60FlatTop

Which reminds me of back when I owned a Corvair back in the 1980s and in tune with the club's goings on. Page two, the article entitled Whoosh". https://www.corvair.org/chapters/lvcc/lvcc_newsletters/lvcc_2019_11_fifth_wheel.pdf

My '94 Impala SS with the Lt1 and a lot of 9C1 stuff always felt like "Cop" and did it well. Even with the 17" old style Cragar SS wheels and Nito Invo tires. One of very few "old" cars I put blackwalls on.

I would search for a "bumper rub strip" for starters.

That's when I would have referred you to my nearest competitor.

"So" a couple of Bendix engineers and their friends from Studebaker got a bargain on a lightly abused Chrysler. $80,000 in 1934 money seems like a stretch to me. But I would like to hear the real story.

Only the small compressor stays on when I am away from the garage. And it is leak free. I was recently telling my wife that I had to walk to four locations to turn on and off the lights in my garage. There is a gang switch by the door that I could tie them all into but I told her I preferred the routine of the walk around. That probably goes back to the days of closing up my grandfather's shop. He would hold up four fingers and say "There are four things to do before you lock the door". Seems that enumeration process stuck through life, both for me and anyone under my supervision. Just reminded of my time teaching trades apprenticeship. First day of class and laying down the rules "OK, there are ten steps to making coffee. I want you to know that if you leave out the step where you put the water in you will NOT get a 90% grade. Same goes for this class". And a lot was based on numbered sequences. Oh, one of my grandfather's step was unplug the compressor, and for good reason. Not like mine.

It wasn't hard to stay in a nice hotel after I told my wife about flamingos and pineapples. We took the car.

You can take that picture to a sign shop and have one made with vinyl on metal or painted metal. That may be the origin of the one you saw to begin with.

I could not find the specific Buick book but I recommend Addall.com as my first choice in book search engines. I have been using it close to 30 years now. https://www.addall.com/

Tom, the Rambler looks a lot like one Mike Rothschild bought from Howard Sharp. The history doesn't match, though. Interesting that with so few they could be that similar. A condition of that purchase in the early 1990s was that the dynamo be made operational. Howard referred Mike to me to make it work. I got a thorough competency grilling over the phone and the sale moved on. I figured the car had been hand cranked to start since 1920 or before. I made the dynamo operational and installed batteries. There was also an ignition battery and a magneto. quite an electrical system. When Mike came up from NJ with his trailer the car failed to start for a different reason. He was in a hurry so he used the dynamo start switch to power it into the trailer saying he would fix it at home. I remember there was confusion on the actual year of the car at that time. His interest was anything that was eligible for the London to Brighton race that had a self starter. There is at least one picture of that car in my garage. I will try to post it.

The original use of the word "ubiquitous" was to describe the presence of God in the universe. There is a movement to change the meaning to the number of 1960s Buicks with Rally Wheels. Just a rumor, but.

Well, this topic sure got the entertaining comment to come out. I have been laughing to myself and enjoying a lot of memories. I started in this bartering business when I was 11 years old. My father's stepfather, my Grandpa Jerry, had a full line tire business, Wholesale Tires (wholesale to retail customers a post WWII phenomenon) and Jerry's Used cars (a folksy arm around your shoulder implication). I started out mowing the lawn for my grandmother on Saturday mornings but soon filled out the day in the shop. Only I know the high level of restraint I am capable of. The thing that is tickling me now is my lifelong experiences with ethnicity.

The last time I watched The American Pickers was when the squatty one sold some Civil War documentation to a man "his friend" who ran a Civil War museum. I think he sold the stuff for something like $200 saying "I have to make something on this". Here is a well paid TV personality, a camera drew, directors of sorts, and don't forget the Key Grip all sucking up paychecks and this guy feels the need to get his incidental profit. I would have given the items to the person without even making a salable production scene because I knew they were going right where that should. Really irked me. Not my kind of people. Of course when I saw the first episode of American Pickers rolling down the road in their Mercedes van it tainted things right there. All these observations and nuances come together in my mind. Beneficial trickery to teach someone a lesson has been around for a long time. About 2,000 years ago Aesop wrote about animals having similar traits to these ill thought of buyers and sellers. It seems that in the intervening centuries humans have taken on the characteristics of the animals in his stories.

A guy stops in where we have coffee in the morning. I have listened to him and figured out that his money is worth more than other people's. He also devalues anything another person owns. He is my age. One I observe and make a conscious effort not to emulate. To me it looks like things are getting better. Growing up with my formative years in the 1950s and '60s there were a lot of 40 to 60 year old men you couldn't trust. They drove around with the trunk of their car filled with stolen tools from job sites, tools, chains, gas cans, anything that wasn't nailed down. Mailing 25 cents in the 1950s was a maximum security project; folded cardboard to mask the shape, tricky disguises, if they saw the shape of a quarter you'd never get your cereal premium. Factories were always short of home use taps and dies. If a mechanic transferred buildings he would fill a second tool box to divert home. And the stainless valves in home water systems. So many pilferers. Young people today don't seem to be like that. My son in law and my nephews are pretty open with their shops and I don't see that. That group born from the turn of the 20th century to the middle of it may be the least trustworthy group of males in the history of mankind. Now that we are nearing the third decade of the 21st century the worst have died off and the ones they influenced are fading out as well. Incoming generations, whatever their interests I am pretty sure there will be a lot less connivers to deal with as the years go on. I should write a book on how those old timers influenced me not to be like them.

As I understand this "Art" it is played at the expense of the seller. I had to remind the last person who came to my house to buy a lift I listed. "We are only $300 apart on the price" he said. "Yeah, and you are talking about my $300. Go buy the other one." "What do you mean? These things are hard to find." "Huh."

The seams I am writing about are the seams from cutting out the top of the tank and any seams where weak or perforated metal is replaced. I sold a lot of gas tank sealer at swap meets. It was hard to convince someone to buy 2 quarts for coverage. About the only way was to make them think a friend needed a tank sealed as well. Tell them they could do theirs first and then pour it into their friend's. That worked quite often. Buying a reproduction anything doesn't sit well with me. The conversion from Inch/pounds to Metric doesn't give me a lot of confidence from my experience. Well, that's it for me, back out to the garage and file fit the ears on my brake pads so they will go into the sliders. What was that about manufacturing measurements.

I used to sell a lot of car items on Ebay. I started in 1998. It was good for the first 15 years or so but it stopped being fun and was fun taken over by the feeling I was shipping things for approval. No matter how well things were pictured and described the buyers knew Ebay would side with their complaints. And I sold less, passed on opportunities to market hoards, and last year some Cadillac Cimmaron owner in the Hudson Valley just turned it off all the way. I don't have a '46 Chevy or late '40s Chrysler but I know what to do with my shiny stuff. I enjoy seeing it there on the wall, much more than some clown whining about a pin their friend found. A few hundred bucks hanging on the wall and some owner crying about unobtainum. Well, they pretty much earned the absence of parts availability. Let then live with it. There was a point when I excluded one country from sales. Only that country had repeated requests for partial refunds. It was noticeable. I offered a full refund but they just wanted part of the money back. I excluded a whole country because they were so predictable, and often the same auto manufacturer's parts. Prior to wall hangings I made this bench. A really nice '69 Cadillac bumper but there was a scratch that I knew would cause someone to hack up a big hair ball. It made a great bench for years. In the end the right person got it for his car. Every interaction between a buyer and seller is a learning experience. I learned. I changed. Those I learned from represented the whole group.

If I needed to repair a fuel tank I would cut out the top for full access to the insides. I would gently glass bead all the internal surfaces in the lower sections or joints. Then cut out and replace anything weak. We have a local radiator shop that will do that. I might try it myself when the pending opportunity arises. Once I worked on a mid-1950s Bentley tank that had many dividers and chambers that never could have been done effectively without opening it. That is when I decided to continue with the more difficult method. I would not use any internal coating and rely on leading all the seams. Once installed I like to keep my tanks full. It is my summer routine to top off the old cars on Sunday afternoon every week. I have thought of adding oil to create a thin film as the level falls but keeping them full is best.

In a real starter shop you might find a high torque or low torque GM starter barrel. The high torque has a spacer between the winding wire and the solenoid. It should be the high torque but some people like me would put the shorter one into their car if it started on half a crank. I used to give my old cars to my needy friend Mike. He took them to a shop that always seemed confounded with them. I think the most entertaining was the 1994 Roadmaster that didn't have a gear reduction starter and didn't need a chip in the key.

Is that reading the stepper gauge like the speedometer?

Pry up on each exhaust manifold to see if either has become delaminated. There are two thing you want to avoid: 1. Power braking that can cause the throttle linkage to pull to wide open, and not release until all the torque is released down the street or by a sudden stop. 2. Doing a sudden hard stop that could launch your engine and transmission forward placing the rotating fan into the radiator. Usually the lump of iron will return to the correct position and just leave a circular mark on the radiator fins. My friend, John, said "Once I had to make a panic stop and this God awful sound came out of the car but I haven't heard it since". I have a short pry bar that I check them with once a year with the routine service. Any doubt, I'd change them out. I have some control over point 1. Edit: I just checked the link. For $42 I could see changing them every 10-15 years.

That wrote that in Kenosha, no less.

I am a bit south, at the 43rd latitude. Our winters are relatively short at only 4 months. I can't remember a big job I ever got done during hibernation. Maybe it has something to do with my blood viscosity in winter months. And I do less each year.

This picture can give a moment of pause to the bifocal guys.

It is a job if you decide to get into it. My seals were all good and the short driveshaft section ahead of the pinion was dry as a bone. The reason I got into this was a small squek at low speeds, especially moving through groups of people. I had one bad bearing cup in the rearmost universal. And you can get involved in that "as long as I am there syndrome. The man said "That's a lot of work to go through for a little squeak". 75 year old car, huh. Mine is 12 years newer, last torque tube.