Guttin'

It's been a bit since I've written, but that's not for lack of progress. It's just that I'm juggling the remaining tasks while not getting any actually completed. The motor works. The transmission works. That crazy electric overdrive thingiemajigger works. If you don't count the questionable brakes and shot suspension bearings, I have a functioning car! Now I just need to turn it into something my lovely girlfriend would be happy to ride in. Which leads to the final countdown: rust repair, paint, and interior. At some point I'll do one more post about the stereo setup, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. First up, interior.

You've seen the starting pictures (and if you haven't, go read the old posts, you lazy bastage). Crusty dark blue skin that used to be vinyl barely clinging on over a foam that has long since turned to a pale orange powder. Gross. So to start with, let's rip the shit out of it.

Something was definitely living back there...

Interesting how much plywood you find in an old car. At least it's easy to replace... The shelf in the rear is a pair of plywood sheets screwed to a bit of a hinge. The rear seat-back is built on a piece of plywood. I'm told the headliner is stretched across a wooden frame. Strange, nowadays the only "wood" in a car is the veneer trim put there to look classy. If a car's measure of class is the amount of dead tree in it, mine wins hands down!

Speaking of which, let's pull the doors apart while we're at it...

The mechanicals in the doors are all in good working order. I'll give them a decent cleaning and lubing, then stuff the doors with vibration damper and Thinsulate Acoustic before wrapping them back up again and burying them behind the door panels. All of the interior panels are simply flat pieces of fiberboard with some vinyl stretched across. I'll see if I can pull that off myself, wish me luck. I'll be using generous amounts of sound deadener before I reassemble - I want this car to be better than new. The wheel humps look to be two pieces of vinyl stitched in a curve, maybe I'll exchange stitching new wheel humps for some fine beer (any stitchers feel like taking me up on that?). My cheap-o carpet kit might be an object lesson in why not to get cheap-o carpet kits, but I won't know that until I get to em.

But Wait, There's More!!

I picked up my seats from Classic Restorations in Verdi Nevada, and they are looking great! They're refinished in leather for all the parts that matter, vinyl on the rest. The back seats are vinyl as well, but only Isis the dog and stinky children sit back there anyway, so who really cares if it's not perfect? New foam, new elastic webbing, and cleaned up mechanicals. They're looking and feeling great. I'll need to replace the rear seat webbing, but I'll burn that bridge when I get there.

So fresh and so clean!

Isis goes here.

(or more likely, on the top with the seat folded down)

We're getting down to the last few tasks, but it feels like there's still so much left to do!

On the Road, Again!

Well boys and girls, I couldn't resist any longer. After a quick bath to wash the garage dust off of the car, I decided to take the Volvorine for a quick little putt putt around the block, and putt putt she did, successfully making the journey and safely returned to the garage without losing any important bits!

They see me rollin'

They hatin'

This little adventure taught me a few things that need seeing to:

• The left turn backing out of the garage dumped a bunch of washing water out of the heater box into the passenger footwell. The immediate right turn down the road dumped the rest of it onto my shoe. Will need to investigate that drain hose and seals
• The accelerator pedal doesn't seem to move the throttles until it's halfway to the floor. Time to replace bushings on the throttle linkage.
• Idle was almost entirely controlled with the choke. I really need to get to that carb tuning...

But, there was even more good news, showing I'm closer to the end than the start!

• The brakes are solid enough to get me to the DMV for title and registration (will be even more soliderer with some bleeding)
• The speedometer, while bouncy, at least provides some vague indication of my forward progress
• First through third gears spin splendidly.

The Short List

This brings me to my short list to wrap up mechanical work and make the car ready for it's trip to the body shop. As always, I may find good news or bad news, so the situation will remain fluid, but at least I can put together a checklist to start marking things off!

• Rewire the ignition coil back through the tachometer. Seriously, I want to know why the last guy moved it to a single screw hanging off the engine block.
• Adjust the throttle linkage to give some semblance of a link between what happens at the accelerator pedal and what happens at the carbs.
• Set the timing and tune the carbs.
• Put more bullet points into my blog.

So, spose it's time to dig up some insurance and get ready to check out some body shops. Now, more road candy for my adoring fans:

I'm all out of captions. Let's go for a drive!

IPD's 50th Anniversary

IPD USA turns 50 this year. To celebrate they're giving away a bunch of money and parts for our car projects.

I don't know about you, but I think they missed the boat on this one for their sponsored vintage project...

Oh well, Happy Half Century IPD!

The Story Till Now, Part III: Shinies

One of the draws to this car is the glorious dashboard with six individual chromed brass gauges. Seriously, it's a work of art that you simply do not see these days. Unfortunately, as you've previously read (you *have* been following along, haven't you?), my shiny chrome gauges were anything but, coated in however many years of dust and some sort of green corrosion. From left to right in there we have a tachometer, temperature gauges, speedometer, fuel level, oil pressure, and clock.

You've seen this before...

Step 1 - Polish the Bits:

With the right tools it turns out polishing up the old gauges is really quite easy. To start with, I gave them a quick scrubbing with some 409 (careful not to get any cleaner or water inside, who knows the havoc that would be wreaked) to get some of the surface crap off. After that, it was copious amounts of quality time with the dremel and a polishing wheel. One more trick: after cleaning, rub some baby oil into the faces to minimize cracks and really make them glisten. Oh, you want before and after pictures?

Old and Busted.

New Hotness.

Yeah, they clean up nice. While somebody more knowledgeable than I in the metallurgic arts could go into details as to why, I'll chalk this one up to them not being made of chromed plastic. Now to figure out what works and what doesn't. Thanks to some wonderful help on the Yahoo Groups 1800 list, I was able to repair the clock (more on that later), and the oil and fuel gauges worked out of the box. The tachometer was bypassed sometime in the past when an aftermarket ignition coil was installed in a wonky location. The speedometer might work, I'll find out when I can get the car up to speed (or when I chase down the cable and hook it up to the drill). Temperature gauges are a different story, being detached from their usual locations in the engine bay. I suppose I'll just have to be careful and I dunno... drive in the cold for the time being.

Shiny!

Keeping Time

It seems these clocks never work longer than a year or two. Rather than a quartz controlled device, they are a finely balanced electromechanically driven mechanism requiring the near perfect function of some very fine parts. As they say: they don't make them like they used to... And there's probably good reason for that... However, these clocks are just too cool for me to let die an inglamorous death, forever stuck at 3:26, a gorgeous but non functioning relic of the past. Luckily for us, an intrepid member of the community sorted out the root cause of the clock failures and rigged up a solution! Armed with this new knowledge and a full bin of electronic parts from EE 201 a decade ago, it was time to dig in!

First hurdle: These clocks are not designed to be opened. The bezel is literally bent around the backside to hold the thing together. Thirty minutes of savage twisting with a screwdriver freed the clock from it's shiny confines and gave me these beautiful guts:

Brass Clock Guts

The root cause of these clock failures is a a reciprocating balance wheel driven by an electromagnet. To discharge the magnet's capacitor, a fine wiper sweeps brushes against a contact, closing the circuit and allowing the balance wheel to change direction. The above description is more or less entirely inaccurate, but the gist of it remains: too much current through too small a contact in too short a time. To resolve this, a transistor circuit is added. In this setup, the transistor basically works as a relay allowing the wiper to draw a tiny fraction of the current it used to, with the transistor sinking the rest of it. Two resistors, a transistor, and some wires are all it takes (extra special thanks to Bill Jackson of the Yahoo group for drawing this up!).

Circuit Wired In

Only time will tell if it keeps time (hehe, I slay myself), but the clock has been running without issue since installing it two months ago.

Now I just need to put them all back together...

Remember, don't let this guy near any power tools.

Fuel and Air

There's one more installment in the story 'till now, but first let's cover some recent events. I just completed my first carburetor rebuild. It took a bit over a month to get all the parts (don't cheap out on knock-off rebuild kits, boys and girls), but they're done and they work!

The SU Carburetor

The carburetor has just one job: Mix fuel with the air that's being sucked into the engine. This involves four basic functions: interfacing with the fuel system (float bowls), metering the amount of fuel that goes into the air (needles and jets), ensuring the right amount of air/fuel mixture gets in to the engine (throttle), and providing a means to enrich the fuel mixture so the motor can start when cold (choke). I suppose there are endless ways to skin that cat and I'm sure I'll learn another way when I dig in to the dual Bing carburetors on my Airhead motorbike. It took some reading and perusing of the youtubes to demystify these little devices. From the outside, they are a chunk of metal with all sorts of tubes, springs, and appendages attached. I'll be honest, digging into them terrified me.

My Carbs After Rebuilding

Then I did some reading into how they work. Anybody with an old British import may be familiar with these little devices. They were designed back in the stone age by a company called Skinner's Union, then slowly refined a little at a time. The result is an extremely elegent and rugged design with few moving parts or delicate wear items. In essence, there is one moving part for each of the carburetor functions above.

In the float bowls, a plastic float opens and closes a needle valve to provide fuel to the system.

The fuel mixture is determined by raising or lowering a tapered needle in the fuel jet. For me, this is the most fascinating part of the design. The needle is at the bottom of a piston which moves up and down based on how much vacuum the engine is producing. More engine vacuum pulls up the piston, increasing the area the air can flow through while the taper on the needle increases the amount of fuel that can join it. The moving piston keeps a constant air velocity across the fuel jet, allowing the precisely tapered needle to accurately meter the amount of fuel it lets in.

Airflow to the engine is controlled via a standard throttle butterfly just downwind of the vacuum pistons.

Cold starting is achieved by both lowering the jets (so they interface with a narrower part of the tapered needle) to increase the fuel flow and slightly opening the throttles.

Rebuilding

Originally, I had picked up a set of Walker carb rebuild kits from Amazon, because, y'know, I'm cheap. After a few weeks of waiting for the back-ordered kits, I dug in to them. Dismantling the carbs starts with the piston covers (also called "dashpots" because British people are cheeky). Pull off the dashpots, catch the spring before it bounces away, pull out the pistons (careful of those needles!!) and dump out the old oil. Now a couple of bolts to remove the floats, a couple more for the bowls and jets. Two little screws come out of the throttle shaft allowing removal of the butterflies and shaft.

Everything gets a thorough soak in the bucket of death cleaner. Seriously, only use in a well ventilated environment. After a thorough wipe-down and a bit of polishing the exteriors with some steel wool, I got to rebuilding. I found my carb kits have an extensive selection of gaskets and seals, and my carbs themselves use perhaps four of them (actually, I needed six, but there was only one set of exhaust flange gaskets instead of the needed two). I went ahead and replaced what I had: needle valves in the float bowls, float bowl gaskets, dashpot damper gaskets.... I suppose that was it. The carb kits didn't seem to have quite the right air filter gasket either.

First issue: One of the jets has a cracked throat. This may have been why the car was parked, since there's no way to accurately meter the fuel. There's also chance that the little bronze throat got sucked into the engine and wreaked all sorts of havoc, but we're thinking happy thoughts. Of course, my carb kit doesn't have the jets. Luckily, proper SU branded kits are available through the current owner of the branding: Burlen. Now comes another two week wait for that to ship from England... Cheeky Brits...

In the meantime, let's put a better bandaid on that hole in the exhaust:

Only the best for my cars

That should do for now.

We Live Again!

The SU repair kit arrived and, strangely enough, has exactly the parts I would have needed in the first place with no extraneous gaskets or seals. Live and learn. I'll keep the gaskets for later since I just need the jets right now... New jets require re-centering the needle and jet. If the needles aren't perfectly centered, they'll rub on the jet throat, both ruining the fuel metering and rapidly increasing the wear on the needle and the jet. This means loosening and tightening the bolt that holds the jet to the bottom of the carb body over and over again until you can drop the piston and have it land with a "thud." Yes, that is the technical description of how to perform this vital task.

Needles centered, let's bolt it back together! But wait, there's another issue. For some reason, the prior owner had the throttle linkage so loose that it bound up on itself and wouldn't allow the throttles to close all the way. Perhaps they were trying to adjust the idle... A shot of PB-Blaster and some vise grips to loosen those rusty nuts and we're (finally!) back in business.

One final step - those dashpots need oil. The oil serves two purposes: 1) provide damping for the pistons to keep them from bouncing all over the place, 2) provide lubrication for the pistons which would otherwise be metal on metal against the dashpot covers. There is no consensus on what to oil to use here. All the internets tell me is "don't use water." Proper SU branded dashpot oil is available, but folks with these motors use everything from 5wt suspension damping oil to 20wt. Many recommendations I saw were for automatic transmission fluid (ATF), which I happen to have! Here's another valuable lesson, boys and girls, always read the label on that little blue bottle so you don't fill your dashpots with 30wt oil. Yeah, that'll pretty much keep em from moving...

There's still a lot of tuning to do. I'll need to check the valves and timing, then do an actual carb tune which I may even write up!

In the meantime, enjoy some sweet music:

The Story 'Till Now, Part Deux: Stopping

 I know I know, anybody that knows anything will tell me that a car only really needs two buttons: Go and Go Faster. And, while I'm quite certain I'd be able to get the damned thing titled and registered at the good ole Nevada DMV without putting a drop of hydraulic fluid into the rusty and bone dry master cylinder, I plan on karting the dog around in this. Friends don't let friends put dogs in danger.

Puh puh please don't let him do this to me

So, this brings us to Part II of The Story 'Till Now. We'll be covering a solid refresh of the braking system - and I'll note it's a far more solid refresh than my original plans or budgets had accounted for. It seems up until the advent of ABS, all cars have more or less identical braking systems. The pedal pushes a hydraulic cylinder which pushes fluid through a bunch of lines out to the brakes themselves where more cylinders push the friction surfaces together. The 1967 Volvo 1800S has a vacuum powered brake booster just past the master cylinder, drum brakes on the rear axle, and fascinating three-pot disk brakes up front.

Start at the Top

This story starts at the master cylinder. Tucked up against the firewall is a brown device, a cylinder with a bowl on top. It's not supposed to be brown. Nobody makes brown car parts. They're black or silver or red or who knows what - and as much as it pains me to say it - brown is bad. I knew this when I bought the car. I had tried to take a peek inside the brake master cylinder only to have the cap shatter in my hand. So, the first part I ever ordered was a shiny new (black!!) brake master cylinder. Some months later, new master cylinder installed, I used my better judgment (for once) and decided to check out the remote brake servo, given it's generally woeful external appearance.

Remove servos look like this

 

Then Work Your Way Backwards

A quick peek inside dashed any hopes of a getting the brakes up and braking any time soon. After ordering a rebuild kit, I found this was a Mark II servo rather than the factory installed Mark I. My rebuild kit wouldn't work, and a kit that would is going to set me back two hundred fifty dollars. Time to regroup and come up with another plan

Some sort of worm must have turned the old fluid into bird poop

The new plan involved fitting a modern remote booster with the same boosting ratio as these ancient British built contraptions. Of course it will have no bolt holes in common with the originals. Hell, it would have no bolt holes at all. A few weeks of procrastinating followed by a day of installing gives me a new booster, installed backwards, mounted in the general vicinity but nowhere near the proper brake lines. Happy days. Luckily, my Friend Who Knows Better was able to get me the proper tools and advice to plumb this infernal new contraption in.

Aftermarket remote brake booster

A Corollary on Brake Bleeding

There is an official way to bleed the brakes outlined in my wonderful Haynes manual. The first step is to enlist the services of an assistant. Sure, you find somebody willing to sit in your ratty-ass old Volvo and pump a pedal for hours on end. See how far that gets you with your friends. After the promise of three foot massages, a fancy dinner, shared custody of the Volvo *and* the dog, and a trip to Tahiti, I coaxed my wonderful girlfriend out to help in the process. Covering the rebuilt hydraulic clutch and all four wheels...

One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Holding...
*squirt out two drops of old fluid*
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Holding...
*two more drops*


...Repeat for the next hour. That my friends is the sound of true love.

Nothing Can Stop Me Now!

A funny thing happened when we bled the brakes. The front wheels stopped turning. Seized brakes, so much for all that Going I had planned. On the bright side, I had foreseen this hiccup and already had sitting on my desk a pair of caliper rebuild kits. Now, a disk brake caliper really is a very simple device. Rebuilding one is damn near trivial. Take it out of the car, pop out the cylinders (use air pressure to help you out, you'll need it), gently pry off all of the old cracked rubber bits, clean thoroughly, polish the guts with some very fine wet sandpaper, reassemble with new rubber bits. Unless of course the cylinders look like this:

Corrosion is bad, mmkay?

In which case you should replace the cylinders or spring for some professionally rebuilt parts. What you should not do is quietly rebuild them anyway and put them back on the car until a convenient rebuilt pair is made available. Remember kids, do as I say not as I do. On the bright side, the sloppily rebuilt calipers work adequately for getting the car into the driveway and back to the garage. This car will not be leaving the driveway until a properly rebuilt set of calipers are installed and the rear wheel cylinders are replaced. That, however, will be a story for another time.

The Story Till Now, Part I: Going

I must come clean. I purchased this car back in September or October or something like that. Right now this minute it's more than a hunk of useless metal - it's got more working bits then broken bits. Heck, I've even backed it out of the garage and then drove it back in again. I've just decided recently to write about my misadventures. So, let's set the wayback machine to September (or October or something like that) and fill everybody in on the progress to date! Luckily, I started a build log and have been relatively good about keeping it up. I figure I'll roll this out in three installments, each covering some facet of the rebuild process. Part One focuses on the fuel system and the bits that make the car go.

What I learned from the seller:

Pretty much nothing. He said the motor turned over but the fuel system would need a rather thorough overhaul to get it running. The engine bay is pretty much complete, so I can at least tell where the parts I need to replace are supposed to bolt up.

Step One: Does it blend?

My basic mechanical knowledge (from playing with legos and dismantling the electric can opener) tells me it's probably a bad idea to just mash the starter on a car that's been sitting for some unknown amount of time. A brief chat with a friend, we'll call him "someone who knows better," confirmed my suspicions and gave me a moderately safe way to get it going:

• Pull and inspect the spark plugs. They were fairly carbony, but serviceable. 
• Mist some WD40 or other pseudo-lubricant in the cylinders so's we don't crank them while dry
• Hand-crank the engine to make sure it... y'know... turns. Thankfully, it does (at least, once I took it out of first gear...). This also gets some lube on the cylinder walls before giving it a hard cranking from the starter.
• Top off the coolant and oil.
• Do a quick once-over on the carbs - get rid of the old fuel in the bowls
• Get a battery, see that the starter cranks the engine over (chugga chugga chugga)
• Spray some starter fluid in the throttle bodies, put some fuel in the float bowls, cross your fingers, sacrifice a goat, and hit the starter
• VROOM VROOOOM POP VROOM SPUTTER SPUTTER SPUTTER (repeat sputters for about ten seconds) sputter pop bleh....

Great success!

Step Two: Care and Feeding of Your Engine

Now that I have a shred of confidence that the engine isn't just a rusted lump of pig-iron ,I begin going over the long neglected basic maintenance.

First on the list - all of the rubber bits in the engine bay. Fuel lines, radiator hoses, vacuum lines, the crazy little hose that goes into the oil filler. All of it. Then, change the oil and flush the coolant. The oil was still black, but the coolant was a strange dark green not unlike the old Surge soft drink. It's something to keep an eye on - who knows what's happened sitting for so long, but any new oil or other contamination of the coolant means more fun times in the engine bay and a lot more stuff to dismantle. That electric can opener I couldn't reassemble is starting to look awful ominous...

Oil and coolant: Check. Fuel and coolant lines: Check. Spark plugs and wires: Check. Thermostat: Check. A few things remaining to do like the belt drive, water pump, distributor cap and rotor, but I'm at least at a spot where I can move on to some of the major efforts.

Step Three: The Scent of a Fuel Tank

I learned from step one that the motor does indeed run, at least until it exhausts all of the fuel in the float bowls. Nothing is coming up from the fuel tank, and that's probably for the best. The flavor at the filler hole is a sickly sweet mess that smells exactly nothing like gasoline.

Every gasoline internal combustion engine needs three basic things to survive: Fuel, Spark, and Air (strangely similar to, yet subtly different from Earth Wind and Fire. Yeah, you hear me). Given my earlier efforts to get it turning over, I determined I indeed have all of the basic ingredients for motoring bliss except for a steady supply of sweet liquified dinosaur. You'd think that for as long as it takes nature to make the stuff, it could sit for a bit in a tank without going bad. I suppose it's nature's way of getting back at us for poking holes in her and sucking out her blood. In any case, I needed to get it all out of my car before it got angry and evolved into something... terrible.

Volvo must have looked through the crystal ball and seen my predicament back when they designed these things, because lo and behold the underside of the tank has a big fatty bolt just asking to be removed.

 Smells like R Kelly's sheets

Some four gallons of a substance that looks like ginger ale tumbled out. After pulling a handful of screws, some minor encouragement from my floor jack, and some thrilling acrobatics, the tank is out and ready for replacement!

With the old tank out of the way, I could find the root of the fuel issue: solid fuel varnish somewhere between the tank and the fuel pump in the hard line under the car. It seems cars get clogged arteries as well. Always gotta watch that cholesterol, boys and girls. 

I picked up a new fuel tank from IPD (why on Earth is somebody still manufacturing these things??), a fresh length of 3/8" fuel hard line from Napa, and a new mechanical fuel pump. After hours of twisting, bending bolting, pinching, fenagling, cutting, and cursing, I finally had the car sputtering along to its heart's content. On to the next crisis.