I got to go up to Indiana over last weekend and the first of this week. I got to see a lot of the family and … blah… blah… blah… sorry I just couldn’t stay that interested in it all, when I knew there was a chance to work on the 56.
New pictures are in the 56 Chevy Album in the gallery. I took some of the bottom and stuff this time, since there were headers and such. There are a couple with it running too, though thinking about it now, I should have taken a movie instead, so that you could hear the sound of it firing and everything.
Unlike last time I went up there Imon is feeling a lot better and he also had a complete day off to show me what I should be doing. Sunday was rainy up there from the remains of hurricane Rita, so we spent pretty much the whole day in the garage working on the car, which was exactly what I wanted to do.
We fixed one of the leaf springs on the back, because it had sheared through its alignment bolt. Since we had one of them loose we decided to take the other one loose and cut off the leaf spring shackles that had been put on the car and that where way too high. This brought the car down to a more normal ride height.
We painted the radiator and got it back in, with new heater hoses. Imon said that the old engine hoses looked ok, so we decided to put them back on. About this time Jim came over to help and see what was going on. We poured in two gallons of antifreeze and filled it with water. We reconnected the fuel line from the trunk, where Imon had been draining the fuel tank of the old nasty gas that was in there. Imon had also removed the aftermarket electric fuel pump and put the standard fuel pump back on it. We put some gas in the carb to get it started since there wasn’t any in the fuel line and pump and turned it over. It fired right away, but ran out of gas in the carb and died. We put some more in it and fired it again and this time it just kept running. We let it sit there and idle for a second while we checked for leaks and such. It turns out that I didn’t tighten up the hose clamps enough so they were all pretty much leaking a little bit. We shut it off and tightened all of those and started on getting the alternator put on it.
That was a little troublesome since the bracket on the alternator had broke at some point. We mounted it a couple times, not realizing that the bracket was broke, and it was just too flimsy for it to be right. Once we noticed that it was broken, Imon found the piece off of it in the bucket of stuff that we had taken off of the engine, last time I was up there. Imon welded it back on there (a little more solid than it was before) and this time when we mounted it things seemed right. Getting that on there allowed us to put the fan belt on and after that the engine was pretty much done. As a matter of fact the mechanics of the car are pretty much done.
Speaking of done, Imon was pretty much there. He sat down and talked with mom for the rest of the night, while Jim and I removed the body trim on the car. That was a pain because most of the clips were held in by bolts that went through the car and had a nut on the inside of the car. Most of them were easy to find, but they had been on there for a quite a while and it took a bit of convincing on some of them. Others were inside door panels and we had to pull them apart to get inside. That is where we ran into glue that had to be at least 20 years old and was still tacky. Impressive to say the least.
After we got that stuff we pretty much called it a night. We started the engine a couple more times, just because we were so amazed how well it was running. This was an engine block that had been sitting outside for around 20 years and we weren’t noticing any real flaws in it. I went back the next day to take some pictures and it fired right up then too.
Next the car has to get stripped down and sanded. Once, it is sanded down then it is time to fix the body and then I think it is ready for prime and paint. Once that gets done, I think it has to head to the trim shop to get the interior done.