My manifold does not have that hole. Only attached tube at the top-rear as seen in my second photo.

Thanks Dave, It's amazing how good they stay looking when they are not running! Here is one of my favorite shots.

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Carl, here are some pics that may help.


First one is the spring for the heat riser, got mine from Kanters.

The second one shows the exhaust heat tube from the rear of the manifold to the carb on my '54. Not sure if your manifold may be different.

The third is just a side view of the manifold/motor.

Also you may want to move your jack stand back further, as you are supporting the greatest amount of weight with the narrowest part of the frame. I actually support mine where the frame rail and x-frame meet. Just in front of the firewall as the frame is still straight (flat) here so it sits nice and level on the jackstands. Some of the other folks also like to use the engine cross member.

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Do the V8 core holes have a ridge the plug seats against? If not, the way I have seen them remove when there is no seating ridge is to tap one side with a drift to swivel the plug in the hole, and then grab the edge (the opposite side) that sticks out with a pair of pliers and pull the plug out.

Any 51-54 non-convertible model. Great cars and super cheap prices.

Carl,

Sometimes freeze plugs are also called core plugs (which they really are).

Carl,

Take a look at the last entry on my project blog for information on replacing the vent flapper seal.

Since I have seen the question of fresh air vent flapper seals asked a couple of times I thought I would go ahead and replace mine.

So here is the drivers side vent. I remove the push on clip securing the flapper pivot rod in place on the opposite side of the bellcrank. Then you have the pull the rod out the bellcrank side. This may require a little strength and twisting as my rod was in there pretty good (see picture to understand shape of the rod).

Then you carefully pry up all the legs of the staples, and remove them so you can try to reuse them. The two halves of the flapper come apart and you can remove the old seal. Clean up the flapper, repaint, and install the new seal. Replace all the staples, and then reassemble the vent. Touch up paint as needed.

I bought my seals from Packard International. Call their main office for pricing. But I think they were like $10-12 each.

If you look at the old seal you can see that most of the seal that extended outside of the flapper had already hardened and broken off. That is why the new seal looks a lot larger.

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Well another productive evening at class last night. I managed to get the outside surface of the truck lid completely stripped to bare metal. 40 Grit on a DA made for a quickly take down and leave an almost perfect surface to do the body work on. I need to skim coat a few small section of the lid when I had to pull out a few dings. But other than that it's almost ready for primer. I still need to flip it over and take care of the bottom side which is much worse. Mainly all the old sound deadening material that is coming loose.

I did a blunder move last night. I took the trunk lid into class, I had forgotten to remove the trunk lock assembly at home. So I took it off in class, and thought I had put all the parts (assembly, cylinder, emblem, bezel) back in the truck. So when I got home last night, I was unpacking everything I realized that the cylinder (with the chrome swivel emblem on it) was missing. This was the NOS, perfect cylinder and chrome emblem I found many moons ago.

The I realized that I must have left it on one of the workbenches at the college. Ah-crap, I figured it was probably long gone. But as I was one of the last folks to leave last night before they locked up, I figured I would try to see if it was still there this morning. And sure enough, it was still where I left it. Crisis avoided. So note to myself, take everything apart at home.

We finally had a chance to test out the Eastwood Concourse HVLP gun last night. This gun is designed to work on only 4cfm at 29psi, and based on that would be perfect for most home compressors. We had it hooked up to the industrial air supply at the college, so I have not had a chance to try it on a low cfm compressor. But it did spray superb. We used it to spray Auto Air-Color water-based sealer on a project truck with a 1.2 tip. Both Jerry my instructor (and who runs a well know shop here in SoCal), and his teaching aid commented that it sprayed surprisingly well and had a great fan pattern. One of them commented that he liked it better than his SATA RP gun as it laid down nice, with almost no overspray, and doesn't use as much product as the SATA RP does. While probably not on the same caliber as a SATA HVLP gun, it is a great gun for the non-professional user, or the professional who needs a 2nd gun and doesn't want to spend $600+ on a SATA HVLP gun. I bought the Eastwood Concourse Deluxe package with 3 tips (1.2, 1.4, & 1.8), a plastic cup, and a teflon coated aluminum cup, digital gauge and I believe it cost around $230. But they have small packages that are cheaper.

So far very positive feedback for this gun. The real rest will come Wednesday when we shoot water-based color, and also traditional clear with it. Stay-tuned.

Well just as a backup in the event of a more severe issue. I have setup my laptop to automatically do a differential backup of the entire website everyday. So what this mean is that the local software on my Mac with copy down any changed or added files to the website daily. Then the Mac with keep that backed up to an external drive via TimeMachine.

It took two entire days to download the entire 6.5GB of files for the initial sync over Broadband. Luckily now it only takes a couple of minutes to sync the differential files daily.