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| The spiffy custom plate frame I got last September. I think. Here is one last chance to see the 70s vintage commercial plates, now replaced with authentic 1956 plates. |
8 December 2000 I get an email from a reader Up North:
Hey I really like your website and your style of writing . I keep checking to see what you're up to but I notice that you haven't updated in a long time - are you still doing stuff ? Hope to see something soon
thnx
S---- C-----
Barrie , Ontario, Canada
The Shame! My patient and loyal readers, I HUMBLY APOLOGIZE for this long absence! There have been a few different reasons I haven't been keeping up the journal:
• I've been very busy with other ventures, expanding my business and hustling up new work. It's been hard to justify doing work on the site when there is professional self-promotion to do.
• There hasn't been the time or resources to do much work on the Beast. But I'm looking at my notes and it just ain't true.
• Perhaps I thought I would be further along than I am right now. The schedule I made in preface, part III is pretty laughable.
Anyway, This chapter is going to be a grab bag of different Beast-related events and jobs, in VERY rough chronological order.
THE WRECKING YARD Sometime in I believe October I was at a wrecking yard, looking for 6-bolt rims and a fuel tank float assembly. Those Chevy rims are EXTREMELY hard to find. Anyway, I found a '69 Chevy C-10 and I pulled the float out of it. I'm going to use it to calibrate the fuel gauge (more later). This yard is located in an industrial section of San Francisco where the Beast gets a lot of attention from passersby. One admirer told me there was a yard just about a mile up the street that had two Task-Force trucks in it. Wasting no time, I headed over.
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| The right door I found in a junkyard | The bottom of the door. It's still a lot better than the original. |
Sure enough, I found the yard and there were indeed two trucks: a 1958 3/4 ton Chevy and a 1955 1/2 ton GMC. The Chevy was in rough shape, but the windshield was absolutely perfect. After juggling finances (like I said the resources have been a little thin of late) I bought the windshield. The Jimmy was in pretty good shape, and it's right door was in great shape, much nicer than mine (the whole bottom of the door on the truck right now is just plain missing). I had to come back the next day, but I managed to get the right door, the original style ignition, and a pair of perfect lower hinge covers.
On the third day, I came back again for a few oddments I thought I could tear off the Jimmy, like some dash bezels and the rear axle (hey, I could replace the ring and pinion off the vehicle!) but someone bought the whole thing. Bastard. At least I got the door! : )
THE FUEL GAUGE After doing some test with a Volt-Ohm meter on the float assembly, it seemed to be fine. Which is weird, because the gauge is all screwed up. Considering it's 44- year duty cycle, I'm not too surprised. I devised a plan to calibrate the gauge so it'll give accurate readings.
I attached two long wires to the float assembly I tore out of the '69 in the wrecking yard. I attached one to of the sensor stud on the back the instrument panel, and the other ground under the dash. That way, I could easily raise and lower the float arm and see if the needle does the same. The needle is moved back and forth by the variable resistance created by the sender between two fixed magnetic coils. To adjust the gauge, the magnets must be slid up and down so their fields would affect the needle differently. The problem is, when you adjust the "E" needle position, it wouldn't go to "F" when the float arm is raised up. Then vice versa. Over and over. Touchy, delicate work. It took a while, but now it works like new, I think.
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| The new windshield. I don't know why I took a picture of a transparent thing, but here it is. |
THE WINDSHIELD Finally! That crap windshield, which was getting dangerously clouded around the lower corners, was removed and the new one was put in. Removal was easy, putting a new one in is not easy. I did it myself, and it slotted in pretty well, but I should have had some help to get the top edge in a bit more snugly.
Well, I was feeling a bit smug about big jobs at the time. Just a few days before, I helped replaced the vinyl top on my sister's Miata. She got a nice new one with a glass back window and we got the replacement done in five hours, tops.
THE SPOTLIGHT Crawling along in ebay one fine evening, I found a decent-looking Unity 6" spotlight. The bidding, as usual was limp until the last 10 minutes. Thank God for DSL! Anyway, the upshot is I got it, and it was a quality item.
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| The Unity spotlight, pre-installation. |
A spotlight? Not quite a stock item, you're thinking, as well as a non-authentic brand (GMs of the period had Guide accessory lights). Well, sorry. I've always wanted one. It'll tell you why.
Firstly, one of my fond memories of my childhood was when I got hang around with my dad while he was at work. Now, I'm not talking about the tavern he owned (I was never that great at billiards, and it really wasn't my sort of crowd), but his time as a lineman for Pacific Gas and Electric. Most kids think of their dads as bigger-than-life, but having a dad who could climb poles or lift you up sixty feet above your neighborhood in a cherry-picker crane bordered on heroic.
Sometimes, when he was on call at night, he would take me along for a ride in the huge brown-and-tan PG&E utility truck while he drove around Santa Cruz and fixed power lines. Larry's intimate knowledge of the workings of high wires had some great side benefits (we never paid for cable during most of the 1960s and 1970s and he installed an unauthorized streetlight on our cul-de-sac), but the most fun thing I ever saw him do on the job was the streetlight dousing trick with the roof-mounted spotlight.
[WARNING: The following paragraph contains a description of an illeg-- no, not illegal, it's more... mischievous activity. If you are a teenager with a spotlight, don't read this. You'll have fun and piss off the cops.]
On the top of most average streetlight units is a photosensor, which turns the light OFF when exposed to light. To protect the sensor, it is enclosed in a metal cover that looks exactly like a spray-can top, with a small hole for admitting light that ALWAYS faces North (in the Northern Hemisphere, I'm guessing). If you hit a streetlight with a spotlight from the North, it'll TURN OFF for three minutes or so. I know it sounds like a pretty lame trick, but to a nine-year-old kid it was pretty impressive.
I revived the art of streetlight dousing when I started driving, using a handheld spot. Got darn good at it, too. My friend Daev and I could turn off every single streetlight on 41st Avenue from Highway 1, past the Mall, all the way to Pleasure Point. Never got caught, and if we did, we figured the evidence would vanish in three minutes when the streetlights came back on.
So you can best believe when I got the spotlight installed the spotlight into the Beast I roamed the hills of Western San Francisco for a few evenings, looking to spread a little darkness. It's a lot harder to douse those streetlights than it used to be. You have to hit the lights from a higher angle, practically from a hilltop at the same level as the sensor cover. I think the reason it's gotten harder is advances in public utility technology. In the mid-80s most municipalities in the state replaced their relatively dim, bluish metal-halide streetlight lamps with bright, orangey mercury-vapor lamps. The new streetlights probably have more durable, low-sensitivity photocells in them, hence their relative indifference to spotlighting. (FYI: you can also douse a streetlight with a handheld laser, but it's really a game of skill).
Changing subjects slightly, I installed the spot on the beast at the top corner of the door post, so the handle points straight to the driver's head. It looks a little scary, but the only alternative would have been to install it low on the door post, and that only works with one of those hard-to-find spotlight/mirror combos.
Anyway, when I drilled the hole for the spotlight shaft, I nicked the wires for the dome light. When I rigged the spot and tried it out, I immediately lost all my instrument lights. An inspection of the headlight switch revealed the thermoelectric breaker, which is supposed to bend away from the contact in the event of an overload, just melted. I installed a jumper wire and tried it again. Acrid smoke began pouring out of the door post area, as the short-circuit melted the insulation of the dome light wires. Thank God I installed one of those battery quick-disconnect deals (the one with the plastic knob on it-- get one NOW), or a fire could have broken out. I ended up replacing the dome light wiring and the headlight switch. If there's a lesson in all of this, it's that if you have a vintage truck with it's original headlight switch, hang on to it. I believe the thermoelectric breakers on the overseas-manufactured replacement units don't really work.
THE
LICENSE PLATES The registration for the Beast came due in October.
Rather than just renewing it, I decided to get the plates changed to the vintage
set I bought last year. It was surprisingly easy. I just filled out a short
form, brought the plates to the DMV for verification, and six weeks later
the registration card came in the mail with a set of stamped aluminum side-plates.
Pre-60s plates had no space for both month and year stickers. The year sticker
went on the side plate and the special miniature month sticker went on between
the "CALIFORNIA" and the embossed "56."
Although it's ahead of my schedule for renovation, I have to admit they look extremely cool, and really unify the look of the Beast. And they're still commercial plates, which means I can still park in commercial spaces downtown with impunity.
TWEAKING THE ENGINE I think I finally have a handle on the fumes problem. That damn carburetor leaks gas aplenty from the air horn gasket. So I removed it, put two new gaskets in place of the old one, and used lots of copper gasket goop. It took a little tweaking, but now it doesn't drip gas onto the exhaust manifold. No fumes, less likelihood of a massive fireball enveloping the engine compartment.
SPECIAL
GUEST SECTION! I got an email a few months ago from a fellow named
Bob from Somewhere in California:
Good Morning Skot, GREAT WEB SITE!!!! My passion is also the 5-9 Chevy trucks. I'm 52 years old now and still going at it. I recently purchased the panel in the photo I sent you. We're doing a rolling resto in hopes of entering the Paso Robles, CA show on Sept 8-9-10 of this year.
And he attached a picture of his GREAT '55 Panel. Check out the Rally wheels and bucket seats.
Another
panel we've been keeping an eye on is Stanley Foster's resto in Los Angeles.
As we can see from the picture he sent over it's coming along nicely.