Rusty_OToole

Be careful here! You may be making a mistake. The choke thermostat is like a metal cup with a lever sticking out. It is bolted to the exhaust manifold with 2 bolts. The lever has a rod that goes up to the choke at the top of the carb. It has a bimetallic coil spring that closes the choke when cold and opens it when the engine is hot. There is no electricity or electrical wire involved. It would help if you told us the make of car but I am assuming DeSoto. If so it has fluid drive. The fluid drive model has 2 electrical devices on the carburetor. One is a switch that is on when the throttle is closed, the other is on when the throttle is wide open The first causes the transmission to shift and it is located at the front of the carb at the top. This one has 2 wires. The other is the kickdown for rapid passing gear. It is at the back of the carb. This one has one wire. It seems one of these wires has become detached. It should simply plug in again. The double wire to the top front, the single wire to the rear of the carb about halfway up. This rear connection has a wire clip to hold the wire in place, if the clip is missing the wire can fall out easy. The fitting the wire goes into is like a small brass tube with a slot in it for the wire retainer clip. These wires should go to a box fastened to the air filter support, from there they go to the coil, and from there back around the engine to the transmission. Hope this helps clear things up. If you look around on the net you should be able to find a picture of a Dodge DeSoto or Chrysler six with fluid drive. They are all practically the same from 1946 to 1954 as far as the carb wiring goes.

There were lots of options available for a 53 Chrysler. Some were factory installed, some were dealer installed and some were aftermarket. As you can't be bothered to tell us what options you have I can't tell you which they are. I'm certainly not going to type out a list of all the options available in the world for you. Tell us what you have and I can tell you if they are factory.

Here is the best explaination I have ever seen about the workings of the old tube car radios: http://members.cox.net/dcosby1/ Scroll down and click on the "Auto radio information" page. Usually the vibrator is stuck. These can be fixed or replaced, now they have solid state vibrators that don't "stick" or "hum". The other thing that goes is the capacitors. These cost from 35 cents to a dollar apiece and there are 10 or 20 of them in each radio. Tubes are long lived and seldom give trouble. There are old time radio hobbyist and repair people all over the country. I know of at least 3 within 50 miles of me and I live in a small town of 15000. I'm sure there is someone in your area who can help you out if you ask around or do a web search. I could give you the names of my guys. They will help you out but they are in Canada, you should be able to find someone local. By the way avoid anyone who tells you to gut the radio and turn it into a transistor. He is a hack who doesn't know what the hell he is talking about and if you listen to him he will sell you a cheap $35 radio for $800 bucks. If you have a good tube radio you will be amazed at the distant stations it will draw in and the mellow tone, unlike the harsh tinny modern radios. You can also get an FM receiver that will play thru your tube radio.

You are correct about the shifting. I did say "practically the same". The differences are minor, related to using the clutch pedal to put the car in gear when parked, and when shifting from forward to reverse and between low and high range. Plus needing to lift off the gas to upshift. You are also correct that the typical manual transmission of that day was slow shifting. Blame this on the massive gears and all around massive construction of the transmission plus the heavy flywheels used on all cars back then. They were made so old ladies and grannies of both sexes could drive a standard and get to the grocery store. Today we have automatics for those people and standard transmission cars are more "sporting", plus of course today's engines are so small and lacking in torque that they can get away with a toylike transmission that has very little inertia to overcome.

Would like to buy a McCulloch VS57 supercharger either the blower unit only or complete kit. Am planning on putting it on my 1951 DeSoto. I know they sold them as an add on to various makes but don't expect to find one to fit my car. I am an experienced mechanic and can make brackets etc. If you have one please Email Ganaraska@hotmail.com

I have painted new exhaust pipes with aluminum stove pipe paint from the hardware store. 10 years later they were still rust free. The paint discolored for the first 2 feet next to the manifold but never burnt off. This is a very good and very easy thing to do, just wipe off the pipe with some varsol and paint with 2 coats of paint before installing.

The car has a fuel line that bolts on. If it is old, cracked and hard you might want to get a new one from Andy Bernbaum or some other parts supplier.

They should be the same and interchangeable. Make sure the seller knows to take the heat gauge sender out of the engine and fish it thru the firewall. It must not be cut off or disconnected from the gauge, they are a sealed unit. If the heat gauge is cut off it can be repaired but it is a lot easier to take it off properly.

The booster Chrysler used in those days was a completely separate unit from the master cylinder you have. It had a vacuum booster and its own master cylinder. Your master cylinder would feed hydraulic pressure to the booster unit and it would feed the wheel cylinders under higher pressure. These units are still being manufactured. You can buy them from street rod supply places. Your local auto supply store may be able to get one, they are made by major brake manufacturers. Here is one example: http://www.ecihotrodbrakes.com/remote_booster.html There are others, that happens to be the first one that turned up on a web search. I'm sure you can find one to suit your car.

If you look at the fuel pump you should see a heat shield between the pump and the exhaust manifold. It is simply a piece of flat tin about 4 or 5 inches wide bent into an L shape. If yours is missing you or your mechanic can make one easily. I suggest using sheet aluminum because it reflects heat better.

John DeLorean was a total bullshit artist his whole life. I don't know if he ever planned on making cars, he probably didn't care much one way or the other. His so called car company was just another scam to make a quick buck. He had a long history of such scams. He used to worm his way into some small company as the big shot who was going to take them to the big time, then milk them for all they were worth and dump them after a year or so.He would use his position at GM to pull off these scams, and that is why they fired him or asked for his resignation if you prefer. At one time I thought he was on cocaine during his car building phase because his thinking and behaviour was that of a real gone coke head. Now I'm not so sure that wasn't his natural personality. If you study his history as I have you will see he was working the angles and bullshitting his way to fame and stardom from the very first. On the "here comes the judge" business. The judge character was the invention of an old time black comic named Pigmeat Markham. It was Sammy Davis who used Markham's catch phrase "here comes the judge" on Rowan and Martin's Laugh In program. It caught on, and the management of the show hunted up Markham and put him on the show several times.

They used a tubular front axle on Dodge in 1934, I think the Airflow may have had a tubular axle 34 - 37 as well. I know they had a solid axle, from 35 on other Chryslers were independent. The 37 and 38 Dodge and Plymouth had an I beam axle. Sorry I can't be more specific but I know they did use a tubular front axle in 34 and possibly for a couple of years afterwards.

Can you take out the gauge cluster? I know you can on my 51 DeSoto by taking out a few screws. The steering column is fastened to the steering box, you would have to take out the whole steering box, not too practical. Be careful of the temp cable, if you cut it or break it your gauge is ruined. You have to take out the gauge and sender as one unit. If you remove the sender from the engine you should be able to take out the complete gauge cluster with it.

Changing to 12 volts is not impossible but requires a couple hundred dollars worth of parts and some work. It would be easier to leave it stock. Install a 12 volt battery just for your stereo and charge it up with a plug in battery charger. Friend of mine did this years ago on a 6 volt VW and it worked great. He would put the charger on overnight once a week or so. He drove the car every day and played the stereo all the time.

Your car may have come with tubeless tires. They came out around 1950 and Chrysler was one of the first to adopt them. When dealing with an old rim with a rotted valve hole I have done a repair by drilling away the ragged metal and welding in a washer. You can also improve sealing on a rusty rim by sandblasting and painting. The paint helps fill in the pits. If the rim is too rusty you are better off to replace it. Or, use inner tubes made for radial tires. Get the correct tubes and you will have no problems provided they are installed properly. By that I mean the tire man does not pinch the tube or damage it. I have used them several times with no problems.

What you need is a repair manual. Andy Bernbaum has them in repro form or you could get an original at any automotive flea market

I have a technique for driving a fluid drive that works very well and makes it practically the same as driving a modern automatic. Start the engine with the transmission in neutral, the hand brake applied and your foot off the clutch pedal. Let the engine warm up until it will idle at its slowest speed. Depress the clutch pedal shift into gear and release the clutch, all with the handbrake still on. Release the handbrake and drive away like any automatic. When you get up to 15 MPH lift off the gas and wait for the "click-clunk" and step on it again. This is very easy, it is based on the owner's manual recommended technique. You have to drive it more like an automatic, if you drive it like a standard you will hate it. It is not a standard, it is a primitive automatic with a few quirks of its own but with a little understanding your fluid drive or fluid torque drive will work great for you.

On the subject of fluid drive transmissions, I have a 1951 DeSoto six and used to have a 1952 Chrysler New Yorker V8, both fluid drive models. I have driven them, studied them and worked on them. Certainly they are no threat to a modern automatic but they are one of the best efforts at an automatic transmission for their day. They were simple, reliable, worked well, and were not hard to repair or service compared to other automatics of the times. The fluid coupling would slip at idle but as you speed up the engine it would progressively increase its resistance. Around 1200 RPM you would reach a sort of "irresistable force meets the immovable object" point where the resistance was so high the engine could not overcome it, and you could hold the gas pedal to the floor with the brakes locked and the engine could rev no higher. If it did you knew something was wrong with the fluid coupling. For speed or racing purposes they used to drain off some of the fluid to allow the engine to rev higher. This had the same effect as a modern day high stall speed torque converter, allowing the engine to rev up into a higher power band. There is another thing that you can do to speed up the shifts, a simple adjustment. On the carburetor there is an antistall dashpot. Its purpose is to prevent the throttle from closing too quickly which could stall the engine. But the quicker the throttle closes the faster the shift. So you could back off the adjustment in stages until the engine stalls on you when driving, then adjust it up just a little. This would give you the fastest possible shift. One more old time trick. You can force the shift to go faster. For example if you have the throttle to the floorboards in 3d gear in a drag race and you want to force the shift into high, when you lift off the gas quickly whip the gear lever into low range and back into high and the shift will drop right in. All this is sort of academic. I am certainly not going to drag race or abuse my car. I know they used to do this in the 50s but come on. Elizabeth Taylor used to ride National Velvet back then too but I doubt she will be jumping on a horse any time soon. One other thing. A properly adjusted tranny will shift in about one second in normal driving. How fast can you shift a manual trans? I mean a column shift 3 speed from the 40s and early 50s? About the same in normal use. So how slow is the fluid drive really? Or does it just seem slow because you are sitting there doing nothing waiting for it to shift?