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Here's a shot of the dirt found in the drag link joints. Unfortunately this wasn't an isolated incident, the entire car seems to have been lubricated with mud.

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It's been a while since I posted so I thought I'd play catch up a bit. The engine is now fully disassembled and the parts have been scattered across the midwest. The crank is out for a regrind, the cam too, the crank case is being rebabbitted along with the rods and the all the parts have been cleaned thoroughly. I don't have any pictures to share yet but should have something soon enough.

I have had new steering ball studs and locating cups made and they are in the mail and should arrive later this week. In my spare time I've decided to sharpen some of my skills and have enrolled in a welding/sculpture class at the local college. We are about 7 weeks in to it now and I have been practicing my TIG welding skills. I'm getting better at it but I doubt I'll be quitting my day job anytime soon.

I've been building a lamp from discarded car and machine parts and this is where it's at so far: see pics below.

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With sculpture taking over my life for the last few months I haven't been able to work on the car but my last class was on Tuesday and now it's back to the grindstone. I did pick up some new skills in the class including TIG welding and metal forming with a planishing hammer and English wheel. I'm not great at it but I was able to make some crude things including this trilobite below.

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Enough about extinct bugs though. While I was playing artist the engine was being worked on at Classics and Exotic service in Troy Mi. They have taken the engine down to the basics and sent all the parts out to be cleaned and rebabitted and most are back now. I was over there last week to make a payment and everything looks in order. The biggest setback has been the cylinders. The last engine builder bored the cylinders oversize by .005" and the bores were also tapered .001"

In order to fix this I had to return my .080 oversize pistons in exchange for a set that is .085" oversize. Brian is going to re-hone the cylinders for a .002" oversize fit which should be perfect. Another snag was the vibration damper, the hub was cracked and not repairable. I bought another from John Ulrich however this turned out to be cracked even worse than my first one. We are now going to machine a whole new hub from steel as the original was cast and obviously prone to breaking.

I've decided that the crank case could use some polishing so every night for a week now I've been grinding away at it smoothing out all the bumps and ripples. I may polish it to a mirror or I may leave it with a Scothcbrite finish, I haven't decided yet.

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Next thing on the list is moving the engine mounts and brake bits back 7" on the frame to allow the body to sit farther back on the frame. The engine mounts were first to come off and I hope to have them reattached in a few days. I ground down the rivet heads and thought I could then beat them out but just like the frame horn rivets they also required drilling. I had to lay on my back on my dirty garage floor in 89 degree heat and drill out the lower rivets and I can tell you there was some cursing involved. I will have to do more of this tomorrow and I'm not looking forward to it.

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It's been a hot summer which has kept me out of the garage but with the recent cooling I've been able to get back at it. Today's project involved making new cover plates for the front brake pivot arm ball joints. As with the rest of the suspension, these too were worn out so I had a friend make new ball studs. Even with the new studs in place the balls rattled around in the cups so I took it upon myself to make new covers for them this morning. Starting with some 1/4" CRS I made theses on the bridgeport and the balls are now nicely trapped in their housings with about .005" clearance. Each ball was worn differently so I had to cut each cup at a different depth to achieve the proper clearance. Here are the results:

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Next on the agenda is new copper steering linkage oiler tubes. These were full of crud so I got new copper tube and made new lines using the old fittings. The biggest problem was getting the gunk out of the large divider fitting on the drivers side. There is a thin brass cap on top of this that is soldered to the brass base and the only way to clean it is to take it apart and being heavy handed I broke the cap in the process. I made a new cap on the lathe and after three attempts was able to solder the parts back together. The key was using a good grade silver solder, standard pipe solder will not work here.

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Next on the frame mods is moving the steering box mounts back 7" and this was completed this morning. I moved the hole group back by sawing out a section of frame and moving all the holes back in a group. I then rewelded the plate back in 7" from it's old location. The big hole to the left is where the holes used to be and will be the future home of the brake cable frame pass thru. I'm not sure where this will end up yet so the hole will have to stay until I can figure out where to move this slot.

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Before I could weld the brake cable pass thru in it's new location in the frame rail I needed to figure out where that would be. I assembled the front brake arms and ran a string in place of the brake cable and measured the new location at 4" back. I then welded in this plate.

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Next was filling in all the gaps. With no extra stock, I had to use just the piece I removed from the frame earlier to saw up all the bits needed. This wasn't that hard after scratching my head for a while.

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