Car Features: 1957 Ford & 1967 Ford Fairlane GT

Here’s a couple of cars I took some pics of at the Fishkill car show in October. The first one up is a 1957 Ford Sheriff’s car. I originally dismissed this as just a nice car “done up” as a period Sheriff’s car. The reason I did not even consider it to be authentic is that it is a 2-door, and most law enforcement cars are 4-doors. But I did some research and found that before probably the 1970’s, it was not uncommon to find 2-door cars used many times as, that’s right, Sheriff’s cars. So unfortunately, due to my ignorance, I did not really take as detailed a look at this car as I might have.
You can see this car has a permanent “suspect” in the back seat. When people start with the stuffed animals and dolls and such as adornment, I immediately lose interest in the vehicle. This is another reason I dismissed this car.
This car also has what appear to be period-correct roof light and siren. These would seem to me to be difficult to get, but I suppose the right person would know where they are. Perhaps they really are original to the car?
I think it is a huge commitment to have as your personal collector vehicle such a dedicated car as a Sheriff’s car, either as a recreation or an authentic survivor vehicle. I guess some people would welcome this notoriety, but a cop car would be way down my list of cars I’d like to own, if it was even on my list. I’m not sure even the most attention-hungry person would want to always have to tool around in this, when he could have done his car in any of a dozen different styles.

My conclusion is that this is probably an authentic 1957 Ford Sheriff’s car.

This car is a 1967 Ford Fairlane GT. It is a fantastic brandywine color, and the condition of it is impeccable. For the 1960’s, this was considered a sporty mid-size car. I like it’s lean lines, it looks almost athletic to me.
It features a beautiful contrasting white interior, and factory chromed styled-steel wheels. The engine features dual quads (two four-barrel carburetors).
One cool thing to take note of is the original-style windshield-washer reservoir bag on the driver’s side inner front fender. Ford used this flexible bag style reservoir instead of a bottle or canister in the 1960’s, quite different from what I’m used to seeing on my GM cars.
Another thing I like is this factory-original style reproduction battery. Battery? Big deal, you say. When I’m looking at a nice restoration such as this, I want to be transported back in time, and believe I’m standing there looking at this car in 1967. Everything else is refurbished to give that impression, right? Well nothing ruins that vibe more than when I see a car like this with a big green modern Exide or Interstate sealed-top battery seemingly transported 40 years backward in time. These repro batteries are not cheap, but they are available. So top marks to this Fairlane!

Happy Thanksgiving to all !

The electric car lives again!

Well it never lived the first time, but what I mean is that I have a new plan for my ill-fated EV conversion project. For those of you just tuning in (where have you been?) I was building a 1955 Ford F1 pickup into a battery-electric vehicle. When I was laid off from my day job, I halted the project, since I did not know how far from home my next day job would be. I wanted to use this vehicle for commuting, and BEV’s are notoriously limited in range.
I basically had abandoned the project and sold off the F100 to recoup my investment. I still have the S-10 chassis, which I diligently POR-15’d, and I have a load of other S-10 parts to outfit the eventual vehicle. This got me to thinking: What was some other way I could make my EV? What would be simple, cheap, eye-catching, retro, and different? I am now going to go…dune buggy!

The original dune buggies were fiberglass tub-bodies put onto modified VW chassis. This was a very popular kit car conversion in the mid-60’s; cheap, easy, available, and cute. I will use the chassis I have since it will sturdy enough to support the battery weight. I plan to move forward with construction without actually buying any of the expensive electrical components, such at the controller or the batteries. I will just find out the dimensions of these components and use mock-ups of them, or just “leave room” for fitting them later. Not the ideal way to do design, but sometimes the necessary way to do it.

I plan to make a dune buggy-style fiberglass body myself from scratch. I plan to make the entire body in cardboard (!) first, and then cover it with fiberglass. The fiberglass dune buggy design has some advantages. First, it has no opening doors, this simplifies things greatly. It can be very light, I would save probably 2000 lbs over the F100 conversion I was planning. That’s a lot, and a big help to a BEV. The shape would be familiar, retro, and yet morphed into what I need to fit my plans. Finally, it is a fun vehicle. I am getting into the beach-y Jeep-surrey mode I spoke about before. Very cool.

I had settled on the idea that as a dune buggy, it would be a seasonal vehicle. So it’s a summer run-about, oh well. But after thinking even more, I thought about perhaps a removable canvas soft-top, with zipper-closing plastic side windows like you see on some Jeeps. If I did that, this would still potentially be a year-round vehicle, albeit one that requires the proper attitude to endure in the cold. Would I be up for it? I don’t know. But I won’t know if I don’t try, and at least I would be moving forward. The best part is that I think I can keep going in this direction without a big financial investment.

So, what do you think? Cool or stupid? Overambitious or easy? Let me know. Bye for now.

The great snowplow project, part 3

Bring it on.

This is some of the 50-odd pounds of metal pieces I cut off of the old plow. I burned through a lot of acetylene and oxygen. There's probably an ozone-layer hole over our house.

I got a couple of driveway edge markers at HD to use as the plow edge markers. They're fiberglass, with reflective tape and rubber caps. Cheap too. Here's how I attached them. Small length of metal tube welded on, a cotter pin in the bottom, and a wrap of duct tape (not shown) to make them fit nice and snug.

I still needed to make a deflector along the top rail that makes the snow curl forward and downward while plowing. Plows come with a strip of flexible yet durable rubber on them for this. I had my own idea of what to use. You know those big rubber mudflaps that you see lying along the highways that have fallen off of big-rigs? Guess who stops and picks them up, and has a small collection of them in his garage for just such an occasion. Go ahead, guess.

I sacrificed a worthy candidate, using a circular saw to make quick, accurate cuts. This worked surprisingly well. A few bolts, washers, and nuts through pre-drilled holes, and it's done. I am very happy with the result.

My good friend Joe V. donated* this small winch to me. I checked the internet, and quickly found a diagram on how to wire a DC motor reversing circuit. The internet is wonderful. I had this hard-wired into the cab, but a couple of problems arose. For one, it was tough to get the stiff 10-gauge wiring to fit into the dash nicely. The other problem was that I could not see the winch while I was operating it. For these reasons, I pulled the wiring back out and made a remote switch box.

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* Joe V. is one of a few people with whom I am now at the stage where we just give each other stuff if one of us has it and the other needs it. Doesn't really matter how much it's worth. Perhaps most people are always like this, but I have only come to it in the last 5-10 years or so. It's nice. Nobody keeps score, everybody helps each other. It's just real nice. Thanks, Joe V!

I have to hook up the motor leads manually. I have wing nuts on the terminals, and I have them color-coded with pieces of colored tape.

I also have to hook up to the 12v positive and negative leads to the battery. These are male-female-coded so they can't be mixed up. All of this coding is necessary for the switch to consistently work the way I have it labeled.

I have about 10 feet of cabling, all jacketed nicely inside corrugated wire loom, that I string along the hood and into the window of the cab. I made a switch box out of a house electrical box, and used a rocker switch that Joe V. also gave me. The switch is 2-position momentary, with a center off. I put little labels on there, I had previously markered O/I on the switch for Out/In. Same thing.
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It's nice to be able to actuate the winch from right beside it with the remote box. Just more peace of mind, and to me, simpler than hard-wired into the truck.
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So where are we? The plow is done, I have even done a couple of more mods to make it safer, and easier to operate. Like most projects, this took way more time than I thought it would. I definitely got a lot of practice using my acetylene torch, but that was something I needed to do. Now I'm more comfortable and faster with it. I spent probably $500 on the project, if you're scoring at home. Paid a little for the plow, bought some new steel, burned through 2 bottles each of acetylene and oxygen, some paint, some wire terminals, wire, and a surprisingly large amount of new hardware. I did only use 2 cheap paintbrushes for the whole time, one for yellow, and one for black, by doing the aluminum foil wrap trick! As far as labor, I would not be surprised if I had 80 hours in this. Of course even the painting takes time, and that's not exactly skilled labor, but it is time nonetheless. By comparison, a new personal plow costs about $1500, and I really wanted one. There was no way I'd be buying one this year, but now I basically have one (probably more heavy-duty), for much cheaper. I also figure if it keeps me from having a heart attack, then it was a pretty good investment. Thanks for your interest, back to cars soon.

Special thoughts special edition

1. I have named our homestead "Stickamucka" from the Iroquois Indian translation: many many many many sticks, which is what is always covering my backyard lawn. More than just could have fallen off the trees, neighbors must come and deposit them there when I'm out.

2. I was at the grocery store and I saw this teenager wearing his pants so low that the waistband must have been mid-thigh, his punk-ass covered by a long shirt. To show these punk kids whom is really cool once and for all, I will henceforth be wearing my pants completely loose and laying down around my ankles. Beat that.

3. It certainly is more palatable to be paying $2.50 a gallon for gas for my lawnmower. Dropping $25-30 bucks to fill a gas can for my frickin' lawnmower really burned my butt.

The great snowplow project, part 2

The great snowplow project is almost done. I have so much to show you I will have to break this up into 2 posts. Let's get to it:

Here is the plow on the ground. Looks pretty nice, right?

One nice feature I put on the main frame is a pair of rubber push bumpers. This way I can push cars or stuff during the times when the plow is off the truck. I picked these up at a car swap meet like 10 years ago because I always thought it would be cool to have a push bumper on my truck. Now I do.

Here's the business end of the blade. After researching personal snowplows, I found that they are only like 18" tall. I cut about 6" off the top of the blade, and reattached it with bolts as the new scraper part of the blade. This stiffens the bottom edge all the way across, and if it gets damaged in some way, I am just dealing with fixing this part instead of the whole blade surface. What's nice about the short height is that even with the plow raised, the headlights remain unobscured. I don't have to fool with the auxiliary plow lights of any of that nonsense.

This is the same area from the backside. I had to basically cut that horizontal top bar off the top of the 6" piece, and grind it and re-weld it back on to what is now the top. Even things like drilling all the holes for all those bolts took a ton of time.

Here's the brackets and parts that make it all work. I cut a ton of steel off the A-frames to lighten them up. Just getting stuff like the huge 7/8" bolt, nut, and washers that serve as the pivot point took a lot of time. I had to go all the way up to Sarjo in North Poughkeepsie. You don't just get that stuff at the local home improvement store.

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I shortened the existing chain that holds the plow in the up position for when you're driving around and such. I re-used the hook that the chain sits in, since I thought the hook and chain were kind of manly technologies. I even had to put a couple of new weld beads on the eye of the hook to restore the amount of material that was worn off of it; now it's like new. Yes, I painted the hook like that because I wanted a...red hook. Incidentally, there is a Red Hook district in lower Manhattan, Dutchess County does not have the only one.

As you can see in the red hook photo, I made adjustable struts to replace the side-to-side hydraulic cylinders. What I did was; using the original cylinder end anchor points, I made these 2 struts that have 3 positions on one end. The steel pin would drop through the two plates on the A-frame, capturing the strut. If both pins are in the middle position, the plow is straight. If the pins are in the shortest position on one side, and the longest position on the other side, the plow is angled towards the short side. Yes, it is a manual, have-to-get-out-of-the-truck operation, but it is easy to do, and I don't know how often you even really change the plow angle. It was necessary to build an angle into the struts so they will clear the A-frame when using the middle or short side positions. I painted the heads of the pins yellow so they will be easier to find in case they get dropped in the snow.

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I'm pretty proud of these struts for a couple of reasons. First, I think it is a simple solution to how to angle the plow. The design seems very sturdy and rugged. The actual construction came out fantastic; the pins fit easily yet snugly into each position. Both sides are identical, a rarity in handbuilt applications like these. This is not really too important, but from a design standpoint, it's something I always like to achieve. This way, even if the whole thing is taken apart, it cannot be put back together wrong. And I got a high degree of accuracy despite basically doing this from measurements and chalk marks on the garage floor. Really. Finally, while it would have been nice to use real mechanical steel tubing, my steel supplier is way out by the Overlook area. I took a chance and went to Home Depot. I put one of the steel pins in the end of a piece of 1" black pipe, and it fit perfectly! Two 4' lengths of pipe easily fit into my car, and while pipe is not as nice as tubing, 1" pipe has a hefty 1/8" wall thickness, more than strong enough for this use.

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Next time we'll look at the winch and wiring, and some other small details. I hate to say it but I am almost looking forward to the snow.

The great snowplow project, part 1

I have not been posting as much as I should lately, but I have been busy working on the great snowplow project, and I kind of just wanted to work on it without getting slowed down too much. As I have featured in two previous Wordless Wednesdays, I got this used snowplow from my brother-in-law in return for scrapping his old Bronco for him. The Bronco did not bring as much from scrap as we had hoped, so I gave him some cash for the plow.

I have been considering a "personal snowplow" for a little while now. These are smaller, lighter-duty plows than commercial units that you would use for a business. These are just for doing your own driveway. But they're still expensive, so buying one is out of the question right now.


After looking at this plow for awhile, I decided to convert it into a personal snowplow. I just don't want a big-honking heavy-ass commercial plow on my truck. It's too big, and too complicated. I began by eliminating all of the parts I would not need. I will not use the hydraulic pump, lines, 3 hydraulic cylinders, the valve and cables, or the auxiliary lights. There was still a lot of heavy steel parts that I thought I could do without, so I spent a couple of days with my acetylene torch cutting and cutting, trying to eliminate weight without making it too weak. I eliminated hundreds of pounds by the time I was done. Here is the reworked quick mount parts mounted onto my truck frame. Yeah some parts are a little bent, but believe me I spent tons of time unbending stuff as it is; you can't get it all.
I finished the mount assembly with a coat of black enamel I had left over from the trailer right after I took this photo. You can see it's partially painted.

Here is my great grille-guard/cow-catcher/roo-bumper/winch-mount/push-bar. It's primarily the winch mount for raising the plow. This is all new angle-iron. In retrospect, I probably could have used lighter steel for this, but it's sometimes hard to judge at the time. You want to make things sturdy, but not overly heavy. I am so paranoid that the plow will literally fall off the front of the truck on Old Hopewell Road and cause a huge, fire-y crash if everything is not sturdy enough. I think it will be strong enough that I could burst through police road blocks if I need to. I just hope I don't need to.
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Incidentally, the over-the-road trucks in Australia have massive "roo-bumpers", way bigger than this. They travel at very high speeds over the outback highway, and kangaroos on the road are a big problem. Look at the big trucks in the movie Mad Max sometime and you'll see.

Here's a side-view. I was going to tuck it in close to the bumper and have it shorter, but at the last minute I decided to make it way-tall and have it sticking way out front. I think this increases the redneck styling tremendously! Yee-haw! I hope my little Mack bulldog on the hood there can still pee past the front of that.

Here is the plow proper. I cut about 6" off of the top of the blade. I welded one of the old plates across the top. I am reusing the cut-off blade part as the sacrificial blade scraper part now. That is the part you see up on the stand. I'll go over the parts and functions in better detail later. You can see the nicey-nice new painting I did; 2 coats of Rustoleum bright yellow enamel really make it look almost new. All the frame parts are black. I painted all the parts I am reusing, this took a lot of time to do.
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Most of the scrap metal parts are on the floor there on the right. I can tell you that big inverted angle part used to be the plow blade scraper. It is 1/2" thick steel, like 5" wide. That piece alone has to weigh 200 lbs. I would estimate this plow assembly used to weigh 500-750 lbs total, I will have it down to about 250 lbs total.
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Like a lot of projects, this one has taken a long time before it looks like anything is done, and then all of a sudden things come together and it's nearly done. I hope this at least works decently when it's finished. It figures I'd finally get a snowplow now that global warming is taking effect.
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One nice thing is that I've had a lot of time to think while I have been working on this. One of the things I have been thinking about is the aborted EV project. I have what I think is an exciting idea for that, so please stay tuned for that news.