Antique & Classic Cars Blog

One of my favorite Murphy’s Laws is this: any tool dropped while fixing a car will roll underneath to the car’s geometric center.

There’s another law of auto repair that I have often observed, though I’m not sure Murphy has catalogued it: Any time you approach a locked door with something heavy in one hand (like my toolbox, today, for example), your keys will always be in the pocket on that side. It doesn’t matter if you habitually place them in the opposite pocket. Somehow, the Murphy node in your brain decides which hand you will carry the heavy item in and simultaneously chooses that hand for pocketing your keys.

This rule is near infallible for heavy automotive items, but is just as reliable for an unwieldy bag of groceries or anything fragile.

Thanks Murphy!

I asked my buddy, photo-journalist Lee Klancher, if he had any cool photos for the blog. He sent in the following–a vintage truck Mother Nature is calling home, slowly moldering back into the earth. It rests near his father’s home in Rice Lake.

Love of the automobile is an egalitarian force. What is old and decrepit can stir the soul as much as the finest and fastest. Who among us has the willpower to hike within view of a sight like this and not walk over for a careful look?

Guess the owner of this one needn’t worry about anyone towing it away some night.

And he’s got a lot of parts to make it all run good.”

Little Dearborn on University Avenue is the greatest indoor collection of car parts I’ve seen. Three stories, 35,000 square feet. In biz since 1952, at which point the founder to set up shop selling obsolete parts he would buy from dealers. I’ve driven by it for years, but the region of my brain that’s supposed to alert me to cool stuff was always off. Finally my editor, Angelo, said, “Why don’t you go over there and see what’s up.” ‘Bout time!

Hiring me to work at this business would be amazingly stupid because I’d spend the whole shift wandering around picking stuff up: “Wow!…. whoa!…. jeez!… holy cow!…. incredible!….”

I’ve posted some pictures, which fail to do the place justice. While the hard-to-find original Deuce and near deuce stuff has mostly gone, they have thousands upon thousands of amazing vintage parts–you name it. Flathead parts, trim, fenders, radiators, wheels, grilles, axles.

During the war, steel wasn’t available for grilles so people made them. This is wood….

…a stand-in for this.

They have mini fiberglass T-Bird bodies for electric cars that ran off starter motors. They have an original Maytag mini-racer powered by a gas Maytag engine…. The roadster in the back is built with aftermarket body parts, but the McCulloch supercharger was sitting under a desk for years till someone decided to fix it and slap it on a flathead.

I’ll be doing a piece for the print version of the paper on this place soon. (And I don’t even have a Ford!)

Gary Mitsch, a recent Locals in Motion subject in the print version of the paper, has a hot rod so cool it deserves a little cyberspace. He found this ‘32 Ford sedan offered by a New Jersey seller on the internet. The seller delivered it and Mitch shipped it off to his friend, hot rod savant, Boyd Coddington.

Here’s some featured goodies: 1957 Chrysler Imperial 392 Hemi engine, bored and stroked to 440 cubes; Hilborn electronic injection; Hot Heads racing cylinder heads, hot cam, and 6-speed manual transmission. This is a car to take when you absolutely, positively have to be there, yesterday.

Here’s the rebuild kit for the Borg Warner T10 4-speed transmission. Fun to look at all those clean, well machined and useful parts.

For some reason–e.g., the seller likes both transmissions and baseball–each kit comes with several baseball cards. I don’t collect them myself (thus, I have no sob story about my mom throwing them away when I went to college).

I have no use for them, so the first person to send his or her address to weekendgarage[ a t ]comcast.net  ( [ a t ] = @  ) will receive them in the mail. Put “baseball cards” in the re: line.

Anyone rebuilding a transmission of your own this winter, drop a note and tell use what it is and how it’s going.

I know a lot about wine. For example, in addition to red (which is for meat), there is also white (for fish), a fact connoisseurs should note. Since we have all seen grapes, which are green, we can deduce that vintners adjust the colors so you’ll know what to drink with what. (Some diners aren’t too sophisticated.)

But more exciting than the liquid or its color is the cork–a useful tangible object that comes free with a good bottle. Our friends Keith and Michele came for dinner last Sunday and brought a bottle of red that was especially nice, because its cork was identical in circumference to the o-rings on a certain new-old-stock U-joint I picked up on eBay and one of whose original o-rings I broke by looking with my fingers, not my eyes as I was taught.

This excellent free cork held the promise of righting a careless wrong…through these steps.

First, we needed to mark the wine cork at the same height as the original grease seal. By sheer luck, its height was identical to the height of my pen’s point laid down on the workbench. Marking the appropriate line all around was as simple as rotating the cork across the stationary penpoint.

Line marked, it was not too hard to cut off the future gasket with a fresh straight razorblade. Rather than cut in one push, I carefully rotated the cork to cut along the line all the way around, going gradually deeper with each revolution until it was cut through.

Next order of business was to make a center hole. As commenter Gary suggested below, I thought about ways to make a punch–e.g., a hollow tube with a sharp edge that could drive the middle portion out with a hammer rap. Couldn’t find anything suitable…but I did have a washer of proven circumference (see previous post). Hold washer, centered, trace carefully with scalpel making several passes and our hole is cut.

The hole was a little snug, but some fine sandpaper rolled grit-side-out provided a good means of smoothing and enlarging it. Rotating the new seal on the gritty paper cylinder got us exactly on. Final step was to hold the sandpaper flat and run the original cut edge over it to smooth that out too, then blow all the cork dust off the new piece.

Our new part was a vindication for the wine industry. The U-joint cap fit on it perfectly and rotated smoothly. I took it and the others off, rubbed some grease into the roller bearings in each one, refitted and then pumped grease into the U-joint till it was all lubed up. Now it’s re-boxed and ready for the Borg-Warner T10 as soon as it’s rebuilt.

Gluing a cork gasket (grease seal, O-ring) that a hardware store might give you free if they had an old one on a shelf is not keen economic reasoning at its best. But it’s fun!

Glues are frontrunners in the bold claims department. What they say they can fix compared to what this tinkerer has successfully restored to one piece is a very lopsided ratio. Wood glue is an exception–perhaps because clamping is essential and furniture is easy to clamp. I resolved to exert some sort of compression on this project for best effect.

Here was the approach:
1) Find appropriate adhesive. Schatzlein Saddle Shop, where my wife had to buy something for her wimpy one-horsepower horse, had a glue that included cork among its adherables.

2) Get a form of appropriate size and shape to glue the thing on–but not to. Parkway Hardware had some plastic thing–spacer, insert, bushing–whatever the tray said that was about the right size.

3) Apply wax paper so we don’t glue our cork seal to the form. The cylinder was easy to cover: cut a thin strip, tape one end to the plastic thingy, wrap and tape other end to itself. The base was nominally more challenging but a washer on my work bench from the running lights we fixed in an earlier project was just about the right size: set washer on wax paper, trace with scalpel, slide over plastic thingy… Voila, non-stick form.

4) Apply glue to each end of each broken piece. Let sit ten minutes per instructions, press together. For proper fit I ensured each piece was in the right place and right-side-up.

5) Another thing Schatzlein had was these bags of small rubber bands, apparently used for braiding horses’ tails and manes. Packaging did not say “for use with broken old cork stuff worth about a penny.” But it worked anyway–only trick was getting the small rubber band properly seated around the tiny cork gasket without shouting.

6) Wait overnight. To my surprise, the result looked very convincing. Could glue-applications writers have entered a new era of credibility?

7) Final test was to fit our glued product…. Doh! While the glue bonded the pieces together nicely, it also took up a tiny bit of space at each of the four bonds. The result was a gappy fit. Sure, the metal skirt on the u-joint cap would probably have pushed it together and been perfectly adequate, but when you go out of your way in the name of minutiae, get it right!!

Here’s an undamaged gasket with proper snug fit.

(Coming up next: Recycling Your Wine Cork)