We Have Wheels!

Brian and the boys were down this Sunday and he brought all four wheels with tires mounted.  He also brought some rocker panel stripes that he carefully applied:

I'm impressed with his attention to getting every job he works on just right. 

The car is really looking more and more like a finished product, at least on the outside:

 

Still riding a little high without an engine or trans. 

I'm still working on the dash, radio, and instruments.  It's slow, but I am making progress.  I should have a report later this week. 

One Step Forward and Two Back

I'm in a difficult stage with the Mustang.........electrical problems, which are the kind I hate.  I figured that with the steering wheel in it was time to test the under-dash and lighting electrical systems before going any further with interior work.  I hooked up a small battery from our wood chipper to the main power circuit of the non-engine components and got most of the lights and signals working, but some lights were dim and the horns were feeble.  Thinking the battery was not putting out enough amperage, I hooked up jumper cables to our van and almost melted some wires before I quickly disconnected the battery.  I definitely had a short somewhere and had to find it. 

Big Mike came to my rescue.  Turns out that besides being a hell of a mechanic and metal fabricator, he is also an electrician.  We checked out all the easy options by disconnecting systems one at a time and measuring resistance in the main power feed.  After all the easy ones didn't solve the problem, I started taking apart the instrument cluster, dash switches, and finally the under dash wiring that I had worked so hard to put in.  After a full afternoon of deconstruction we finally found the source of the short.  It was basically due to using a 65 wiring harness with a 66 instrument cluster.  I had already had problems with this mismatch and wrote about it in this blog: http://thegoodroads.blogspot.com/2013/04/ammeter-to-voltmeter-conversion.html.  Back then, I decided to connect the two wires together that were for the 65 ammeter, and those, for some reason, were the cause of the short.  This picture from another car shows them connected and routed through the 65 ammeter sensor as they were intended. 

They had to be left disconnected.  By the time we found this, the dash looked like this:

So now I am in the recovery mode and slowly putting everything back together and testing each component.  Some things are still not working, but at least I don't have a short and can trace power and ground connections. 

Meanwhile there has been some parallel progress.  Brian bought a couple of wheels that he liked and he brought them down to verify that they would clear the brake calipers.  They do, and they looked pretty cool:

 

The old lug nuts don't work with the new wheels and will have to be replaced. 

Next are some more wheels with tires mounted so I can move the Mustang out of the shop when I need it for work on my own vehicles. 

On an earlier trip, Brian had brought down the metal bulkhead that replaces the cardboard one between the rear seat and the trunk.  This is an important safety modification.  Because the top of the gas tank doubles as the bottom of the trunk, a rupture of the tank from a rear end collision that results in a fire, would have the fire basically in the passenger compartment immediately.  I remember when Ford got sued over this on the Pinto back in the 80's.  I had painted this bulkhead and then Brian put it in.  Even Colin pitched in on the job:

 

Most of the time was actually spent working on finding a solution to the hacked-up hole in the dash where the radio goes.  I think we came up with a good solution, but I'm being delayed in installing the radio until I get the rest of the electrical system working properly. 

Give Me a Brake!

I have worked all week on getting the brake lines and master cylinder installed and the brakes bled and working.  I have not been 100% successful, but I'm working on it.  Before I got to the brakes, I put some weather striping on the doors:

 

 

Then I tackled the brake lines.  We bought pre-bent lines for both the front to rear line, and the individual front wheel lines, but because we are doing a disk brake conversion with a dual-chamber master cylinder, there was some custom bending and fitting needed.  I bought a flaring tool and tube bender from Harbor Freight, but the flaring tool was normal HF (i.e. Chinese) quality and it was difficult to get a quality flare that would not leak.  The brake fittings require this type of double flare, where the tube is first ballooned out and then swaged into a flare:

 

 

 

 

 

I must have made a dozen of these to get three or four good ones, but eventually I got all the fittings and lines connected except for the master cylinder.  I was paranoid that I would have leaks and not be aware of them until I had brake fluid leaking all over the place.  It would not be pretty to have to disassemble brake lines with fluid already in them in order to fix the leaks.  So I came up with a way to connect an air hose to the brake lines so I could apply constant air pressure.  That way I could detect leaks before adding fluid:

 

 



 

I had a lot of leaks initially, but most were caused by not tightening the fittings enough.  A few required new flares.  I tried using one of Carolyn's incense sticks to search for the smallest leaks:

But the best method was to get my ear as close as possible to the fitting and listen for a leak. 

After I was pretty sure I got all the leaks, I plumbed in the master cylinder after first bleeding it on the workbench:

 

Hooking the master cylinder push rod through the firewall and to the brake pedal and the brake light switch was a bit of a hassle, but eventually Carolyn and I teamed up to bleed the individual wheel calipers.  The results have been somewhat disappointing.  The brake pedal travel is too great.  Although brake application starts to occur as soon as the pedal is depressed an inch or less, the pedal can be mashed to within 3 to 4 inches of the floor and will not "pump up" like you would expect with air still in the lines.  It has been a long, long time since I drove a car without power brakes, so maybe this is normal.  The best thing to do would be to drive the car and find out how it works, but we have no engine.  And that has been a good thing as far as plumbing in the lines and the master cylinder because I must have made 50 trips into the engine compartment, and things would have been much more difficult with an engine in there. 

Just to take a break from the brakes, I took on an easier job and installed the rear speakers:

Tomorrow I go in for cataract surgery on my right eye (left was done last year), so I will not be working on the Mustang for about a week.  That's OK, I think I'm ready for a break. 

Mustang Progress Report

Speaker Wires

Time to string the speaker wires.  Radio-to-rear-speaker wires were run through the door sills, along with the wire loom for the tail lights and backup lights on the driver's side.  Better than running under the carpet, which would be the likely route when added to a finished car:

 

Kick panel speakers wired and installed:

 

Door and Quarter Panels

First the sheet of water-seal material is glued on:

Then the quarter panel attached:

Door panel, arm rests, and window crank and door handle:

 

I ran into a problem when installing the window cranks for the quarter windows.  The window regulator shafts were apparently for a different style of window crank and the shafts were too long and did not have a threaded hole in the end for the screw that holds the crank on to the shaft.  The crank was too far away from the side panel:

 

 

 

First, I hacksawed off the ends of the shafts:

 

Then I drilled and tapped a hole in the end of each shaft:

 

The result was that the crank fit snug to the panel:

 

 

 

The interior is coming along:

 

 

 

Fuel Line

 

Brian was down over Christmas and we worked together to install the pump-to-tank fuel line:

 

 



 

It was a pre-bent line and fit nicely:

 

It has been a long time since we took the car apart, and while rumaging through old parts looking for some fuel line clips, we came upon this part that was a mystery.  I think it has something to do with the spare tire.  At least I'm pretty sure it came from the trunk. 

 

I gave Brian a brake master cylinder for Christmas, and he had brought down the rear brake line, so the next step is to order the front lines and then install them.  This will involve some fabrication as the master cylinder is not stock, but is a dual-chamber unit made specially for disk brakes, and the lines will have to be custom fit.  In the meantime, I have some other parts to install. 

Calipers Back On

As stated in the last post, the plan was to take the calipers to a paint shop for powder coating in bright red, but that didn't happen.  The paint shop didn't want to bake the calipers with the pistons and seals still in, and I didn't want to take them out.  At the same time, Brian decided that the calipers weren't exotic enough to warrant bright red, so we decided on plain old heat resistant black paint.  I could do that myself, but first I had to borrow the bead blaster back to get the rust off.  It did a good job:

Next came a couple of coats of high-temp gloss black caliper paint and then the re-install.  Final look:

 



We have ordered the front-to-rear brake line and the fuel line, but the brake line has not arrived and the two need to be installed together.  Things have been kind of slow on the Mustang, but I have been really busy on some other projects, so the winter has not been boring, for sure. 

End of Summer Vacation for Mustang

Brian and the boys were down for a post-Thanksgiving visit and we brought the Mustang over from the tool shed to the shop to get ready for the winter work.  We didn't do much to it except install the new steering wheel, which is a GT replica.  The whole dash area is looking pretty good:

That big ugly hole where the radio goes is the last dash problem to solve and we are working on it.  One thing we discovered when we took the wheels back off and put the car up on jack stands, is that the brake calipers had rusted with the car just sitting indoors in the shed:

Since the wheels Brian wants to install are the kind where the calipers are visible, this was not going to be acceptable.  So, even though I thought I was done with the brakes except for the front-to-rear lines and the master cylinder, I guess I get to back track a bit and remove and disassemble the calipers:

I got the rears off today and ready to take to the paint shop.  Fronts should be easier without the parking brake.  The plan is for high-temp powder coating in bright gloss red.  Killer look. 

True to tradition, we had our shoot-out during the visit, but this time Big Mike brought his arsenal, or at least part of it, over to the house and we burned through a bunch of high-power ammo and killed some paper targets and one old propane tank.  The tank still had a little gas in it that got lit off at one point.  Great fun!

 

Thanks to Mike, this was a memorable visit for all of us.