Projects Mild custom '51 Pontiac Chieftain

I figured the trim ring had been turned down gently against the backing plate. I was correct. Bent that up and it all came to pieces. You can see how faded the red paint was behind the chief.


I bent the brass tabs holding the chief in place and he came out. Being brass they all fractured off. I then removed all the old lacquer and masked it up with fine-line tape.


Painted it with red lacquer, 3 coats and removed the tape.


Drilled the post holding the chief in and tapped a thread down the hole, cutting a screw down to fit with a shakeproof washer behind to hold him on.


Polished the plastic up as best as I could and crimped the trim ring back on.

That's how that all happened. Happier with how that looks now.

Phil

 

Hi, Phil ...
Have you ever tried pulling the turn signal switch lever straight out to the left ? Some Pontiacs had a 4 way flasher system !

 

This one does not, the switch inside goes up, middle, down and that's it (I've had it in pieces already). Would be nice if it did though!

Phil

 

I had a moment of thought tonight and decided a small experiment was in order.

I wound about 30 turns of wire around #1 spark plug wire and attached the ends to an LED. I then put my neon spark tester in line and compared what was being gathered.


Spark delivered to the plug, we get a bright flash from the neon and a dim blink from the LED (3 yellowish dots top left), but between times the neon chatters and so does the LED:


So there's a fair bit of stray energy making it to the plug.



I think new wires are in order, along with some new plugs.

Phil

 

This afternoon, I was stood talking to my neighbor, who had pulled the tarpaulin off his little bugeye Sprite in his driveway and was cleaning all the leaves out of it. He told me he was thinking of getting it all fixed up, I had a look at it and it's a little ropey but not bad in the grand scheme of things.
My wife walks across the street from our house carrying a parcel. I'm confused because I've not ordered anything, nor expecting anything to be delivered.
I turn it over a few times, my neighbor cheerfully comments that it isn't ticking. Pulling my keys out of my pocket, I tear the package open and remove the contents, a small plastic Tupperware container. I see a familiar shape, immediately recognizing what it is; my wife takes a few guesses as I remove the tape and pop it open.


I walk back home and popped it into the center of my steering wheel.
Mystery Benefactor, I thank you.
Doesn't that look great now?

Phil

 

Now that is wheel purdy......and what else is great is, it's a Straight Eight !

 

WOW!! very nice wish I could hit the like button more than once. Do you really not know who sent you this?

 

Its always tempting to make rusty brake drums look better by painting but paint is an insulator and rusty cast iron is very good at dissipating heat.

 

Flat black dissipates heat ...

 

It's not heat resistant. It'll burn off and go rusty soon enough. It's just made it a little nicer to handle in the interim.

Phil

 

What a nice secret admirer!

Sent from my SM-G973U using The H.A.M.B. mobile app

 

Noce surprise package! Don't toss out the crazed old plastic piece yet. I have seen great results from coating trashed plastic pieces with liberal amounts of vaseline, and letting it just sit for a while. Might be worth a shot.

 

What is this "throw away" you speak of?

 

Something that Prius drivers and IPA beer drinkers do.

 

I love these old tin Indians, they had style and great details. Your car is amazing!

 

I had a little time of my own tonight so I decided to refit the slam panel. I had straightened the worst kinks out of the hood latch cable and oiled it up, rummaged in my box of random nuts and bolts and stuff and found a set of suitable fixings to put it all in place.
The hood now latches and can be undone from inside the cabin for the first time since I've owned the car.


I also set the fast idle and choke for the cold weather we're having. I finished the day smelling very heavily of unburned fuel. Feeling mentally a little better now, it's nice to get back to doing things on the car.

Phil

 

Phil,
We took our first cruise of 2020 in the 53 Pontiac. We took pizza to the beach with my wife, son, daughter in law and grandson. On the way home I was thinking; "I wonder if Phil is cruising in his Pontiac right now?"
Keep up the good work on your Pontiac!
Greg

 

Greg,

I can only hope right now, but I'm glad you've been able to. Your Chieftain is looking real sharp right there!
I did make the comment to my wife today that if I do get it on the road this year, it'll likely be too late in the summer to actually drive it as the weather's likely going to be just too hot and humid to comfortably drive it any distance.

Looking at it, I need to re-line the front brake shoes so that's on the list also before it hits the streets.
But, that list is growing shorter. It's down to items that need money throwing at, currently the car is having to take back seat when it comes to that. Hey ho. I'm not going to complain, the last of the items are safety related so it'll wait for those!

Phil

 

Cleaned the plugs and re-gapped them.

Nasty misfire remains. Got a couple plugs that have gone bad, couple wires.
Spark plugs and wires are better than socks and stuff for birthdays.

Phil

 

Ordered some plugs and wires (place only had 4 plugs at a good price so I'll wait for them to stock more) but a hopefully decent set of MSD branded wires should sort out the ignition from tracking to ground where it shouldn't. Also ordered a new can of red lacquer so I can finish off the tail lights and the rear wheel trim emblems.

Progress. Not a huge amount of traction yet but progress nonetheless.

Phil

 

You are making great progress!!! Remember this is just a hobby! Lots of other stuff comes first. Keep up the good work!

 

Some days it doesn't feel like it. I have a feeling this is going to be a brutally hot summer so working on it is going to be unpleasant in the next few months.
Way it goes though. I don't know if I'll make any shows again this year...

Phil

 

I have no doubt that you will be able to get this sorted out. I use Packard 440 wire with Rajah spark plug connectors and never worry about plug wires again. Nobody listens to AM radio anymore, anyway.

 

It's got some cheap off-brand silicone wires right now and a collection of Delco plugs that are past their prime.
I've ordered a bunch of USA made MSD wires and angled plugs, and some genuine Japanese NGK plugs because sadly they're better quality than any home-grown brands in this category of plug. It helps also that they are the same plugs used in a lot of lawn equipment (B6S).
The pops and crackles on the radio are all part of the charm. The alternator whine and spark plug chatter are not.

That's why I'm retrofitting Bluetooth to mine (all plans going well), which will introduce a high fidelity signal to the preamp- by then the interference has to be eighth of a volt or more to make a noticeable impact the the audio, rather than a couple of microvolts to affect the RF amplifier and IF circuit.

Phil

 

Damnit Phil you're making my head hurt

 

Yeah, one more time; this time, in English, please.

 

Okay! Let's see where we go with this.

There are two things that you need to know (not necessarily understand why, but know that they are the case) before this.
First, any spark emits energy- rather chaotically and randomly across a wide range of frequencies. Some you see as light, others you can't, like radio waves.
Second, a rapidly changing voltage in a wire carrying current caused by that voltage will make an electro-magnetic field around said wire.

Dealing with the first one; sparks make radio waves:
An AM radio works by detecting a change in the intensity of the radio signal it's tuned to and outputting that change through the loudspeaker. However, a moving coil loudspeaker requires a lot of energy to be made work, much more than the incoming radio signal carries. Therefore, the signal has to be amplified, the signal in the energy detected, then that amplified again to make the speaker output the content in the signal. Because the amount of energy in the airwaves from the transmitter are so small, any other source of energy will add up in the radio's amplifier and distort the original amount of energy recieved- it is additive, that is if the signal transmitted is 1 unit and another source transmits at the same frequency at 1 unit the net result is 2 units, and the loudspeaker is moved to a position that isn't true to the original source. This manifests as pops and clicks and whistles on an AM radio.
The ignition system of the car is made up from sparks, so the energy radiated from that is collected by the antenna, amplified and ends up coming out of the loudspeaker.

Second, an alternator makes electricity by changing the polarity of a magnetic field rapidly. If it's done fast enough it'll emit energy from the wiring that's going to be collected by the antenna, amplified by the circuit and put out through the speaker, as a whine.

FM radio gets over this in an interesting way, which is why it became popular for traveling; however the circuitry is more complex (an FM radio is just the FM circuit sitting on top of AM guts, which is why FM radios normally also have AM capability), but that's a totally different kettle of fish.

So, the way I'm hooking into the radio to make it Bluetooth capable is at the point where the audio has been extracted from the radio signal and been turned into a relatively large voltage- it's certainly large enough at that point to run a pair of headphones. If you put a pair of headphones on and wave the wire near to your distributor cap with the engine running you'll hear nothing, the amount of energy the headphones need to be made work is more than they can collect from their antenna (the wire) so you don't hear the interference. That's the voltage level I'm working at, I'm putting headphones type voltages in so any noise collected at that point doesn't make it to the speaker through the power amplifier.

Clear as mud?

Phil

 

On the units of energy thing, think of it like this. If you consider the radio as several sections, each dealing with increasingly large signals:

Antenna > Stage 1 > Stage 2 > Stage 3 > Speaker

At antenna, one unit of energy is collected from the radio station. The sparks emit one unit of energy also. If this stage collects both energies through Stage 1 of the radio, the net output will be 2 units.

Stage 1 outputs 1 unit of energy as 10 units of energy into stage 2. That's a problem because if we collected 2 units from the antenna then there's 20 being pushed out into stage 2.
BUT if we can shield the collection of energy from the sparks, they are still in the air as 1 unit- added at this stage only make 11 units of energy. So, we have gone from 200% output of what we should to only 110% of what we should.
Stage 2 outputs 10 units in as 100 units out to Stage 3.

Again, if we shield stages 1 and 2 from stray spark energy and collect it from the air into Stage 3 as 1 unit of energy, the net result is 101 units, a 1% error, which is inaudible.
Stage 3 outputs 1000 units per 100 put in.

This final output goes to the loudspeaker. So, for 1 unit of energy collected, there are 1000 put out.
However, if I disconnect stages 1 and 2 and put my own 100-unit big signal into Stage 3, any interference collected is so minute that the output is faithful to the input and the loudspeaker makes a very clear reproduction of the music put in.

That's how it works, and how it doesn't end up all crackles done this way.

Phil

 

Yea !!! What Phil said...

 

I'm with him! ^^