Car sent off to the paint shop

Well, I've sent the car off to the paint shop. There's still body work that needs to be done and they will do that plus some finish up wiring. A shop that is about 1 hour south of here in Mansfield will be doing the work, House of Hot Rods and Classics. www.txhouseofhotrods.com/   They have a fairly big operation where they can do mechanical, electrical, body work and interior plus fabrication. They have a  backlog of work right now, so it may be a while before they get to me but I wanted to get into the queue.

They were coming to pick up the car on Wed and we decided it would take two trips to get everything down to their shop. The truck driver was supposed to be here at 10:00 am but showed up at 1:30 pm instead, never seems to go as planned. It was raining in the morning so I covered the car with tarps, but by the time he finally go here the rain had stopped. With the trip down for him being an hour and then unload and come back up it looked like it was going to be a two day affair to come back and get the body parts. But he ended up showing back up here at 8 pm so we loaded up in the dark.

So I probably won't have a lot to post on the car for awhile. I also imagine there will be a lot of honey do list headed my way now : )

                                    Loading up the chassis.

                 Second run to take the body parts. Got a little late into the night.
           Our neighbor Nate Nelson and his son Jake came over to help us load up.

A little of this and that.

Well, my charcoal canister master piece I made to eliminate gas fumes in the garage didn't work. So I made a post to the 33 builders blog about my issue and got a response from another 33 builder, Bruce, from CA. He actually told me I should reroute my line for better access later and sent me a unit he said would stop the fumes and did it as a favor, no charge, nice guy. I rerouted the line and installed the unit he sent me and no more fumes : ) Here's what he wrote me about the unit he sent me, because I couldn't figure out what it was from. " The unit is used on about every Chinese and Honda small engine in the 200 to 340 cc class. I have used them an the last 6 hot-rods I have built----with no fumes in the garage after install, They seem to last about 8 years." Thanks Bruce.

I've also been trying to button down a bunch of small items that needed to come off  my to-do list. Because of needing to ship me the body unpainted from NC I started a search to find a painter here locally. I think I may have found one south of Fort Worth about 1 hour, Mansfield, from Flower Mound. Traudl and I drove down there on Monday and found they are a very large full service Hot Rod shop. They had a bunch of custom/vintage cars they were working on. The catch is, that in order for them to give me a good quote I have to trailer the car and body parts down for them to see, which makes sense, but costs money if I decide not to use them. If the quote is too high I will have spent $250 for shipping for nothing plus I will have to bring the car back home. They seemed like really nice folks and also seemed to know their stuff. Their name is House of Hot Rods and Classics http://www.txhouseofhotrods.com/  I will probably have the chassis and body parts shipped down to them next week sometime. Oh yes, I received the body parts on Tuesday and have stored them up on top of my lift. Lots of parts.

I had to shut down for a little while lately because a very close friend of ours from back in the sixties is very ill with cancer and is having a very difficult struggle with it. So Traudl and I decided to drive up to Kirksville MO to visit her. I'm really glad we made the trip. Traudl helped a lot with the driving so that made it much easier. I'm not used to those long drives, up and back we drove about 1500 miles and about 26 hours. That is a long haul, but I'm glad we did it.

                            Here's where I rerouted the fume discharge line to.

   
        Here is the canister that Bruce sent me to install, which worked great.

           This is the truck that delivered the parts of the car from NC. Big truck!

                         We were one of his last drop off on this leg. He had a small
                          plane in there yet to deliver.

                                      Taking the main body off  the truck.

                       We unloaded the smaller parts from the side of the truck.

                             Everything loaded up on top of the car lift.

                                Chassis back under the lift.

Working on odd jobs

We've been working on some odd clean up jobs. One of the horns connectors got broken so they had to be removed and new ones ordered. I decided to relocate them to a different location but the wires weren't long enough. So Bob and his son Frank were over and they extended the wire and got them wired up. I wanted to get the gas pedal installed but the problem was,  the piece that it would attach to possibly wasn't going to be strong enough. So my neighbor Jim had some angle iron and he helped us fabricate a doubler on the attachment point to make it stronger. I installed the gas pedal but at this point I'm not sure if there will be enough space between the brake and gas pedal. We're going to re-bleed the brakes on Sat, my neighbor Chris is coming over to help with that and I'll be able to tell better then.

I ran into another small problem (opportunity). I put 5 gallons of gas into the tank for the first time and the good news, thus far, is that there were no leaks. The bad news was that when I went back out into the garage later it smelled heavily of gas fumes. I thought I had a leak, but on investigating I found there were no leaks but did find that fumes were escaping from the fuel tank relief tube, I did some research and found that others were having a similar problem and found that some were making charcoal filter to catch the fumes. So I went to Oreilly's and bought a gas fuel filter, took out the filter from it and replaced it with charcoal from Pet Store used for fish.

My painting plans also went to pot. I called the person that was scheduled to paint the car in NC, Whitey Motor Car, to go ahead and start painting the body and parts. He called back and informed me, after having it for a year, that he wasn't going to be able to ship the painted car without the chassis attached. So new plan, I decided to have him ship me the body and parts unpainted and I will now need to find a painter here in our area. It's always something : ) I've also put together parts that were shipped to me by mistake, for shipment back to Whitby.

These are the boxes of parts to be shipped back to Whitby.

                                            Bob taking a test drive.

                                   Traudl decided she would also give it a go : )

                            Had the seat and steering wheel installed so we could
                             measure for the gas pedal.

                           The hose running from the right to the left was the one
                            leaking gas fumes out the bottom.

                          Courtney came over and decided she'd give it a go also.

                                    Now she's getting serious about going fast : )

                          She decided she'd rather be Vanna White and present the car.

                     Here's the charcoal filter I made to try and stop the gas fumes.

                                 Here the filter is installed inline.

Here's where we installed a doubler to strengthen the sheet metal attach point.

                              Got the gas pedal attached here to the cover.

Here's where the gas pedal cover is installed . May need some work still.

Got rear brakes installed now need to bleed the brakes.

We got the rear brakes installed today. My neighbor and friend Chris Kiser stopped in this morning and helped me get the rear brakes installed. We now have to bleed the brakes to get the air out of the lines. The Wilwood brakes are really high quality brakes.

                       This is Chris putting the caliper on the passengers side.

                                    Brake on and wheel back on.

Got started on installing the brakes

We had one of those days today, a couple steps forward and one back. We kept looking at where we had installed the MSD Ignition box and came to the decision that it was going to be visible under the dash when the body is installed so we took it off. We are now looking for a new home for it. I like it back in the trunk where I can get at it easy but that makes it harder for Steve in the wiring department because the wiring harness isn't long enough to reach back there and he would have to add extension to each wire and there are quite a few wires. We'll just have to see what will work best.

On the going forward front we started installing the Wilwood brakes today, the ones I've waited so long to receive, and we got the front brakes installed. It was a long wait to get them but they are so much better than the standard ones. They are black but the brake pads will wear off  the black under them and it will the be silver looking. The black makes it so the other areas will not rust, which you see a lot on cars and it looks pretty crappy. Will try and get the back installed yet this week and the brakes bled.

The red box is the MSD unit we removed.

                           This is the Wilwood brake disc I had been waiting for.
                            Slotted and drilled.

                      Here the red thing is the brake caliper where the brake
                       pads are installed in.

                        Inside look at the caliper with brake line hooked up.

                                  Finished on the front, I like the look !!          

All parts needed for now are here and we're moving along quickly to engine start

We've now finally received the brakes we've been waiting for and got the incorrect drive shaft yoke problem sorted out. There have been many things done since the last post but several of the larger ones were:

• Steve has been plugging away at getting the wiring all sorted out and hooked up. We're trying to get done what's needed to start the engine up.
• Exhaust. Spent a lot of time getting the exhaust fitted and ready to go. I think we are mostly finished all but a few final things we'll need to do when we put on the body. Hoping that everything is tight and there are no leaks. Friend Bob helped a lot on the exhaust.
• Drive shaft. We had a problem where the yoke supplied wouldn't fit into the rear housing of the transmission. What we found was we had a wrong yoke and also a bad rear housing bushing. Somewhat frustrating but all worked out now. Drive shaft is now installed.
• Finish fuel line. Got the fuel line finished and looking good with help in cutting the braided line from my neighbor Jim, aka the tool guy. He's a life saver when we have a tool problem. So we have the fuel line now in place. I changed the carburetor lines over to a stainless look.
• Fluids. Filled the radiator with anti freeze and water mixture 50/50. Also put in the transmission fluid but made a mistake in doing that. Didn't read the instruction : ( It says engine should be running. I put in 7 qts without the engine running and the yoke not installed. Got some transmission fluid on the floor to clean up, but once the yoke was installed all was well, at least for now.
• Parts. I'm the head parts guy and it seems like I'm either making a parts run each day or ordering them online or both. Hope we're getting near the end of this.

I'm kind of getting anxious to start the engine, which will be a good bench mark on the build for us.

This is the rear tranny housing with the yoke in it. The yoke is the Y shaped thing at the top, which will hook to the drive shaft, it has a shaft on it going down into the rear housing, that wouldn't fit initially.

I changed out the coupling attached to the carburetor to a more chrome look.

 The braided fuel line we made ended up being a little too long so I needed to route it differently to not look so bulky up in the engine compartment..

              Rear tranny housing re-installed here ready for the drive shaft.

 Neighbor Jim has a really neat tool for flaring lines. Here he's helping me with flaring the fuel line I shortened to take up some of the extra amount of line in the engine compartment.

 
Here is the new and improved fuel lines in the engine compartment. The silver covering you see is just there to protect the painted firewall from being scratched. We'll take all of that off when we're ready for prime time.

Here's the drive shaft hooked up to the tranny. You can see a little bit of the yoke sticking out. The thing sticking up out of the tranny is the gear shifter. This is a 4 speed auto with overdrive.

                        Here's where the drive shaft is attached to the rear end.