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Hi there, driving these beauties in Europe means every once in a while to get spare parts and material from the US. While ordering, shipping etc. works pretty well with most US suppliers, shipment cost often are higher than order value (definitely with UPS, sometimes even with USPS). Both combined have to be taxed (19% VAT) and pay import duty. So I frequently end up paying more than twice the original order value. This was already leading to funny situations at the airport when I checked in a ww tire or a complete exhaust system on one of my flights back from the US to save all that overhead money. Is there anybody who knows a better way to solve this? Would there be interest to eventually bundle shipments and reduce cost? Cheerio, Christian

Thanks guys for the advice and tips. Indeed there is a way to adjust the bearing in the shop manual by tightening the castle nut. It´s about setting the right friction value for the bearings. Done that, no effect. I guess I will dismount the arm with the bracket together and then get the retainer bolt out to look at the brarings. Thanks again for your valuable advice. Christian

Larry and all fellow sufferers, I had the same in my two 37s. I tried all the litany that has been described in this blog as well as in many others before. My conclusion is that all mentioned activities probably help a bit, but nothing can turn around the situation as effective as a new cored rad. Of course, if all the mud is still in the system, it won´t take long until the new rad is as clogged as the old one. Chemicals have all kinds of side effects on gaskets etc., so I am not sure if the potential risk is worth it. When you get a new core for your rad, some companies can offer high performance cores that look basically like the old ones but are much more effective (e.g. 4 rows of tubes instead of 3 rows). So my recomemndation is: 1. get the rad cored; 2. use the time when the rad is in treatment to open the freeze plugs (you might want to remove the manifold as well) and get all the sh..t out of the block that you get hold of. Just flushing isn´t enough. Use an old wire hanger to sratch the baked stuff and then flush the mess out. You will find most of it near the last two cylinders. Don´t worry about the freeze plug opposite to the fire wall, you´ll get by this area with a wire from the last side-plug; 3. Check or block the intermediate thermostat valve; 4. if your spark plugs show a light brown surface, don´t worry about carb adjustment or ignition timing. It´s a bigger and not cheap project, but hey, it´s a good feeling to start a spin and being sure that you´ll return on your own 4 wheels in good shape, ain´t it? With both my cars I can go now uphill 7-10% at 100 degrees outside without any boiling for miles. Good luck!

Hi there, here in Germany we´re sometimes handicapped with some stupid rules and controls. The authority for technical inspection has faulted the steering of my Roadmaster and don´t want to let me drive the car again until I´ve fixed an issue that I´ve never seen as such. There is some play in the bearings of the intermediate steering arm. The arm can move a bit up and down in the holding bracket and also tilts a bit with an audible "knack" when I move the wheel. According to the shop manual, there is nothing to adjust or do, but that doesn´t solve my problem. Either some of the washers between the steering arm and the bracket have been lost, rusted away or whatever, or the ball bearings are in a bad shape. Does anybody have experience how to overhaul the whole thing? How can I dismount the intermediate arm from the bracket without damaging the ball bearings? Anybody out there who could kindly help with advice? Thanks a lot in advance, Christian

My convertible top seems to be cotton and has never seen any care. The effect is that it attracts dirt and dust after cleaning like a magnet. Is there any recommendation what to use on these old fabrics that protects against dirt, oil (and water as a side effect)? Thanky, Chris

I bought this hood ornament on a swap meet. It seems to be a zinc sand cast model with poor or little surface treatment. Maybe not original, but certainly worth to detail it and make it more beautiful. Does anybody have an idea, how to best detail e.g. the face, some of the folds etc.? I am not talking about polishing, but rather carving/engraving out the countours, lines and shaping the face? Thanks for your advice. Christian

ok, I did my own research. It´s from a 1933 or 1934 Cadillac. It seems to be a Zinc sand cast model with no or very little finishing or surface treatment. Maybe sorted out due to some blow holes, lunkers or stuff. Still beautiful enough to try to get it detailed. Do you have any recommendation how to detail the contours, the face etc? I am not familiar with this at all. By hand or with a small machine? Which tools etc.? In the age of 3D-printing, the good old hand craft work seems to get forgotten.

Hi, today I purchased a hood ornament on a parts swap meet, like shown on the pictures. Does anybody know about the make and year? Can you tell by it´s surface and shape / detailing if it is an original or a cheap imitation? What would you suggest to get it up to glossy glory? Thanks for advice, Christian

Hi there, by the time we probably all have aftermarket exhaust systems for our pre-war cars. For my two 37s I purchased the complete system at Waldron´s with mixed experience. The cars got a lot louder than they have been before. Not good for a car that should be nothing but humming.... Looking at the drawing inside the documentation and into the pipe of the muffler, it becomes clear why. These aftermarket things are built up inside a lot simpler and cheaper than what used to be the original according to drawings (less chambers, simpler pipe perforation, no damping material). Question 1: Are there other sources you can recommend for whisper quiet mufflers? Question 2: Do you know any DYI instruction, dimensions etc. to try to make one myself? Thanks as allways for good advice, Christian P.S. yes, I know that Waldrons has a "loud" and a normal version of mufflers, but even the normal ones are too loud for me.

This is a summary of a long story how I finally solved the overheating problem of my coupe. Thanks to many of you who contributed to this forum I always kept going. At the end, it comes down to focus on a few elementary things. My 37 Special Coupe kept boiling as soon as temps got over 30 Celsius even without going uphill. Once overheated, she kept boiling even in idle. Here is what I tried: - checked ignition timing, advance and vacuum. No issues, spark plugs are light brown, as they should be - checked carburator and fuel pressure - no issue with it. Trying more fat or lean adjustments didn´t make an improvement - checked thermostat - working fine She kept boiling as soon as I drove a while. Especially when I killed the engine, brown ugly water immediately started spurting out of the rad. damn, the easy stuff wasn´t the root cause apparently. Ok then, I installed an electric fan. As I had a 12V conversion, it was easy to find a strong one. I operated it with a manual switch, as one eye anyways was observing the temp gauge constantly. Well, that slowed the process down a bit, but couldn't finally prevent overheating under harsh conditions either. Next was reverse flushing the whole system. First the radiator - not much dirt came lose. Then I reverse flushed the engine block which yielded some rusty stuff. But all that did not prevent overheating thereafter, no big change. In my despair I bought a special acid, filled it into the cooling water and let the engine run for a good hour, let it work over night and ran the engine again. Then I drained it out and flushed the running engine for quite a while with plain water, hoping that any residues and mud in the block had beed resolved and removed. Result: bogus - no change! This winter-spring I finally decided to dig a bit deeper: Re-building the radiator. First challenge: How can I unmount the radiator without removing the whole nose of the car? Actually, it is quite simple: 1. Remove the hood (only 2 bolts have to be removed). 2. Remove the rods that connect the firewall with the nose. 3. Remove the waterpump together with the propeller 4. Remove the thermostat housing 5. Now you can unfasten the rad and pull it carefully up and out I brought the radiator to a professional rebuilder, who soldered a new high performance core into my old rad frame / top and bottom part. (Cost me arount 900 bucks!) The radiator looked like new. The surprise was what he told me: Apparently the rad has already been rebuilt - but by a bloody amateur. This guy managed to block almost the complete front row of capillaries with solder as well as most of the back row. Before I assembled everything back together, I decided to take a look into the engine block, into the water jackets. For that I bought on ebay a small endoscopic camera with LED illumination. Plugged it into my laptop and hoped to see all the way through the engine block. Big illusion. That thing wasn´t focussed enough and all I could recognize on screen was a blurred brown mess. No way to draw any conclusion out of it. Ok then, lets open a window into the engine: The freeze plugs. Consulted this forum how to remove the freeze plug and started with the rear one. Drilled a hole, widened the whole, applied a plier, then a big lever and tried to wrestle that thing out of the block. It didn´t even move an itch. Long story short, at the end I used a thorn and hammered one side into the engine block, so that the opposite side turned to the outside. Then i could pull it with a plier. (the picture gives an impression about destructive force) There was about half an inch of crud at the bottom of the water jacket (only). I used wires, scratchers, lots of water to loosen and flush as much as I could out of the block. Next challenge: put a new freeze plug back in. I tried everything I could given the limited space, but the new plug didn´t want to go in a little bit. Therefore I had to remove the carb and manifold assembly, just to be able to apply a few strong hammer strokes on a bloody freeze plug. That worked well. Here I recomment to use a wooden block or a big nut to not deform the freeze plug with the hammer. Next I remembered some threads in this forum that recommended to completely block the shortcut valve underneath the thermostat. Well, I decided against it, but just put a bit more tension onto the valve spring with two washers (see picture). Later I realized that this valve anyways was bypassed by the passenger compartment heater - as long as you have no valve in these lines. My conclusion is to obstruct coolant flow by jamming the hosepipe to the heater when it is warm outside. I made all gaskets by myself from a sheet of 1mm gasket paper and used a non-curing heat resistant sealant, before I reassembled everything onto cleaned and smoothend surfaces. When assembling the hood, I had to weld new special bolts, which didn´t turn when fastening the hood. The previous owner of the car just has used large washers to mount the hood rim, which made the bolt turn when trying to unfasten them (third picture). The result so far: I didn´t yet manage to get the temperature over 180 F, even with a partially obstructed airflow to the radiator (put my T-shirt in front of the rad). Unfortunately the weather in Germany still is too cold to draw a final conclusion but I am pretty sure that I have finally solved it. Conclusion: Cleaning the engine block and having a new high performance radiator core is most likely fixing the problem sustainably. All the other stuff is just fiddling with the symptoms.

Hi there, because of notorious overheating I brought the radiator of my 37 Special Coupe to a restorer who will exchange the cool web into a high performance one, but use the lower and upper shell of the original rad. He offered to also foresee a thread for a thermo switch and besides recommended to remove the fan blades from the water pump and use an electric auxiliary fan with a thermo switch instead. (I have to say that he is a well known radiator restorer for old cars and I´d assume that he knows what he is talking about, but his main experience may come from allways overheating Jaguars or Austins.) He said that the advantages are: - lower noise - longer life for the water pump - about 10 hp more Since I have a 12V conversion, it should be easy to find a good electric fan. My questions now: Should I do it at all?? (normally I am a proponent of original) Anybody has done this? Experience? Where to place the thermo switch? at the top of the rad with a 190 fahrenheit switch point, or at the bottom of the rad with a 120 fahrenheit switch point? Thanks for your recommendations Chris P.S. yes, I know that I should look at all other reasons for overheating first and I´ve done it. Ignition timing is perfect, vacuum and rpm advance works fine. Carbon monoxide (carburator) is in good range, spark plugs look perfect, tried to clean the engine block several times by flushing and with acid. Water pump is ok, thermostat works well, etc.

Friends, thanks a lot for all the interesting input. Since I was lucky enough that 1/2 inch of the bolts were sticking out, I opted for the simplest solution. I welded a nut on the remainder and started to turn it slowly with a wrench. Twice the nuts broke off at the welding spot, but then I increased the current with minimal wire progression and gave it a 3 second blitz, which almost molt down the nut. Both bolts came off this way. No idea if soaking in an Aceton/ATF mix helped or if it was just heat combined with subtle-brute force. It´s great to have such a broad base of knowledge and wisdom here!

Hi, when I tried to remove the thermostat housing and waterpump from my 37 Special engine, unfortunately two bolts were so blocked that they broke off. Now ca. 1/2 inch of the bolts is still sticking out of the motor block housing. As the engine is still built in, there is not much space to tinker between the rad and the engine. Question: Does anyone know any magic how to losen them and get them out? They seem to be corroded inside the thread as if baked together. Is there any fluid (besides the usual MOS2), that kreeps in and dissolves the rust? Has anybody made good experience to just weld a nut to the remainder and try to turn it out? Thanks for your advice. Christian

Thanks Joe, as this is exactly what I did already, I have to presume that I need to get the generator repaired. As to the regulator: I still have the original regulator with the guard terminal for the starter switch. Non of the sources known to me seems to have replacements or rebuilt ones. Does anybody know a place where to get them? Chris

Last week my wife and I took our 80C for a tour through the Swiss Alps. At the beginning, I could still watch on the Ammeter that the generator was charging the battery and reacted to switching the light on or off. Then it stopped charging and we finished the week on battery power - not a solution for eternity. I checked the regulator, but could visually see no issue. Manually pressed on the relays while the engine was running, no reaction. Then I checked the generator and exchanged the worn down brushes with great hopes that I found the issue - what a disappointment. Did the usual tests: - ground the F field terminal: no change, no charge, neither on idle, nor on high revs - measure the voltage on A terminal with med to high revs: only 1V - 1.5V, independantly if F is grounded or not, so the cut-out relay does not open - bridged the cut-out relay engine standing (is this what they call polarizing the generator?): no difference afterwards I am at the end of my wisdom and fear that there might be a short or open connection somewhere inside the generator. Would be grateful for any other idea or advice. Thanks in advance, as always. Chris

As far as my experience, old exhaust systems are never 100% tight - starting from the manifold down to every junction. Nevertheless this shouldn´t lead to the strong smell I have inside, when going slow or standing with running engine. Now I saw that there is a direct path of hot air from the engine department through the inner side of the fenders directly to underneath the dashboard left and right, coming in behind the covers next to the pedals (front end frame side brace). While I took some effort to have new and tight rubbers, where the pedals go through the floor, this seems to be the reason for smell and nausea. Am I missing some part here that blocks the hot air or is that the way it used to be? Thanks for your kind advice, Chris

Hi there, I discovered recently that my carb has a hole (picture where the arrow is), where some air is sucked in when the engine is running. I could not clearly identify if this is meant to be or if this hole should be closed. Does anybody know what was originally connected there or why it is open? Thanks.

Hi! I finally found someone who has these parts. After calling at least 15 part suppliers in the US, of which most were not capable of looking up their parts list catalog, I came across Arletta Truck Parts Inc. Geoff was a great help and today the package arrived with exactly the brake cylinders that fit in there, incl. proper brake hoses. I am glad that there are still guys out there who go the extra mile and don´t just look up their database. Definitely worth the money, imagining what options I really had (1 cylinder for 52.10 US$). In the meantime I also found some reference part numbers that may make it easier to source these parts in the US: F3384, F9344 (Wagner) sometimes also shown as WC9344 33073 Bendix 172-338 AC Delco By the way, the thread on the brake hoses are 7/16-24 on both, the male and the female end. I hope this helps future desperate searchers who are stranded by the usual suppliers like Bobs and Kanter. 2530-00-799-1696, M22976, MC22976, B9D2140A, CITZ2140D, E22976, F22976 Cylinder Assembly,Hydraulic Brake,Master More Information for WAGNER WC9344

Hi guys, thanks for all the great tips. I learned a lot from it. Fact is that the iron cast core fitting for the thread broke off completely. So the core is not anymore usable. I´ve seen a lot of offerings to rework old cores etc., but no cores for sale. The cross reference table in torque tube also only references for the Series 40 and 60 models. 80s and 90s have lager wheel cylinders. 1-1/4 bore and 7/16-24 hose fitting. Chevy trucks seem to have very similar brake cylinders, but with a 7/16-20 thread. In some of the McLaughlin Buicks, Chevy parts have been used. You can recognize this if the wheels have 6 bolts instead of 5 like in my case, so it seems to be an original Buick brake assembly. There must be after market wheel cylinders that fit. It would be great if through this forum we find that information. I am sure that there are more 80 or 90 series Buick owners out there who will find this useful. Regards, Chris

Tom, thanks for the advice. Unfortunately these are the smaller cylinders like used in Series 40 and 60. Series 80 and 90 have bigger 1-1/4" cylinders and they seem to be harder to find. Chris

Tom, thanks for your reply. Yes I am now looking for 1.25" cylinders and will replace both sides. God knows what has been built in there by someone. Would you have a source that you can share with me? Chris

Hi there, I need some help to find out what I can do. I am a proud owner of a 37 McLaughlin Roadmaster C. As you can see on the photo, the thread of the left front wheel cylinder is broken and I am trying to find a replacement. Living in Germany - a heaven for all metric parts and hell for inch parts - I have great difficulty finding a replacement cylinder. The old cylinder carries a number C 9346 and "made in the USA" - does anybody know what this is and where to get an exact copy? Strage are also the measures: Bore between 1" 9/32 and 1" 5/8 (measured with a metric gauge 32.8mm, though). Literature tells me it should be a 1" 1/4, Bobs only has 1" 1/8. So if I don´t find an exact replacement, I have to replace both sides and risk a weaker brake efficiency. There may be compatible aftermarket brake cylinders which I can´t find from here. Does anybody have a good advice or know what I should do? Thanks so much for your help, Chris

I pride myself of having two 37s. One with an original engine, original rad and electric push fan. The other one has an overhauled engine, high performance new core in the rad and no electric fan. Guess which one still keeps overheating in summer? Bingo, the old one with the electric fan. Especially when you start burning lots of oil while overheating, it points to another issue within the engine block or head that needs addressing. My Roadmaster with the overhauled engine can go slow at 95 F as well as climbing uphill at 50 mph without overheating. If you want to really solve the issue, an electric fan is nothing more than a mediocre bandate. That's the lesson I´ve learned from this. I also tried to flush and reverse flush the whole cooling system with all kinds of agressive substances. Didn´t make a hell of a difference, although it was amazing what kind of mud and scum came flushed out.

Hi there, I am sure that the interior of my 37 McLaughlin Roadmaster Convertible isn't original and I will replace it now. Does anybody have photos or references on the correct carpet material (type, texture, typical colors used)? The car is black with brown leather seats. Do you have a recommendation for a good source? Thanks so much, Christian

is that the one currently on ebay? Christian