Projects A Budget built 52 Suburban for my girl

Really good stuff man!!!! Dani has to be really happy thanks to dad.

 

Congrats and thanks for sharing the story. Good call on the old cam and lifters. I would have bet money they would work for you.

 

Just like that...that was quite the thrash and it looks quite fitting in that brown...Congrats on that Milestone event @Baumi and Dani...

 

Liked you cars on the other forum, like your work, spent my last 5 months in the army 4th armored ansbach

 

Good job, and awesome story! Thanks for sharing.

Sent from my SM-G900V using The H.A.M.B. mobile app

 

Squeezing the time tight? Nah, you had plenty of time. Not like our usual last minute trash for the HAMB drags. Nothing like firing and engine for the first time and 30 minutes later hitting the road with it heading to the drags.
Hope to see you and Dani there sometime soon!
Great job!
r


Sent from my iPhone using H.A.M.B.

 

Well it states in th original post that Dani is his girlfriend, not his wife, and definitely not his daughter. LOL

 

Great job!!! Has someone told you already that your rear bumper is the actually the front and the front (your present flatter one) should be the rear?

 

That's Mild Customizing... Now I'm going back to check it out...

 

That´s a sentente to hang on my living room wall, hahaha

 

Honestly, I never had a cam failure ever. I mostly used GM, Edelbrock, Isky ,Comp and Crane Cams, and even summit brand were fine. This time I figured to save some of Dani´s money and buy and enginetech cam from rockauto. I cheaped out and it did not work. I don´t even blame the cam, I am pretty sure the hard layer on the lifter started peeling off and rubbed on the cam lobe. I´m not a metallurgist, but the lifter material is very soft, just like a casting, and the few pieces of the hard layer I found in the pan were not thicker than chrome that comes off a cheap valve cover. You can actually see where I grabbed the lifter with pliers to pull it out. I damage the hardend layer simply by pulling it out. Lesson learned, do not cheap out on camshafts or lifters!
And on the other hand, 15 out of 16 lifters were fine! A single bad one was enough, hahahaha

 

Suburban and panel rear bumpers are the same as front bumpers and not the same as pickup rear bumpers. Gotta do your research before you try to be an expert around this house.
The bumper he has on the front actually does look like a pickup rear bumper rather than a front bumper though. A burb should have the same bumper on both ends but you take what you can get and run with it where he is at. The flatter pickup rear bumper won't fit right on the back of the burb if my info is right.

 

Hahaha, Cosmo, yes, I have been asked that before and I know that And there are many more incorrect parts on the truck.
The story is, the rear bumper which is on the front now , came with the truck and was badly twisted, so I straightend it as well as I could. For the rear, I found a pretty decent and cheap pickup front bumper in the local classifieds. It was not good enough for the guy´s resto project, so he bought a new one. Good for us.
Now that we had two bumpers, Dani took a good look at them and said she wanted the bad one on the front , just in case she would hit a curb or something else, because it would be a shame to ruin the nicer one. That´s the story behind this

Did someone notice the modified radiator support? I had to do that , because we were given a perfect and free 51 Chevy pass radiator that had already gotten a new core years ago. Obviously they were running straight water in it and it was extremly clogged, it looked like a limestone cave inside and was pretty heavy for a radiator. So I filled it to the top with vinegar based bathoom cleanser and water and let it sit for a few months. When I flushed it my driveway was completly white from chalk, but there was still calcium in there. But it worked since the radiator was considerably lighter than before. Another fuel up with vinegar cleaner and water and after a few more months the radiator was clean as a whistle inside .

Another one....On final assembly the hood would not stay closed. The tongue on the hood lock was worn enough to not engage anmore. Someone had already fixed it by brazing it up, but it had worn out again. I had to weld it up 1/2" and grind it to shape to make the hood stay shut. I was doubtful of that repair and explains why we had the hood strapped down on our trip to Berlin. But after the first 1500 miles of driving I´d say it worked ok, hahahaha
The reason why I am explaining all of that is, we car guys have a different approach to a project. We buy what saves us time what we think is cool. To Dani , Urban was alreday cool from day 1, hahahahaha
If I ordered a new hood latch from Ecklers that would have been another 200 Euros after shipping, tax and duty. Dani would have had an expense but no visible progress. That is why I tried to focus on spending her money on fixable used parts where it made sense and buy all new when things were safety related ( frontend bushings, brakes, steering components, wiring harness, bearings etc).

 

Thank you Stogy! Good to hear you! I´ll forward your compliments to Dani, she´ll appriciate that! Maybe we´ll be back in Canada next summer. Not fixed yet, but if we do it would be great to meet you again!

Thank you Roger! Your service is highly appriciated! Ansbach is not far from me, maybe 90-100 miles. The best breweries are around Nürnberg too, but everyone is going to Munich for beer, hahaha
I hope you liked it here.

Ok , Raven , you won! Haha, 30 mins before leaving is a close call! I´d love to visit the HAMB Drags someday and meet more of you guys... maybe we can make it happen someday...

 

Thanks for sharing. Looked like a lot of hard work. Love the old 2-dr panel type vehicles including the Suburbans. Enjoy!

 

Hi Baumi, love your build thread. It's good to read a build where you can't just go out and buy the parts and have to make do with what you have. Re your cam problems, I put a new cam and lifters in my 301 chev last year from Rockauto and within 17 minutes it had taken 1.6mm off the bottom of one lifter. So pull it all out, clean everything and go with a new cam and lifters. After 20 minutes of breakin there's that bloody tick back again! A quick inspection found number 7 exhaust lobe/lifter was shot so time to spend some more money on better quality ( I hope) lifters and cam. It's been over a year and still haven't got back to it. P.S. my other car is a 55 Chev. Keep up the good work.
Glenn S.

 

Great Job!

BigMike

 

Hello,

Suburban…your build is pretty awesome. There is a lot of work making it into what you now have. Kudos… the hard work paid off in droves. Now…on to the road trips. The word Suburban is interesting as most of us equate it with a small blonde housewife sitting in a large moving SUV that takes up a lot of roadway. The Suburban housewife driving a giant Suburban, in a Suburban community called the “Suburbs.”

From our early surfing days here in South OC, we always liked the Suburban. It was not too large, did not look like a windowless van, and had the cool look of a station wagon without having the upkeep on the wood frames. Plus, it had the advantage of being able to take a few more friends to the surf spots with the roof racks and room in the back.

My first car, a 1940 Ford Sedan Delivery was very cool for a form of surf transportation. We could not stack surfboards on top without drilling in mounts in the roof or use the rear door to lock in the rear straps. So, taking out the back window on the rear door allowed two surfboards nicely and three if we finagled the angles, using a thinner surfboard. So, that meant only two possibly three friends could go surfing. The sedan delivery was made without rain gutters in the rear, like the Suburbans. (surfboards back then were minimum 9 feet and were larger with the size of the surfer…)

The Suburban had a lot more room inside, the rain gutters allowed any clip on surf rack or home made racks to be installed or taken off with ease. The interior was very roomy and definitely allowed more than three friends to go to the beach. The only problem was that it would not fit in our old post war two car garage home in the Westside of Long Beach. Back in those days, the wooden garage doors were 2x4 and plywood or redwood slats. They hung down to make the opening so low that a Suburban would not fit.

Jnaki

In watching your thread, it brought me back to recent times, talking to the owner of the cool Suburban I saw one afternoon in a local OC parking lot. It was one of the nicest Suburbans that I had seen in recent times. The effect was not a show car, but a daily driver with a bunch of custom stuff to make it functional. Chevrolet and GMC all came from the same mother.

https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/vintage-surf-transportation.326942/page-7#post-12590299

 

Well done!

 

Great job, I have an old Ford crew cab that needs a bunch of love...but I do love it. This is inspiring

 

Jnaki, thank you for posting on this thread. I really enjoy your stories that come from a time I always dreamed about. Born in ´76 I´m a little late to the party but your stories always make me feel like I can be part of the late 50s ,early 60s, surfing,cars, music, all things that I never experienced and only know from being told or watching old movies. I bet Dani´s Suburban must have been exposed to salt water frequently, as rusty as it has been. Maybe it used to be a surf wagon too? It came from California...

Chris, thanks! You are pretty good in finding survivor cars, I´m sure you could find yourself one that only needs oil changed and dusted off, hahahaha
I´ve seen you post about your truck, I wish Dani had bought something that nice, hahaha

 

Great work - that old Burban never had it so good. You both should be very proud of your work! Enjoy!

 

I like a story with a happy ending. Good job.

 

I appreciate your "get it done, with what you have/can find etc. build", thanks for posting it.
Many of us work out of our garages, with less then ideal state of the art equipment, but still manage to accomplish a finished worthy project.
This is reality, unlike the TV shows.
Well done!

 

Sooo, I have not updated this thread in quite a while because....I just didn´t do much on Dani´s ´burban other than a carb rebuild. But now, that I have some time to kill, I´ve got a "honey-do list" from her. So I put some insulation inside the roof and made a headliner out of ABS sheets, which worked pretty well. ABS is some kind of recycled plastic which is pretty flexible in one dimension and it can be formed in many directions if it´s hit with a heat gun. This was not necessary, because the headliner sheets on a suburban are only stuck into a channel inside the roof and kinda lock themselves into place. The material came pre cut, I just had to trim it to fit,like round the corners, cut out holes for the crank handles and so... It was about 100€ . Plus shipping

The surface is a bit like artifical leather, it has some structure . Maybe I´ll fab some bow to cover the areas where the sheets butt against each other, but Dani´s said that´s find for her, so I might skip it, hahahaha

 

Todays task was to build brackets for a sunvisor. Ok, they are availible everywhere, but ther are also almost 300$, and with Dani having a mouse trap where other people have their purse, spending 3 bills plus shipping and duties was out of question... plus I have time now and two drums full of scrap metal I can build things out of for free.
So I decided to give it a try and fab up a few brackets.
A few hours later Dani went for a test drive and she was very pleased. She said she did almost 140 kmh ( about 90 mph) and the sunvisor was solid . Hahahaha, I was a bit shocked but Ok, I told her to take it easy....next time.

 

Baumi, Ich wunsche mein Deutsch toll wie dein Suburban sind. Kudos fur hottrodding in dem Vaterland, ich hatte gehort das es sehr schwer ist.

 

Hey, your Deutsch is very good! Probably way better than my English. Thank you for your compliments!
I guess hot rodding here is not any harder than in the US, but it costs more to have parts shipped.So I try to repair what I have if I can. But nowadays things are pretty easy, with ordering online, ebay, paypal, credit cards.... When I got my first old American car, a 62 Impala, I asked my uncle from Canada to bring an Old Car Trader to his next visit in Germany. He did, and I thumbed through it and called some advertisers if the had the parts I needed.I guess Harmon´s Chevy were the first I called. They would send a catalog but upfront I had to send 20$ cash in an envelope to get it. After a few weeks of waiting a got a catalog and ordered by fax. After ordering I called to make sure they recieved my fax and usually was told a few parts were on back order...I called so often I got friends with one of their employees, Doug Rich was his name.... unfortunately they have closed their business....But after all, it ´s so much easier now for us here to build cars than it was.
Now I recieve most orders from the US in 3-6 days. Summit, Rockauto, Jegs, speedway, are pretty quick. Bigger stuff may take longer.

 

Nice looking visor brackets you built!