As I mentioned earlier, my cousin Woodson has developed severe health issues. It is unlikely he will again be able to drive his car. He would like to have the car in good operating condition for his children, who would not know how to work on the car if it wasn't running correctly and unfortunately, getting someone to work on an old car and do it correctly without causing additional damage has become very difficult. I hope to be able to get most of the issues sorted with his car so it will be reliable and driveable.
Unfortunately, Woodson has run ethanol gasoline in this car, which has most likely eaten up many of the rubber components of the carburetor. The carb has a very bad stuttering problem and falls on its face when you give it gas and it takes a two footed dance to keep it running at red lights. Also, the choke is completely non-functional. I removed the carburetor, which after dealing with The Clam felt very simplistic.
Woodson had a '55 Chevrolet shop manual, so I used it to disassemble the carb for cleaning.
After documenting each and every step with pictures I laid each piece out in the order it was removed and took pictures of that.
After that I washed each piece of the body of the carb in steaming hot water and blew out all the passages with compressed air. Then I took all the small little pieces and put them all in the carb cleaning solution. I'll let them sit in this for a couple of days. Unfortunately, due to environmental regulations, carb cleaning solutions don't work as well as they used to. The previously taken pictures will help me to sort out the large amount of assorted screws and small parts when I take them all out of the solution. Two of the larger carburetor body pieces would not fit and I will have to do them separately once the first batch is finished.
April and I successfully made the trip to Pigeon Forge in the '57. The only real issue we had is that the overdrive quit working one night. It turned out to be a blown 10 amp fuse to the relay. We took backroads there and took the interstate back. The overdrive allowed us to cruise at modern speeds with normal traffic on the interstate with ease. The six cylinder did great. It was miserably hot and humid but as you can see that didn't stop Rose from enjoying riding through the mountains in "The57Marge."
A while back a friend put me in touch with a demolition derby guy who had just acquired a '71 Safari. If there is a silver lining to owning a hard to find, rare, '71 Pontiac, it's that of all the GM B-bodies of that year the Pontiac is the only one that has a core support that mounts under the frame rather than over it. Demolition derby guys don't like this and as a result discard the front clips from Pontiacs when they use them. That's good for me and I was able to get this front clip. The guy was making a trip near the area so we arranged for him to drop it off while he was down this way. When I got home I had the front end of a '71 Pontiac sitting in the driveway. I called Adam, who painted Woodson's car, and he said that he doesn't do complete restoration jobs anymore but that he would paint the needed pieces to the wagon since they will be removed and not need extensive body work.
I have looked for a parts car or front clip for about a year and a half, so I was greatly relieved to have found one. As with The Clam, the driver's side fender did not have rust, but the passenger side was rusted through. I'll have to cut this out and replace it like I did last time.
The hood has an area that has previously had a dent in it and the bondo is cracking off. There are several more dents and a couple creases which will need to be hammered out and fixed. You can see Luella inspecting the front clip with her current tool of choice, sticks from the driveway.
The first order of business was moving the clip over in front of the garage door. This required more than one person due to the heavy and cumbersome nature of the thing. After that I had to open the hood latch. I tried finding the cable, which was cut, and pulling it with pliers, but it just pulled out of the sheath. I determined that by pushing here with a screw driver I was able to get the hood to open.
After that it was time to get to work
This fender has a few dents and a couple creases in it. Before I go to all the trouble of transferring the measurements and drilling the holes for the woodgrain trim and patching the rust I want to take the fender to Adam and let him look at it to determine that it is definitely something he will be able to fix. I tried to take the inner fender well out first, but this was obviously a northern car. All of the bolts were rusted and all of the clips broke, causing the bolts to spin freely. I had to use vise grips to hold the clips while I broke the bolts loose. Unfortunately, this didn't work on the areas where I could not get vise grips. As a result, I had to take off various parts of the front end to be able to access the areas I needed to remove the fender. When rusted parts that are supposed to come loose do not come loose, it causes you to do a lot of extra work.
For example, the bolt at the bottom of this picture held the front quarter extension on by screwing into the quarter extension and then had a threaded stud that extended through the fender and was held on with a nut. The nut was rusted to the stud so when you turned the nut all it did was turn the stud.
When things get rusty sometimes you have to get creative.
And when that's not enough, sometimes you get out the torch and set the paint on fire by heating up the rusted nut.
Eventually, after enough PB paster, torching and playing leggo-vise-grips, it all came loose. This all took a few hours longer than I intended and I didn't have time to run the fender up to Adam today like I wanted. My nephew borrowed my sawhorses and didn't return them so I had to make due with some buckets and a piece of wood.
The inner fender still remains and I'll have to figure out a way to access the reaming broken clips tomorrow.
The front header panel and grill came off without considerable problems. Each bolt was rusty and held tension to the very end, which doesn't allow you to use your fingers to unscrew anything.
The center support for the grille is broken. I'll have to figure out how to fix this later. Perhaps I can have it plastic welded or I may have to figure out how to do that myself.
