Some Brass Thingies are not Brass....

ALB posted:

Gordon Nichols posted:

.  One of the Trebuchets was designed and built by the Mechanical Design team at Waters Associates to throw pumpkins across one of our fields.  This thing is over 30 feet tall to the top of the throwing arm and can handle 7-12 pound pumpkins!  It is mostly made of 2 X 8's and I'm hoping that they don't overstress it by trying to throw something too heavy, but they are about the nerdiest bunch of mechanical designers I've met and seem over-cautious and that's good.

 

Trebuchets that throw pumpkins would be wicked! We're gonna need pics, Gordon. I hope you see this before all the fun is over...

Trebuchets that throw Punkin's eh?  Do they get involved with the Punkin' Chunkin' experience that had been held in southern Delaware in November?  I live 8 miles from where it originated as a winter festival.  It's back this year after being cancelled a few years due to insurance and lawyers.

Great news , Gordo! My heart sank when I saw your dilemma. I know how that feels and I'm  glad you got it straightened out  It's not a big deal to pull the engine when you're set up for it. ( As I know you are.) It just sucks when everything is good and it's running fine.  The biggest PIA , to me, is getting the car off the floor if you don't have a lift.  After that it's just big nuts and  big bolts and don't pinch your fingers.

I hope you can get her up and running and get the last good driving days before the weather turns to crap.  But wait a minute!  You've got that heater!

I have videos of the trebuchets in action, but after a looooong day on my feet (9am to 5pm) I'm pooped.  Watching the Indy/Green Bay game and then going to bed.  Best festival we've had yet with lots of family activities, 8 different bands, four different food vendors, TONS of kid's activities, hay rides, bouncy houses and 4 competing Trebuchets.  Everyone thinks I helped on this event, but the REAL organizer is one of our other volunteers who became a staffer this year and has done a FABULOUS job on this event. I'll post some stuff/URLs tomorrow.

There is a guy down the road from me that has a full size Trebuchet built on his field.

736 S Mills River Rd    Google map this address and you can see it in satellite  mode.

I've been meaning on taking a ride on over there and checking it out.

CARLOS!!!!!!!

Haven't heard from you since the flooding a few weeks back.  Glad to see your post.

Hope you weathered Hurricane Matthew better than my old neighborhood in Beaufort, SC - They got hammered.

Good on ya, Gordon.

If I had a 30-foot trebuchet I would want to throw washing machines with it, at least. Just saying.

Gordon,

It got a little breezy, but it barely rained. We haven't received any rain of any significance since. Good for driving, but not so good for a Temperate rain forest that this place is supposed to be.

crhemi (Bill) poboiinhawaii posted:

craig posted:

I came into this thread via the ending post.  As I read backwards, skipping a few things here and there, I saw the picture of the hemostat with the doobie.  I kept reading backwards and thought Gordon had dropped a joint into his engine.  Bad X2.  You can afford to lose a nut, but not... 

Anyway, congrats Gordon.  I felt your relief and adrenalin rush.

I had a freshly rolled one fall down my defroster vent on my 61 bus once...it was sad!

Too bad your defroster wouldn't get hot enough to roll up the windows tight, crank up the defroster, and wait for the smoke. Well maybe if you had Gordon's heater in the bus it would.

Trebuchet action from yesterday:

Very cool, Gordon. Love it!

Much better than the air cannon they use in Delaware, one of which exploded yesterday & nearly killed a woman.

The breach door blew off

Air cannons?  We had air cannons, too - built years ago by some guys at R.H. White construction, the company that built Patriots Stadium:

And a Bungee Crossbow - Kinda wimpy, but fun to watch and he had the best aim of all four machines:

All in all, it was a pretty fun day....   Lots of activities, lots of GREAT food and 8 different bands including three college acapella groups.  Now we finish the apple harvest (we have about 35 acres in 7 varieties of apples and bring in over 4 semi-trailer loads) and put the farm to bed for the winter while we get stuff ready for next season.  It's been a great season and we're all stoked for next year.

Just as a follow-up and now that I have the dreaded breather box (the start of all this trouble in the first place) out and on the bench, I tried that same nut on the threaded shaft for the cover and - the damn thing doesn't even fit.....   

It seems line the one that came off must have fit. If the one you found doesn't fit maybe it means that the one that came off is still in there.

No, no....you're confused from my poor explanation - The box originally had three, 10-24 wing nuts holding the cover on, but you can only get them so tight with your fingers (the cover sometimes still leaked) and I don't want to distort the wingnuts with a tool, so I decided to use a hex stop-nut instead and was trying that for fit when it popped into the oil filler hole.  Turns out that the nut I was trying was an 8-32, anyway.  

The good news in all this is that I've removed the four studs holding the alternator pedestal/oil filler tower to the engine case and will be using four bolts instead.  Next time, it should be a lot easier to just pull the pedestal out.  BTW:  Real 356 engines have two bolts near the pulley and two studs on the back, and the two stud positions on the pedestal are slotted so you can easily get it out.  Just FYI.....  I think Anthony mentioned doing the swap to four bolts - at least I was paying attention.

Thanks, Tony!

It was probably my faulty memory, not your poor explanation.

If you ever rebuild the engine, Gordon-- put Time-Certs in the holes. Running bolts in and out of the Magnesium case is only going to work a few times, but bolts are way-the-heck better than studs for obvious reasons.

Yeah, I kind-of gave something like that some thought (like case-savers) but really.....How often does anyone remove/replace the alternator pedestal?  I may have this car another 5 years....maybe....and I probably will never pull it again (if I'm lucky) so going to bolts doesn't sound like a bad thing.  I also found a galled motor mount stud which I can't quickly find a replacement for, so I just touched up the threads and back in it goes, although I'm flipping it around so the good end goes into the case and the nut goes on the bad end.

And did I mention the leaking Distributor shaft o-ring?  I have a spare Bosch 009 so I pulled the o-ring off that one and it was a nice, soft, rubbery one.  When I went to remove the o-ring from my Magnaspark disti (a 009 Brazilian case unit) it was not petrified, but it felt like it.  Turns out it was a nylon-like substance - maybe Delrin - that felt like spring steel.....It actually snapped in two when I removed it - no idea how they got it on the shaft intact.  So THAT disti gets a nice, soft, rubbery o-ring (and then I found another spare one in my gasket bin - also nice, soft and rubbery).

The slow pace of messing around continues.....

It is interesting, and a little frustrating, to see a simple job turn into a major epic, but there you go - the life of the foreign-parts-older-than-dirt, classic car nut.

What started as a simple carburetor rebuild has mushroomed into losing a nut down a hole and pulling the engine from the car, mostly for "ease of access" to get it out.   True, it's really nice to have the little mill sitting out in the open so you can get at everything (and how I envy those "Spydah Guys" and their flip up rear cowls), but that easy access also has it's own mermaids, singing their siren songs of "fix me - Make me better".  At least I now have a stud-free alternator pedestal for ease of future removal.  

So then you get the engine on a shop stand and start looking at it and see a few oil weeps here and there, so you pull the distributor and replace the O-ring seal, then you tighten up the pushrod tubes (mine are adjustable), then you notice that the rear mainseal is a little weepy and could stand to be replaced, too (lucky me - I found a new one in my gasket bin) and on and on and on.  I know.....These engines are, at best, a little weepy, but it's right there on the shop stand, right?  So there you go.

I started to install the fan shroud and noticed that the thermostat bellows seemed a little too extended for a 40º workshop, so I called Bug City, got the dimension for a cold bellows and, sure enough, mine is toast.  Ordered a nice, new expensive NOS German one.    While messing with the thermostat, I found that one of the air vanes was binding at wide open so that it wouldn't return to a closed position until pushed just so.  hmmmmm.....  That might explain more than just the bind, too.  Easy fix in most cases -  just put a couple of thrust washers on the shaft and you're done.  Not with a VW air vane, though.  Where the shaft was binding is impossible to get at because the air vane assemblies, a cassette with two vanes each on both sides of the fan shroud, is a welded shut assembly.  Solved that with three nylon washers with a cut on one side to allow them to become an open "C" when bent and popped them onto the shaft as spacers/thrust washers.  'Nuther problem solved.  MacGyver would be proud.

At least with the engine on the stand I can look all around the sump mating area and see that it's not leaking.  Those silicone gaskets from AirCooled really do work!  And I'm now looking at installing those spiffy air shields that ALB told us about, along the undersides where my heater boxes aren't - especially on the thermostat side to make it work better.

Then you notice the little places here and there that could use some touch-up paint, or a piece of sheet metal that could be bent back a little for more clearance and...and... and......  I think I'll go have a nice cuppa tea before I find more stuff to "fix".

So an awful lot has happened on this job in the past weeks.  Did a Carburetor rebuild, dropped a nut into the engine, pulled the engine, retrieved the nut, fixed a leaking distributor shaft oil seal, added home-built commercial-style sled tins, found and replaced a dead thermostat, fixed a bad air vane in the shroud and checked the end play of the Crank (which turned out to be right on).  Been working hard and finally got the clutch back on and prepped both the car and the shop to put the engine back in tomorrow.  And..........

It is now snowing like hell out side.  

I love it.

Good for you, Gordon.

And just in time for that first warm Spring day...

PS - snowing and blowing up here too. 

Darn cold here too, Gordon.  I don't think we topped 60.

Getting a little nippy in the NC mountains also, but that's not as bad as all the smoke that we've been getting from the wildfires around us. We haven't had any real rain in at least 3 months. Today they just found a fire in the western part of our county. I wanted some dry days to drive my car, but this is getting a little crazy.

Cold here too, had to be 75 degrees last night, I had to put a shirt on 

Until yesterday at 12:02pm...it  was a nice sunny day with open shop then the crap hit the fan ....Now 50 mph gusts and feels like 19 degrees with snow showers. Shop heater gets put back into play.

Yes, yesterday (Sunday) was one of those dramatic weather changes that totally defines the end of one 'season' and the beginning of another....snow showers, high wind gusts that rip the colorful autumn leaves off the trees.  Experienced from Merklin to Nichols.... with me in between! 

Hibernation time has arrived.

CARL!  Been hiding?

Almost got out your way a couple of weeks ago, helping a local club member look at a replica in Waterbury that got sold before we could get there.

Hope things are going well.  

Peace

What a long, strange trip this has been.......

It always gets busy around here during the Holidays, so finding time to do "cah stuff" has been hard, but I got it all back together and got the engine back in, only dropping a small phillips screwdriver behind the engine, once.  Other than that, uneventful....  And I got the tool out.  

Late Saturday, I finally dumped in another $50+ bucks worth of slippery oil, but the car is backed into the shop and I want to push it out and turn it around before I start it and THAT was going to happen today, until I got up and saw this:

Of course, I'm comforted knowing that "Pineapple Bill", over there in Hawaii, is getting a snow storm on top of Mauna Lea.  He's a bit lower than that and probably seeing a balmy 80º, but at least I'm not alone......

I just know what's next, here.

You're not alone, Gordon. White stuff on the ground here on the wet coast this morning as well. If it doesn't melt traffic's gonna be nuts (glad I don't have to be anywhere!).  

I think it's time to shut off the outdoor shower for a few months 'cause the bird bath froze last night and I hate fixing plumbing when I stupidly try to stretch the season.  I haven't showered indoors here since April ,and the annual shut-off of the outdoor plumbing is the beginning of Winter for me.  

I did get to use a whole tank of gas the last few days when the temps were in the high 50's and the speedster ran great, better than it ever has.  Makes me wonder what the next issue will be.  There always seems to be a "next thing".  (not thingy)

Still none of the white stuff here is southern Ontario. We had our first dusting overnight but gone this morning by 10:00 am. Incredible how green the lawns are still here.

I'm kinda looking forward to my annual exposure to colder weather and possibly (gasp!) snow.  This year, rather than spending Christmas in Asheville, we are traveling to see my sister in law and her family that are living, at least temporarily, in Kennebunk, Maine.  Ya think it might be a touch cooler than Charleston?

No Gordon....you're not alone. I woke up to the same early taste of winter. I once thought such a scene was 'pretty'....Duh!

BTW what's the brand and wt. of this 'slippery oil' that's apparently worth  "$50+" ?

Pshaw.. I've lived through sixty-nine Canadian winters, and the last few years have not really been a winter.  We just don't get the dumps of snow, the blizzards, that we used to get.  And I don't hear the beams in our old attic snapping and creaking as they used to, as it's just not that cold anymore.

If a winter's day is sunny, that's good enough for me. 

The Bride and I were out for a putter in the Speedster yesterday in sunny but cool temps. Nice to have the hardtop and real heat. No side windows in though. Today I put the plow on my truck and got rid of 4" of snow. It's just that time of year. 

Real heat, water cooled, you got to love that heater for sure...

Just ran the snowblower this morning with Honda tracks I'd rather have summer but then in Bob's area there is not much winter even less in Vancouver. 

I think that the 250ºF coming out of my gas heater qualifies as "real heat".  Around he-ah, it's more like "Drive you out" heat!  I've kind-of gotten it tuned in and it's become a welcome friend on chilly drives.  I really remember the "faux heat" in my '57 VW sedan, when I had to use a windshield frost scraper - on the inside!

Wow, Lane.....   Christmas in Kennebunk.  Well, yes, there will probably be snow, but it's on the coast so there shouldn't be TONS of it - 1 or 2 feet around Christmas (currently there's zero snow).   But to you Charlestonians it will be a lot. You'll be equi-distant between Portsmouth, NH (with great restaurants - try the Oar House....  "Where all of the Boatmen go to pick up their oars") and Portland, Maine (with more great restaurants).  Flying in to Portland or Manchester?

Be SURE to find and try some Allagash beer while you're up.  You can choose a brand ahead of time here> wicked good be-ah < but beware that some of their beers (like Curieux) are 11+% alcohol.  They're all fantastic and I GUARANTEE you can't get beer like that "down s'uth".   Some of the restaurants up that way also serve Gahan's beer from Prince Edward Island - equally great brew.  Beach Chair Lager was a favorite of my cycling group, as well as Sir John A's (but Scott likes Hellstreet).

You should think of a day-trip to L.L. Beans flagship store in Freeport - about an hour away from Kennebunk above Portland on I295.  Skip any and all "outlet stores" along I-95 - they're not worth your time, but Bean's is - open 24-7 - 365.  Restaurants on Main in Freeport are all quite good.   Try the "Lobstah Cookah", just down the street and, remember, Bean has a clearance outlet store across the street from the main store (save big bucks).

Carl:  I use Brad Penn Green 10W-40 oil in Pearl.  I added an oil cooler pancake thermostat three months ago requiring me to do an oil change (long story) and when I pulled the engine last month for that damn S/S nut, I drained it again.  THIS time I saved what came out and while I wasn't willing to put it back into Pearl, I saved it all for my snowblower and lawn mower.   Kinda ticked me off, but at least the stuff will get used eventually.  

Friggin blower should blow snow three houses over with that stuff in there!

I had a 1969 beetle bought used with 18K miles with a gas heater.  My Knees remember the heat of that gas heater and the smell of the air exchange heat.  Those cars were really interesting to drive in the northern winters for sure.  

Lane Anderson posted:

I'm kinda looking forward to my annual exposure to colder weather and possibly (gasp!) snow.  This year, rather than spending Christmas in Asheville, we are traveling to see my sister in law and her family that are living, at least temporarily, in Kennebunk, Maine.  Ya think it might be a touch cooler than Charleston?

Kennebunk, Me is a neat place, Lane. We go there often. If you don't mind the lineups, the Maine Diner is a popular local spot that has been featured on Diners Drive-ins and Dives. We were there in September and it was breezy and cool. One pic from York Beach and another from that same dock in Biddeford again just North of Kennebunk.