| 05-17-2012 |
Very little progress in the way of visible changes. I went to Pull-A-Part again and got another emergency cable assembly. This one took a bit of work to get off of the two door Explorer I took it from. I got some grommets at the parts house so hopefully I can use one of the original brake brackets to route the new emergency brake. After I get the body on I'll have to locate where the original parking brake handle should go, fabricate a way to mount it and then create a way for it to work with the cable. While I was at the parts yard I snagged another banjo bolt for the caliper. I also got the parking brake light sensor off the Explorer and plan to rig it up to my setup so a light will come on in the parking brake if engaged even slightly.
I finished up the brake system. Fortunately I happened to be talking to a friend this week and he mentioned that he had to make a custom banjo bolt and had to make sure the spacing for the hole was correct. I suddenly had a flash and realized the banjo bolts I had used on my car didn't line up with the brake hose ends because the old brake hoses used big boxes on the end for the bolt to go through and the new hoses only have a small round head. Luckily I found if I use the original brass washer, which was pretty thick, along with the new washers that came with the hoses, it should line up. I'll just have to wait and see when I get fluid in it.
While I was at Pull-A-Part I looked at a 1960 4 door Buick. It was pretty much still intact and under the dash I found an old heater switch. It has a 3 setting resistor with a bulb that shines behind the red plastic knob when it's turned on. I used the money I got from Christmas last year to buy a heater for my '31 Chevy and once I get it rebuilt I'm going to use this switch on it. The original switch was just a simple toggle switch and I like this new switch much better. I happened to have dropped a few parts off with a friend to be sand blasted a while back and coincidentally he called and I picked them up today, one of which was the '31's heater casing which I just painted black today. Another of the parts was the metal backing to the original '31 horn I found a while back from a guy who had built a streerod from a '31 Chevy.
Last weekend we went to Indiana to visit April's family. The last time we were there I drove the '57 and the neighbor, Chris, came over to see it. Chris said his father had worked on old cars and collected many parts over the years, so this time I gave him a call and we went to look at all the parts. Unfortunately, his father had just passed away two weeks ago. I was able to get a sun visor, two valve covers and an air cleaner assembly. Chris wound up not accepting any money for them, so I was very thankful to him for his kindness. Unfortunately, I wasn't thinking at the time and the air cleaner assembly won't fit the throttle body we're using because it was designed for a 4 barrel air cleaner and the one I was given is a 2 barrel so I'm going to take that back to Chris the next time we go up.
I'm going to have to create a way for the valve covers to mount to the engine, but I just sat them on top to get an idea of what the engine is eventually going to look like.
I picked some sun visors for the '57 from Chris' parts. Here's what they looked like before I cleaned them up. I don't have a picture of it after I cleaned it because it was dark outside and I forgot to get one before I installed it. The previous one didn't exist because someone in the past had broken it off at the shaft. Now April has a sun visor she can use. The visor also came with a pretty cool old oil change reminder. It was pretty funky from sitting in the junk car I got the visors from so I took it apart and cleaned each individual disc inside.
Steel wool can clean almost anything.
I got this piece of square tubing that I will eventually use to reshape the brace in the grille shell so it will accept the new, thicker radiator with condenser.
