights onto every crank and balance each? No. A master crank was built with ring weights and run on a balance machine. Easy. That same crank then has the ring weights removed and placed in the production balance machine. The production machine has built in internal balance weights that can be adjusted to make up for the missing ring weights. These internal weights are zeroed out on the bare (ring weights not installed) master crank. This production balance machine also has two built in drill presses with a 3/4 in drill bit. The skilled operator reads the angle an amount of unbalance and knows how much to drill and where on either of the end counter weights. In modern times this drilling became all automated but several parts a day that were balanced had ring weights installed and the balance checked on the manual balance machine.

I had to go run an errand but Oldtech hit on my next comment. The clutch and pressure plate can be a source. They are rather heavy and have a large diameter both are factors in the equation and can be big unbalance numbers. I've seen where the Flywheel, clutch and pressure plate are bolted up to the crankshaft in the balance machine and they are then balanced and left alone and the engine is then assembled with them in place. I once put a new clutch in a small block Chevy. Got a new bad shake. I rotated the pressure plate on the flywheel 180 degrees and it did wonders in reducing the shake.

The reason you feel the vibration force as speed goes up is because there is is an X2 term in the unbalance force equation. The unbalance force you feel increases as a square of the engine speed. IF you have an unbalance.

Just so it's clear. If you go to aluminum pistons which are what ~30% lighter. As long as each cylinder's new lighter mass is matched and equal, they will continue to cancel out. In simplified terms, two fat kids on a teeter totter that weigh the same balance. Two lighter kids that weigh the same also balance.

Dave, read the second to last paragraph I wrote again. So, I think my rebuilt engine is in dynamic balance or close to being so, why is it now shaking? Engine mounts. Either they are side loaded because I'm not lined up on them the same as before. Or the elastimor (rubber) has separated from the metal or cracked or hardened or gone altogether missing or the new replacement is not of the correct dampening rate (hardness). Same goes for the torsional damper if it has an elastimor. A failure here is also a concern for torsional failure of the crankshaft if you run it hard and long enough. And even if correct, that piston mass change you made makes this damper tuned to the wrong frequency. But this is a high speed dynamic issue if the tuning is off. Most of us don't run the engine hard enough to worry. But a torsional dampener with a missing or failed elastimor can shake and even make a terrible rattle noise.

A couple of comments on engine balance The balance being addressed is the balance of the rotating and reciprocating masses not the firing impulses. Firing impulse imbalance is when a cylinder does not fire. That we have all felt and is something entirely different. A miss. So back to things going round and round and others going up and down. Let's start with the up and down masses or as they are called reciprocating masses. Piston, rings, wrist pin, pin retention device (If so equipped) and the small end of the rod. Small end of the rod mass? What? The rod is laid on its side and weighed on two knife edges at the center line of the large crank bore and at center line of the small wrist pin bore. The weight of the small end of the rod is considered to be a reciprocating mass (the other, large end, is a rotating mass we will discuss in a bit). Ever wonder why there are eight cylinders in a row or 8 in a 90 degree V8? (Or 6 in a row?) There are certain cylinder layouts of an engine where the reciprocating mass of each cylinder cancels that of another. So in a straight 8, assuming you got the total reciprocating mass of each cylinder equal to all the others, they cancel out. You just balanced the second order imbalance. Second order? Fancy engineer talk for a shake twice per engine rev which makes sense since the piston makes two movements (one up one down) per rev. Now to rotating. Ever wonder where the position and shapes of all those crankshaft counterweights came from? They are there to cancel or 'balance' the mass of the large end of each rod and the bearing shell (if equipped). The rotating mass. They also balance the mass of each the crank journals and to get picky, some of the crankshaft mass/structure to get out to that journal. But, if we do in this case 8 in a row, and do it right, the whole thing rotates balanced like it was just a simple bar of round steel. No shake. So how do you do that? On a straight 8 it’s done with just the counter weight design, no ring/bob weights to balance. On a V8, that large end of the rod mass you weighed above, you make 8 ring weights that match that mass plus 1/2 the mass of the reciprocating mass and bolt them to each of the eight journals. Think of it as a two half shell ring bolted together onto the journal. You put the crankshaft with these 8 equal ring/bob weights installed and spin it on a crankshaft balancing machine. Think of it like the tire balance machine at the tire store where it spins and tells the tech where to add weight to balance. Except typically on a crankshaft we make two opposing counterweights just a little bit too big so you drill away some mass to bring it in to balance. Why drill and not add mass? It's easier to drill in a production line and things attached to a crankshaft could loosen and fly off. Never seen a drilled hole fly off. Assuming you got all the large end of the rods to match and weigh the same, made 8 ring weights to match that mass and knew what you were doing on the crankshaft balance machine, you have now balanced the engine's primary balance, or first order balance or rotating balance. Congratulations. A further word on crankshaft design. The location of those counterweights on more modern engines that run at higher RPMs contribute to some nasty bending and torsional stresses of the crankshaft. You have to check for those after you figure out where and how big the counterweights are for balance and you may have to do some trade off to reduce stress in the crankshaft. Torsional stresses (think of the crank as a towel you are winding up to wring out the water) are important in a long straight 8 crank and the torsional damper keeps the crank from setting up a torsional 'ringing' by dampening these. Think of placing your hand on a tuning fork to calm it down. So where does all this go wrong? Most machine shops will weigh and match parts, (some don't even do that). Most machine shops do not own a rather expensive piece of equipment called a crankshaft balancer. They 'assume' the crankshaft was balanced once and if you use the correct rod large end mass (which they may or may not know what that should be), the crankshaft will still be in balance. Sort of like guessing where to put the weights on your new tires and not running them on the tire balance machine. Some good news though. If you upgrade to aluminum pistons, and they all weigh the same (the total reciprocating mass of each cylinder is equal), and you don't touch the lower end of the rod or the crankshaft, the engine will remain in balance or as balanced as it was before the piston change. If it’s a straight 8 or 6. And for the engineers out there I'm aware that these are rotating and reciprocating dynamic couples but I'm not going to teach a class in Dynamics of Solids. And more good news for straight 6 and 8 engines, if all the parts are matched for weights, everything cancels out. Also a straight 6 or 8 crank does not require bob/ring weights to balance the crank. You balance spin a straight 6 / 8 bare.