Tech- Fabricating frame-to-body mounts, part 2

I've got some meaty tech for you today, and it's a lot of work, so let's get right to it. I received the body mount parts. I gave the bare steel parts a quick spray painting.


I didn't have any 4" wide steel, so I took 2 pieces of 2", and welded them together on both sides to make a 4". This material is 1/8" thick. I happen to have a spare S10 chassis handy to take measurements from, you could just refer to another body mount on the vehicle.

Here's the steel clamped securely onto the drill press. I'm using a 2-1/8" hole saw. Get the best quality hole saw you can. Expensive but worth it. Turn the drill speed down to as slow as it will go. Slower is better. Use a lot of oil and go to it.

Here's the hole, and I have rounded the edges off with a bandsaw and grinder. I have formed the side piece into a matching radius using my ultra-sophisticated garage-support-column tool.
I welded this up with a nice hot weld. I ended up keeping the welds mostly unground because I like the Frankenstein look.

Here, I have marked the piece for an angled cut like the stock mount had. I have it securely clamped into my bandsaw. I had to stop it to reposition the clamps, but the cut came out perfect. Oh, the things I have done with that bandsaw.

Boy, are we to mock-up already? What I have glossed over is the endless fitting, and sneaking up on cuts 1/4" at a time, and fixing tools that break, and waiting for welds to cool, and running to the store for the exact size holesaw, and the metric #12 nuts, and resetting the circuit breaker a dozen times because you have the welder up so high, etc. It took me probably 6-8-10 hours to get to this point.
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The remainder of the stock mount was toast, so I ground it all off. I used a floor jack to hold the parts in position and give me a little lift on the body. Looks good, so we'll give it a little zip-zap tack weld and remove the jack.

Here we go, all welded on there nice. I have some inside welds, and some outside welds. I painted it up nice, and then installed the bottom plate and hardware.

I finished the interior by screwing a small aluminum plate over the access hole. I hate to bury things permanently. It's doubtful we'll ever need to get to this again, it's the best part of the truck now, but you never know.
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Well that's it. Easy right? Thanks for tuning in, and if your car is coming gbhbghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhnhbmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmb8
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000006 excuse me, my little girl k was helping my there. If your car is coming dismounted, give me a call and we'll get you reconnected. Thanks.

Carburetor clean-out update

I was very disappointed that the truck would not start after my meticulous carburetor clean-out. I began basic troubleshooting and discovered that I had inadvertently broken the positive side coil wire off from it's terminal. Badly crimped wire terminal; how surprising.
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A quick strippy-strip, and a crimpy-la-do-da, turn the key, and the the engine roared to life. The carb is really running nice now. It was running so much better that I had to turn the idle way down. See, when an engine begins to have problems, one way to keep it running is to turn up the idle. This merely masks the problems and is not correct.
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I drove the truck around for awhile to get a feel for it. I think it needs a new transmission input bearing (not a tough job), and some brake work, since it darts around under braking. But it drives pretty cool. Probably looks cool too. I think I'll take it to some cruise nights soon.

Tech- Fabricating frame-to-body mounts, part 1

I don't expect everybody to run out to their driveway today and copy this tech piece, it's fairly involved and requires some expensive tools. But I want to present it so you know what's possible and how it's done. Just because you don't do heart surgery doesn't mean it's not interesting, right? This is a typical cab mount on a pickup truck. Most classic cars that are body-on-frame construction are similar. The frame is on the right, and the hoop-like mount is welded to it. A bolt passes through a big washer, a rubber/steel biscuit assembly, and into the floor of the body above.

Here is what they look like after time and corrosion has taken their toll. Pretty gruesome, right? You can see the hoop-mount is half rusted away. The biscuit assembly is not really resting on anything. The floor pan looks bad but is pretty solid. I think I can save this.

Cranking on the bolt produced some promising turns, but after a few, it got completely loose and would not come out: something was broken. At the factory, these bolts are assembled up into a threaded plate. After rust fuses the bolt to the plate, the bolt will break, or the plate will just spin. The car manufacturer does not care that you can't get these out; they will, however, be happy to sell you another car.

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I had to cut the bolt head off with an acetylene torch. The biscuit came off, but the rest of the bolt was still stuck on the threaded plate above the floor pan. The threaded plate actually rests in a pocket between 2 layers of steel floor, so you can't just lift up the carpet and pull it out, it's in there good. Now what?

More destruction. I took a big holesaw and cut an access hole right through the floor from inside the vehicle over the mounting area. It's big, like 2-1/2". From there, I could pull the plate and bolt shaft out. Here you can see the rusty devil itself. It looks like I made more work, but sometimes it takes work. After I'm done, I'll weld or screw a patch over the hole, seal it, and it will be the best part of the floor. It actually does look like heart surgery now.

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I shop-vac'd a ton of junk out of the pocket area. It's not owner negligence or anything, cars have lots of pockets like this that collect road junk and deteriorate. Rust happens.

Here are the remnants of the biscuit assembly and the rusty parts that fell off. Boooooooo! I ordered replacement items for all of this. In part 2, I will fabricate a new frame hoop-mount out of steel plate, and weld it onto the frame. I'll assemble the mount parts and restore the whole area. A challenging and fun project. Thanks and stay tuned.

Some work on EV-Steve's EV

My friend EV-Steve was kind enough to give me some work doing some mechanical fixing on his EV. It is a 1985 Chevy S10 that was converted to electric by a college as an engineering project, and he bought it sometime afterwards. I have been enjoying working on it for him. I have an affection for these little S10's, as I owned one for 12 years and 219,000 miles.Here's my little tip for today: Sometimes I like to set up my little doctor's operating-tool table. It's just a scrap of plywood set on a stand. I use this to set my tools on while I'm working. As I fetch tools from my toolbox in the rear of the garage, I put them on this table so they are handy, yet out of the way. I stand between the car and the table, so I just have to turn around to get what I need. You can lay parts, supplies, or whatever, on the table. On this piece of wood I even have some numbers markered on as notes from some other project.
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This is WAY better than the lay-the-tools-on-the-car-as-you-work method. I hate doing that. Yes I eventually have 50% of my tools out on the table, but it's still the 50% I need.

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I redid most of the brake system so far on this truck. Another project I did was to replace the alternator. I had to take some electrical components out to get to it, but it wasn't so bad. Not the worst I have ever done. In this view, you are looking into the "engine" compartment (now motor compartment) from the front of the truck. There is a set of 4 batteries up front.

Behind the batteries is the main component board, lifted up slightly here. You can see the body of the electric motor, it has a slight coating of rust on the outside of the case. As a point of reference, the brake booster and master cylinder are at top right, in their stock positions.

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I do dig working on this thing. The familiarity of the S-10, and the coolness of the EV. It'll be here for a while, so if anyone wants the 5c tour, come on over and check it out.

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Talk to you soon.

Carburetor clean-out

The F100 will not start. I took the carburetor off to see if there was a fuel problem. I pulled the carb apart enough to find this little gem, a 1/4" lock washer, jammed in the air door assembly of the secondaries:This was no doubt accidentally dropped in when someone was working near there. The secondaries would never work right with that in there, but it could have been worse; it could have dropped into the venturi, and gone down inside the engine. That would leave a mark. Besides, this is not the reason it will not start.
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I found a lot of dirt inside the carb. A surprising lot. I was going to take a photo of it, but I figured you know what basic dirt looks like. I cleaned out all the little orifices I could, generally cleaned everything else, and checked for broken parts. When it came time to reassemble it, I found that the center gasket was unsalvageable; a careful disassembly had nonetheless torn it apart. This is a problem with taking a carb apart, the body gaskets tear very easily and are rarely reuseable. Since I did not have spares for this carb on hand, I mail ordered a pack of 5.

Here's a new gasket on the left, with the top of the carb upside-down beside it, and a tube of white grease at the bottom. The black paper gasket has a light glare on it in this photo, but it is indeed black.

Here's what I do; I smear a light coat of the white grease on both sides of the gasket before assembly. Sometimes, this will keep the gasket from sticking to the parts the next time they are taken apart, so the gasket can be reused. It's not just a cheapness thing; if you dug into the carb as part of a roadside repair, you'd likely tear the gasket, and not have a new one to replace it.
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Anyway the white grease doesn't always work, but it's worth a shot. Errant grease will dissolve in the gas, so don't worry about it. Might help your mileage or something, I don't know.

Here is the carb all back together. You can see the thin white line going around the carb body where the new gasket is. I am still getting familiar with this style of carb, it's similar to the Rochester Quadra-jets that came on many GM cars. One nice thing about these is part of the design: the main carb top comes off, as shown in the 2nd and 3rd photos, and most everything is accessible right there. The carb top gasket that we've been talking about is horizontal, not vertical like the 4 separate gaskets on Holley carbs, and it's above the fuel level, so it should never leak under normal conditions.

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I did not have time to try starting the truck, so cross your fingers for later in the week.

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I'll leave you with an additional bodge I found while troubleshooting. The silver-colored end of this coil wire is supposed to look like the brass-colored end. Instead, it's all folded and crimped up to fit (jammed) into the coil end terminal. Sloppy fit, and I'm surprised if this ever worked better than intermittently as it was was doing for me. I mean, who does this?

Tech- Give yourself a brake

See, I said brake, because I'm talking about hydraulic brake systems, not giving yourself a break, as in: "to relax"...so brake here is the...um, that is, it's like a different meaning than the ah.....(sound of crickets chirping)......ooooo-kay.
Sorry for the late post, HRitHV fans, I got a one-time side job this week, so I had to take it.
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This is EV-Steve's S10 EV conversion, an '85 model that's been laid up a while. He asked me to go through the brake system and get it up to snuff. The 3 large white boxes contain some of the batteries that power the truck. He runs 120 volts now; 20 6-volt batteries.
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His truck needed some brake parts replaced, and some hard lines replaced as well. The hard lines get rusty eventually and leak. Replacing hard lines on an assembled vehicle can be a challenge. It's part tough work, and part art form, really. The factory puts them on way before anything else is in the way; actually before the body is on the frame. The ones for this truck were relatively easy, because the whole bed tilts up as shown. Nice.
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You can get hard lines at any auto parts store, they look like this, if your eyesight is bad:
They come in 10-inch incremental lengths, and there are coupling nuts to make really long runs. The nice thing is they already have "double flared" ends on them. You need double flared ends to withstand the pressure in a hydraulic brake system. This pressure can average 2000 psi.
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Here are some of the lines I did on EV-Steve's truck. You can see the sweeping bends and how you must go around obstacles. The brake hose is new as well. The whole system must be good to work properly.

To make the lines really nicey-nice, you sometimes have to shorten the length to make them fit well. If you doubt your abilities, you can just make a sweeping loop with the extra length. This way you don't have to make a new double flared end after cutting, which requires special tools and some experience, or at least practice. If you make a leaky new end, you are no better off than before.

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I personally could not bear having the too-long lines on there. In my view it is bad workmanship and therfore unacceptable. I was not satisfied with the look of the lines I did, so I cut them shorter, and made new double flared ends. Now they are the correct length, and they look great and function perfectly.

Sometimes the fittings will leak. This is especially prone to happen on any double flared ends you make. Get out your line-wrench (you do remember I taught you about these special wrenches, right?) and give the fitting a good tightening. There. Still leaks don't it? Frustrating. No no no, don't just crank on it more, you'll strip it!!! Jeez. You want to make another flare, but then the line will be too short, huh? Forget that.

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Here's the tricky-trick secret to all of this (aren't you glad you stuck around for the tricky-trick secret? I knew you would be): Loosen the fitting, then tighten it again. Repeat. Repeat again. Notice that every time, the fitting will tighten a little more than before, with less effort. This is the flare bedding in. Keep doing this until the leak stops. Yes, it will.

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Now just bleed the brakes, and stop confidently and safely.

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I have a good carburetor story from the F100 coming up. Hopefully we can get that running soon. Thanks for tuning in.

Tech- Mirror glass replacement

I broke the passenger side rearview mirror on my trusty big white pickup a while ago. I somehow backed it into a branch of a neighbor's tree that's near my driveway. A rarity; I pride myself in my backing abilities, but I was attempting an extremely difficult backing-up trailer-turning maneuver and ran out of space.

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I bought this replacement-glass-kit-thing at the local Advance Auto parts store. It is actually a plastic, not glass, mirror that's probably about 1/16" thick. It's somewhat flexible, and the idea is that you can cut it to fit your mirror. Don't know how well it will work, but at only $7, we'll give it a try.

The first thing to do is to get all of the remaining pieces of broken mirror glass off of the mirror back. To do this, I had considered repeatedly backing the truck into the same tree branch, since it did such a good job at removing most of the mirror glass in the first place. Hmm, that might be too tricky, even for me. I settled on using a 1" putty knife and a razor-holder tool to pick the pieces off manually. The razor tool was to slice through the adhesive holding the mirror parts stubbornly to the backing plate.

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WARNING: when you do this, you will inevitably cause many small sharp pieces of mirror glass to litter the ground. This could cause someone to get a nasty cut at sometime in the future. So I drove to the parking lot of the place that fired me and did it there.

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I somehow did not cut myself doing this. So even if the replacement mirror doesn't work, that was a major achievement.

Next, hold the mirror panel up to the mirror back plate, and draw around the outline with a marker. Make sure you are doing the correct side! One side is pretty blurry; this is the back side. The other side is covered by a thin plastic protective sheet, lift up a corner and you'll see the nice clear reflection; this is the front side.

This is the blurry side.

Cut out the mirror. I am using a set of big tin snips. I love this tool, it cut the plastic easily. You may have to do some sandy-sanding around the edges to get a nice fit. Take some time here or everyone that ever sits in the passenger side will comment on what a poor job you did. You know how they are.

The kit comes with some double-sided tape (my brother D once pointed out that ALL tape is double-sided, only some are sticky on both sides). Peel and stick the tape onto the back of the mirror, put it in place, and you're doney-done. As a bonus, on my truck, the mirror backing plate itself is curved, so the plastic mirror panel can adapt to this and now has the good convex shape like the original glass panel had.

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This would be an easy fix on most cars, even older cars for which replacement mirrors or glass is not available.

Tech- Painted the open trailer

I was looking at my open trailer the other day, in anticipation of using it to bring EV-Steve's S10 down here to help him with some repairs. The trailer was looking kind of shabby; too many winters outside, and too many summers in the sun had taken a toll on it. Fresh from the glory of Por15-ing my S10 chassis, I decided a quickie repaint was in order. This trailer is more like equipment than a vehicle per se, so a finish befitting industrial equipment was planned. I took a trip to the Tractor Supply store in Highland. Man I love that place. You feel like a rough and tough cowboy, or at least a rugged, rural farmer just walking in the place. It's all farmer/man stuff, a modern day version of a general store in the dusty old west. I got a gallon of gloss black truck & trailer enamel. Enamel! Where else could you get enamel paint anymore? The big box home stores don't sell it. This is the kind of stuff a farmer would brush paint on a tractor or something. Real man paint.

I washed the trailer off and gave it the once-over with a floor scrubbing brush. I rolled the main deck of the trailer with a big roller, then went to a 3" roller, and finally a trusty chip brush for the detail areas. Probably took less than 2 hours to do the whole deal and it looks like brand new.

No, this was not a high priority, but it's actually nice to be able to take the time to do a project just because it would be a cool thing to do. If I was still working I would put this way at the bottom of my list of to-do items.

Yes I still have to wash and detail the tires and wheels.

Tech- Fabricating a new throttle linkage

Well, I'm back! I know it's been awhile. I've been on vacation, and I needed some thinkin' time. I have decided to press on, at least for now. At this point, I will turn my attention to some projects on the F100 itself. I am going to try to get it on the road, as cheaply as possible, with the gas motor that's in it. I will save the S10 chassis as is for now, until I decide what to ultimately do. All this could change at any time. But first...some ice cream:Carole, I know you try out different ice creams. Try all the ones you think you might like to try. Then try this one last. After this, you will not want any other, ever, ever, ever. I decree it to be the best there is. I will never need any other. Done.

The throttle linkage on the F100 is the most pathetic, laughable, sorry piece of crap that I have ever had the displeasure to see on a vehicle. When I first saw this I literally could not stop laughing for about 5 minutes. I'm serious. I don't know who made this, and how they could have managed to spend so much time and effort and yet have such a poor result. I think the only thing that could be worse is if it was made from a length of string, except that string would at least keep proper tension. Take a look at this gem while I point out its 'features':

First note the material: wire coat hanger. The bends needed to clear the carburetor no doubt flexed a great deal, so reinforcing bars were soldered across the bends to stiffen them up. This actually kind of works. Kind of. You can just barely see in the back the loose bolt connecting to the pedal linkage. The main piece of wire must have been too short, so another was connected to it with a bolt and nut, you can see them just to the left of the bigger curving black hose. From there, the coat hanger extension goes somewhat cleverly through a 3/8 bolt and nut that is also extremely loosely positioned in the carb linkage hole. You can see how much bigger the carb linkage hole is than the bolt going through it. I can't believe this worked at all.

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Also please note the two throttle return springs, a surprising example of over-engineering, except to say that the rear one is extended to its mount by a length of tiny, tiny wire, so that will be a major subtraction of points.

Here's what I'll use to make a better linkage: 1/4" steel rod, a small steel tab with a hole, a couple of bolts, a couple of washers, and some nuts. The nut second from left is a "coupling nut", much longer than a standard nut; I used this so I had more area for welding. I had all of this junk on hand in the garage.

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I have been turning the current setting and wire speed on my welder up much higher lately, and my welding has improved immensely. You can't be afraid to turn it up and really blaze with that thing! Man I love welding.

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Here I have the tab welded onto the steel rod already. I have bent the rod to fit around the carburetor. I am holding the rod in it's approximate position, and I have made a small black mark at the center where the rod must connect through the carb linkage hole.

From here I cut the rod, and welded a length of threaded 1/4-20 rod (really a bolt with the head cut off) onto the end. This will give some adjustment to the linkage. I welded another bolt onto the coupling nut at a right angle. This is the part that goes through the carb hole.

Here is a comparison of the existing floppy linkage, and the new beefy one I made.

It's hard to see the details, but this is really just a recreation of every mid-'60's factory throttle linkage I've ever seen. I made a bushing that fills the carb linkage hole and allows my linkage to pass through snugly, eliminating all the sloppiness. It's just a 3/16" slice of 1/2" diameter aluminum bar with a hole through the center. Thanks for that bar of material, Mr. big blue computer company.


Here it is test fitted into place. You can maybe get a better idea of how it works from this shot. I will take it off and give it a nice coat of semi-gloss black, my favorite, and of course use nyloc nuts during reassembly.

A little artful grinding, a nice coat of paint, and it looks and works fantastic! Best part of the truck. I am not doing it justice by not showing it painted.

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This would run about $100 (materials included) at Hudson Valley Hot Rods. If I can get this pile running and driving, I'm hoping to go to some local cruises, hand out some business cards, and hopefully get some jobs.

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More soon, thanks for waiting, y'all.