Well, as I mentioned before I had planned to get my '57 Chevrolet out of the garage a while ago. I got into it to fix the rear main seal and found my main bearings were bad. After ordering the wrong set of bearings (20 under instead of 30) I had to wait almost a week to get the right bearings in because Clevite had discontinued the 30 under bearings. Actually, they have discontinued the 20 under bearings too, but apparently I got the last ones on the shelf.
After I used Plastigauge on the rear main bearing and was buttoning it up and torquing the bolts down to the prescribed 100-110 ft/lbs, the last bolt broke off. I was thinking this was a tragedy, however after reading on a forum I realized I was thinking about it wrong. The head of a bolt is what allows the threads to stretch and after the head breaks off there's no torque on the bolt so I was easily able to lightly use a chisel and hammer to back the bolt out enough until I could remove it with my fingers. Didn't even have to chase the threads!
I can't seem to get the front main cap off. I'm going to try to tackle that tomorrow.
The '31 seems to be doing OK now. It had been overheating again. I found that the belt, which I had bought at a tractor store a few years ago after my last one shredded, had stretched and was too long, not allowing the water pump to do it's job. Got a new lawnmower belt at Napa which met the same dimensions (they are both low horse power belts) and it seems to have done the trick, I think. April and I drove it to church today on back roads (about a 120 mile round trip) and it did fine until the very last mile of the trip. I think I'm going to fabricate my own overflow jug out of a mason jar or old glass coke bottle to keep from loosing fluid, which compounds the overheating of course.
I still don't have any pictures of progress, but here's a picture of us running out of gas on the way home from church today. Luckily a nice lady let us borrow her gas jug to walk to the gas station, which we were half a mile from.
We made it to the first gas station and they were closed and didn't have pay at the pump. When we finally made it (walking, we made it within 1/2 mile and then a lady stopped and wanted to give us a ride and the wind was so cold we decided, "Sure") to the next gas station they were OUT OF GAS. Luckily, they had one pump with Premium left, so 2 gallons and almost 8 dollars later we headed back.
