Rusty_OToole

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?