Click to enlarge.

Just doesn’t sound right.

My painting project is done.  Up close you can tell that it was the first car I ever painted, it’s far from perfect.  But I did learn a lot.  Like if you’re going to spend $400 for a gallon of paint, don’t use a $80 house paint sprayer to spray it on.  Like over spray gets e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e.

But I’m happy with it, I really like the color I picked, and unless you’re up close it looks pretty good.  And although it’s no longer green, I think I’m going to keep the name “Big Green”.  Mainly because “Big Brown” conjures up bad connotations.  Although my niece did have a brown car she called “The Poo” and I always thought that was cool.

Anyway, here it is, before and after.

And just in case you didn’t believe it was the same car…

Revived for 2012

The “Obamacon”.  You can make your own here.

What I did this weekend.

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The drawback of driving a 1972 Ford LTD.

On the way out of class one of my students rattled off two 4-digit numbers and then asked “Those sound familiar to you?”

Uh, yes.  One was my house number, the other my street number. (For those of you not familiar with Salt Lake City, and Utah in general, our streets are set up on a coordinate system. Each house and each street has a coordinate number that relates to the number of blocks it is either north, south, east or west of the center of the city or town.)

My first thought was that he had somehow come across that information on the internet.  It’s possible, and a couple other students had claimed they were going to pay the buck or so for the information, but it never came through.

But instead he had been heading somewhere with his brother and they were behind me when I pulled into my driveway.  He described the house and the station wagon on the side of the house perfectly.

If I were driving a 2004 Toyota Corolla, I bet he would have never noticed.

David and Goliath

I’m two blocks from home with Big Green’s trunk full of groceries and in the left turn lane the car goes dead.  It doesn’t sputter to a halt, no big bang followed by a cloud of smoke.  Just dead, like in that scene in “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” (The original 1951 one with Michael Rennie, I never saw the Keanu Reeves remake.)

I turn the ignition key and nothing, not even a click.  When I open the door not even those little marker lights in the door, which take little to no electricity, are on.  Like someone just pulled the battery out of the car. 

I pop the hood thinking that maybe one of the battery terminals came loose.  Nope, but the battery came loose from it’s holder, which makes me think that it may have bumped up against the side of the engine compartment and shorted something out.  Crap!  Could cost anywhere from 35¢ for a new fuse to $600 for a shop to find the $2.65 part that fried out.

First step was to get it out of the middle of traffic.  Which, for a car this big, is pretty much impossible for one person.  Fortunately a really nice young man (named Steele, believe it or not) and his wife stopped to help.  After realizing that even with the two of us we couldn’t push it uphill and flip a U-turn into the car wash parking lot, decided to roll it backwards and try to push it into the Chevron parking lot.  He stood in the road and blocked traffic while I rolled the car to the entrance and when it hit the uphill part he tried to help the momentum and push it into the Chevron driveway.  Just as it got in the perfect position to block exit of the gas station, Big Green started rolling forward and I thought it best to hit the brakes before Steele became my new hood ornament.  Or worse, the grit in the tread of the tires.

We got his wife to get in the car so that the two of us could push it up the hill so that we could roll it into a parking spot.  Just as I thought the two of us were going to spring mutual hernias, a guy in a Corvette pulled over and joined in, along with two other customers from the Chevron.  It took 5 people to push the beast, and it really isn’t that bad a hill.

Once in one of the official parking stalls, I thanked them all profusely (and again here, if any of them are reading) and assured them that there really was nothing more that they could do.

I walked the two blocks to my house, grabbed the battery out of Christine (the convertible), hopped in Old Blue and headed back to the Chevron.  With Christine’s battery in, I still got nothing out of Big Green.  Damn!  My next thought was that I must have fried the main fusible link, but had absolutely no idea where that would be.  So I called The Gearheads to see if they knew.  They weren’t sure, but Mr. offered to head down and have a look-see with me.

When he got there he looked at the solenoid and we decided it looked like it could have been fried when the loose battery made contact with the car’s body.  So we headed back to my house and borrowed Christine’s solenoid, got back and started hooking it up.  While switching the wires we noticed a loose wire that wasn’t hooked to anything, one that looked like it had broken off the grommet that was still on the post of the old solenoid.  We hooked everything back up and the car started right up.

To make a long story a little less long, it was that one little wire which broke off it’s grommet that brought Big Green to his knees.   I’ve returned all of Christine’s parts to her, Big Green has his back, so the only difference between a working car and a dead car was that one wire.

Coulda saved me a lot of trouble if I had noticed it in the first place.

Now, this part may be even less interesting than the 704 words you’ve already read, unless you are a mechanical nut.

Old Blue, Christine and Big Green all use the exact same solenoid, which isn’t surprising since they are all Ford LTDs and were all produced within 4 years of each other.  What is surprising is that the ‘72 (Big Green) has the wires hooked up opposite of the ‘69 and ‘70.  I know they’re hooked up right on Big Green because whenever I switched the solenoid I did it piece by piece, leaving the rest hooked to the old solenoid.  I know Old Blue is hooked up right because I never unhooked them.  And even though I hooked up Christine’s opposite of Big Green’s, not only do they match Old Blue’s, but I started her up and she runs just fine.

(And Battlecruiser’s bizarre setup, just for fun)

Same solenoid, different hookup.  Go figure.

1 + 1 = Happy

The funny thing about bolts is when the end breaks off, nine times out of ten it stays stuck in whatever you were bolting into.

This is what happened to the alternator bolt on Big Green.  Snapped right off and the end was left inside the engine.  Which makes it really hard to just bolt in another bolt.  You have to get that end out.

For me, it’s been a three week process.  Mr. Gearhead rigged the alternator so that the car could run, but since the bolt wasn’t in the engine, it really wasn’t secure enough for long-term use.

2 Weeks ago I tore into it and attempted to extract the bolt piece.  This entailed removing the alternator, 2 of it’s brackets and the fan and it’s shroud.  Lotta removal for a small piece of bolt.  I used an extraction bit that Mr. Gearhead gave me, and all it did was mess up the end of the bolt.  So, I put it all back together again and let it sit for a while.  I gave up on trying it myself and figured I’d just have to cough up the couple hundred bucks to get someone to do it.

A week ago I brought it down to Midas.  They’ve done some work on my cars for me before, but this time they said they didn’t have the ability to drill out a bolt.  So I took it to Pep Boys who said they should be able to do it.  5 hours later I called them up to see how progress was going and was told they looked at it but couldn’t do anything.  Seems my first attempt was off center and messed it up so they were unable to even try.  They said that I’d probably have to get a new engine head (several hundred bucks) that would replace the part of the engine the bolt was broken in.  Thanks a lot guys.

So my older brother, Pedro, pointed out that since I’d probably have to buy a new head anyway, why not just try to drill the thing out myself.  If I totally screwed up the head, no real loss anyhow.  So I figured I’d give it one more try on my own before going the real expensive way.

This week I went to AutoZone and asked the guy if he had something to pull out a broken bolt.  He showed me this extracting drill bit and said what I needed to do was drill a hole in the bolt then use this one backwards, it would drill into the bolt, tighten down and then unscrew it.  I even told him that I had attempted it with a different bit and had drilled off center.  He said no problem, this would still work.

So, today that’s what I did.  Took me a total of 3 hours, and that included disassembling the car, going down to NAPA for a new bolt and then reassembling the car.  Actual work on the bolt literally took less than 10 minutes.  And Midas and Pep Boys couldn’t do it.  Meh!

So, now Old Blue and Big Green are in dang good running order, and that makes me happy.  Now I just have to put the transmission from the Wagon into the Convertible and I’ll have 3 functioning ‘70-ish Ford LTDs.