Colin’s Projects

After reading up on painting, it became obvious that I was going to need a more serious compressor to power the spray gun. I’ve also been using my cut-off tool and die grinder fairly frequently, and the little 12gal compressor just hasn’t been able to keep up. After almost 1 and a 1/2 months of looking around, I found this 5hp, 26gal Campbell Hausfeld. I’ve order an low volume low pressure spray gun to go with it and will take a stab at spraying on the epoxy primer very soon. I already had a moisture trap set up in the garage that I have been using to airbrush my models and it should work fine with the automotive spray gun.

Apparently, this compressor is an oil-less model, which is nice, but its extremely loud. It keeps up much better with my air tools, although, I do wish the tank was larger.

2 weeks ago I started in on the rust repair on the car. The first bit was actually fixing up some small problems on the replacement door that I put on. Those came out great, but I didn’t get a chance to photograph them, unfortunately. Anyways, here is what was the biggest rust problem. This is the front valance, below the bumper. I didn’t take a before picture, but here is what it looked like immediately after cutting out the corroded area.

I cleaned up the metal behind as best as I could with a little bit of sand blasting and a wire wheel attached to my mini-air grinder. I welded up the holes on the inside just for piece of mind, primed it, and then cut the patch piece for the front.

I cut the patch to the exact size of the opening, welded a nail to it so I could hold it while I tack welded it in place all with the hope that I could get the piece in flush so the repair would be invisible.

This started well, but it turns out that some of the surrounding metal was still not so great and the welder just burned it away, leaving more holes. Rather than start from scratch, I just made more small patches to cover them. I really should have cut out a bigger hole, but as I was contemplating redoing it, I realized that this whole panel will eventually be covered by the front spolier and is also going to be covered in a rubberized undercoating, so the patches won’t even be seen.

I had to stop working because it was getting dark and I needed a new wheel for my grinder, but this is where I left off.

After I go over it with the grinder and clean it up, it should look pretty good. The panel feels very strong and shouldn’t let in any more water or road grime.

So here is the 1974 I bought about six months ago. It started out looking like this:

The positives were that the engine was recently rebuilt. I looked in at the head and it was spot less. The cam had hardly been run in still. The previous engine had but the usual progressive Weber carb on it, but it was in obvious need of rejetting and seemed to have a vacuum leak. The body was almost entirely rust free aside from a small hole on the front valance and another bit in the spare tire well. The car was also entirely straight aside from damage done to the driver’s side fender and door. Apparently, the previous owner hit his 1965 Chevy trying to park in his own garage. The door looked awful and wouldn’t even properly close and this is clearly why the price was so low for a car in this shape. A quick inspection showed that the damage was simply to the door and didn’t spread to the A-Pillar at all.

The interior was pretty lousy with only a single seat and the center console missing. The door panels were also shot, which, it seems, is pretty typical for cars of this age. The speedometer was also broken.

So, in the first few weeks, I re-jetted and rebuilt the Weber, installed a Crane electronic ignition kit, replaced the door, put in some very nice seats from a Honda, got a new speedometer, a new thermostat, adjusted the valves properly, moved the battery to the trunk of the car, rebuilt the window washer pump, removed and sold the fog lights, sourced some of the big aluminum bumpers as well as the floor panels for the trunk. After a few weeks, the worn shifter started to become difficult to work with, so I replaced every single bushing in it, which is a surprising amount of work. I also replaced the transmission mount with a much larger one from a later car. The car shifts like a new now but still only has the original 4 speed.

The horribly loud Ansa exhaust was replaced with a beautiful stainless steel unit that has 3 separate mufflers and should outlive the rest of the car!

After all this work, the car runs quite nicely and is a joy to drive. Even with the worn stock suspension, the handling is very impressive and the engine is very strong. This is a very high revving engine with the redline at 6500RPM. It seems to make its most power over 3,500RPM so driving it feels like a much more modern car. The Weber isn’t quite big enough so after 5,000 RPM it feels like it just can’t pull enough air. My plan is to eventually swap in an electronic fuel injection set up from a more modern BMW later. You can actually build your own EFI controller now and program the fuel maps from your laptop which seems like a great way to go about setting up the car rather than having to experiment and constantly pull the spark plugs to take readings.