Back at it again! This time, with a 36″ cheater pipe.
Also, I anchored the car a little better to keep it from roll starting on me.
A few more rounds of heating and torquing, then the inevitable happened.
It was apparently too much to ask of Mr. Goodwrench. R.I.P.
I never did get that axle nut off, but luckily a friend was able to. With a proper garage full of proper tools and being a proper man, Dave was able to torch it up to red hot, then torque it back and forth with his 1000 ft lb air impact. We tried it with the impact before the torch and it wouldn’t budge in either direction.
FINALLY, I will be able to get that brake rebuilt.
Back to that driver’s side rear wheel, I made a couple more attempts at getting the axle nut loose. For a start, I bought a Bernzomatic MAP gas hand torch kit (Amazon link)…
I heated the axle nut until it was smoking, then jumped up and down on it with my old faithful 17″ long Goodwrench 1/2″ drive breaker bar with an 18″ cheater pipe.
Broken breaker bar… OK, fine. I went to Harbor Freight and bought the biggest 1/2″ drive breaker bar they had, a 25″ Icon brand (Harbor Freight link).
That comfort grip TPR handle wasn’t very comfortable. Also, it was too large to fit inside the cheater pipe. That would have left me at 25″ instead of the 35″ I had with the cheater pipe.
So, looking at the business end of each breaker bar, they both had a similar allen key bolt holding the drive in. Swapped those out and was back in business with my old Goodwrench breaker bar and cheater pipe.
But, still no luck. Several cycles of heating and torquing later, the axle nut was still frozen solid.
With the car in gear, the parking brake on, and a jack stand jammed up under the front of the wheel, I still managed to dig a rut by spinning the wheel…
It was also now sitting on top of that jack stand wheel chock, so I had to put it in neutral, release the parking brake, and push the car back a few inches to be able to get the jack stand out.
After a successful second master cylinder replacement, I went back out a couple of weeks later to adjust the brake shoes and found that both rear wheel cylinders were blown. Brake fluid all over the place in the rear. I ordered new wheel cylinders for the front (Amazon link) and rear (Amazon link), figuring the fronts would blow after replacing the rears – pressure finding the next weakest point in the pipeline.
Once I had the parts in hand, while having my morning coffee at the start of installation day, I figured I may as well replace the shoes and hardware while I was in there. Shopping around online, I found that O’Reilly had the parts in stock. Went and picked everything up and was ready to go.
I started at the passenger rear, just like when bleeding the brakes. I was worried about the axle nut, a 32mm castle nut. I didn’t have that big of a socket, so I picked on of those up as well.
Everything came apart without issue and was surprisingly easy. I was expecting a more complicated setup, but not so much.
That picture was taken after blowing half a can of Brake Kleen and wiping everything down. The shoes were about half-life.
One of the washers on the back side crumbled. Replaced it with the closest I could find laying around in my somewhat organized hardware pile.
New shoes and old shoes side by side. The old hand cleaner can is a good brake fluid catcher. It’s also a good oil pan for changing the lawn mower oil.
New parts waiting to go.
As I was reassembling, there were some snags, like one of the pre-drilled holes in the shoe not being big enough for the pin.
I also had to mix and match some of the old and new parts. The new springs were significantly taller than the old springs. I couldn’t get them compressed far enough, so reused the old springs. It was still a very tight fit.
I put the drum back on, took it off, adjusted the shoes, repeated that process ten times or so, getting a nice, snug fit.
Got that wheel back together, but when I went around to do the passenger side rear wheel, the axle nut was not budging. I decided to go ahead and bleed that rear passenger side, but my manual brake bleeder vacuum gun promptly blew out and started squirting brake fluid in my face.
I was able to finish bleeding it with minimal brake fluid ingested.
AutoZone was the only place in town that had one of those manual brake bleeder vacuum guns in stock, so I headed over there. Saw this sweet 1964 Galaxie 500 in the parking lot.
After replacing the brake master cylinder with a Dorman model, I noticed the brakes were already fading by the end of the 150 mile trip home. I started the trip with a full, hard brake pedal. By the time I got home, there was barely any braking down to the last inch of pedal throw. The last couple of times I have driven the car, the brake pedal was clacking against the floorboard. I have always kept an eye on the back side of the wheels, looking for leaking wheel cylinders, and up to this point, they were always dry.
So, I ordered a new master cylinder, this time a NAMCCO model (Amazon link). When installation day came, I jacked up the front of the car, removed the drivers side front wheel and there it was, rusty new master cylinder. Brake fluid was leaking from the hard line at the front and the rubber inlet.
When I got everything disconnected, I found the top hose that we recycled should probably not have been.
It wasn’t losing much (if any) brake fluid, but I think the pressure was escaping without creating puddles. I cut that nasty end off and recycled that hose again. Lesson definitely not learned.
I got the new master cylinder mounted to the firewall, to keep it from flopping around while trying to connect those hard lines and the inlet hoses.
I got everything reconnected except the very last hard line. I was maybe 45 minutes into the process at this point, then spent the next hour or more trying to get it started.
With my fingertips raw and fully defeated, I packed it up for the day.
Convinced that I couldn’t have been doing anything wrong, I decided the master cylinder must be drilled or threaded wrong. I got the old master cylinder out and the hard line screwed right in without issue.
I have been looking for a reason to buy a tap and die set for a long time.
With this being a strange size and thread pitch, I had to get a complete set (Amazon link), or pay nearly half as much for just that one size.
Anyway, in talking to my dad about it, he said “If you unbolt the master cylinder from the firewall, I’m certain it will thread right in.” He was right. Mostly. It was still tough to get it going, but after a tough half a turn, it broke through and threaded the rest of the way in, instead of popping out like it was before.
OK, so, that worked great. I took my manual brake bleeder vacuum gun around, bled each wheel, and had a good, solid pedal. Maybe not as much as last time we changed it, but good, safe transportation.
One win and one loss. Randomly, the drivers side headlight was cracked. I’m sure that is a result of the previous struggles I had with even getting the trim rings to mount at all.
After the first couple of coats of primer and paint went down, there was a lot of texture to the paint. Mainly over-spray dust. I tried going over it first with the blue Scotch-Brite pad, which is the one safe for non-stick pans. That took some dust off, but not the texture.
I then stepped it up to the regular old green Scotch-Brite pad, which also removed some more dust, but not the texture. I found 3M makes a prep pad specifically for in-between coats. I bought a pack of those and tried them out, but same deal – removed some dust, but not the texture. And honestly, those pads seemed to be somewhere in between the blue and green Scotch-Brite pads, so I didn’t put much faith in them working.
So, I had to wet sand again. This time, I had some leftover 1500 grit sheets from a variety pack I bought at Harbor Freight a while back. The sheets are really thin and wear through immediately. They also smear black across whatever you’re sanding, so I was concerned about that.
I did a little area with the 1500 grit and as per usual, the sheet immediately blew out and made a mess, so I went and bought some 3M 1000 grit sheets. This did a nice job and was proper quality sandpaper. I went over the whole roof and pillars with a roughly 2 1/2″ x 5″ sanding block.
There were still some low spots, where the roof is pretty dented up, so I cut a dish sponge in half, making a more flexible, roughly 2 1/2″ by 2 1/2″ block to wrap the sandpaper around. With that, I went over the low spots and for the most part got them smoothed out.
My masking job the first time around was pretty questionable. I had some over-spray on window rubbers here and there and for whatever reason (likely because I’m an idiot) at the bottom of the pillars, I didn’t follow any sort of body lines. Instead, I just squared off the bottom of each pillar, not realizing how ridiculous that was going to look once the masking was peeled off.
So, first step was properly masking around the bottom of the pillars and getting the rust converter and primer down.
I took the antenna off and rather than trying to clean off the over-spray from the first time around, I just painted the pieces with some cheap black primer.
I used plastic drop cloths for masking this time. I had problems with the blue painters tape not sticking well last time, so I tried a different variety. This time, it was much worse. The tape only stuck to the plastic sheet – not to the car or itself. So, I was having to restick the tape all around the car before each coat.
After two more coats of paint:
And then after wet-sanding with 1000 grit again:
While I was there, I also adjusted the windshield wipers up a little (too much). They were flopping down over the bottom of the window rubber and the one on the driver side was overlapping the left side of the window rubber as well. Likely, they just aren’t the right size wiper blades. I’ll have to check that out later.
I have to plan my next steps carefully, since I now have “only” six cans of that paint left. As mentioned in the Goodbye Matte Vintage Blue post, this paint has been discontinued and I have bought all that is available in the county.
That’s not going to be enough to do the whole car, but I only got started painting this because of the rust pitting. Following that logic, I should finish the space below the windshield and then do the front trunk lid. Those are the next most rusty places.
Then on to the rear, finishing up the space below the rear window and then the engine cover. We’ll see what’s left after that.
As mentioned in the Panel Beater post, my last batch of shine juice clotted up and became tacky cement on the car. It wouldn’t wash off. Mineral spirits wouldn’t take it off. I ended up wiping the whole car down with Acetone, which accomplished a couple of things.
It easily cleaned off the shine juice residue, but also removed the top layer of dead paint. Since I have been washing the car with Scotch-Brite pads and CLR, it didn’t break my heart that more of the light blue paint was coming off.
What did break my heart was seeing that the sun-burnt rust spots on the roof were much more deeply pitted than I had previously noticed. I felt like I needed to take action beyond keeping it oiled up with shine juice to try and slow that rust down. Having ten cans of that Matte Vintage Blue spray paint sitting around didn’t help to deter me from the bad ideas that were creeping up.
I got a can of Sprayway glass cleaner, a sanding block and some 220 grit wet/dry sandpaper and went to work.
After getting it smoothed out for the most part and fading up the edges of remaining blue paint, I got it all washed and wiped down with another several rounds of Sprayway.
A few places had bare metal peeking through, but for the most part, it was down to rust and factory paint.
I had some brown packing/craft paper laying around from various parts shipments and decided that would be good enough for masking the windows.
I started off with two or three coats of rust converter spray.
And then two coats of primer.
It was still early in the day, like 11:30AM, but the sun was out and the primer seemed to be drying in the air in between the can and the car body. There was a ton of over-spray. I got (what I thought would be) a lint-free cloth to wipe it down in between coats…
…but clearly that just made a mess. I went back inside and found a microfiber rag that did a great job cleaning the lint and dust off. The primer was still really textured, though and I wasn’t sure about the amount of time needed for that to properly set up, to withstand another wet sanding.
I put a thin coat of color on next.
And then another.
By this time, it was after 5:00PM and I didn’t want fresh paint getting wet overnight, so I decided to stop here.
After finding a decent color match with the Krylon Fusion All in One Matte Vintage Blue, which I sprayed in the spare tire well, I decided I should go buy another can or two to keep around. I went back to Lowe’s where I originally bought that paint and that whole line of paint was removed from the shelves, with no empty slots.
Looking on the Lowe’s website, the paint was still listed, but was marked unavailable. Further researching on the Krylon website, it looked like Ace Hardware was the only other place where it was available. Not knowing for certain what my paint plans are, I decided to stock up, and went around to every Ace Hardware in reasonable driving distance, from Candler to Swannanoa, and bought every can. In five stores (three didn’t stock it to begin with), I found ten cans.
I bought a set of door glass rubbers/felts/scrapers, because they are all dry, cracked, and broken. When I saw how much disassembly was actually necessary to replace all of them in each door, I decided to start small and just do the vent windows.
Starting on the passenger side, I drilled out the rivet on the top hinge.
And then removed the old gasket. Here are the old and new seals, side by side for comparison.
They look very similar in size and shape, so that’s a good start. But, I quickly realized, the measurements were off just enough that the new seal wasn’t going to sit flush.
The distance between the slot that is molded in the top for the hinge bracket and the hole in the bottom for the hinge pin is an extra 3/8″ or more larger than the original, so the seal is floppy around the edges. I made some “precision” cuts around the bottom end to shorten it and make it fit against the back side of the vent window opening.
But it still didn’t sit right in the frame and was too thick below the window, so it bunched up when opening or closing the window.
My first attempt at pop-riveting the top hinge didn’t go so well…
…so I didn’t mind having to drill that back out to put the crusty old window seal back in.
While I was there, I decided to go ahead and replace the vertical seal along the back edge of the vent window. Here are the old and new seals together for comparison.
Luckily, that went more smoothly than the main vent window seal did.
The lock/handle broke off of the passenger side vent window a while back. I have new ones, but it looks like a tough job that I’m not quite ready to take on. When I opened the driver side vent window to replace the vertical seal on it, that lock/handle snapped off as well.
It didn’t match the one on the passenger side and isn’t the correct one for this year of car, but it looks like a factory fit, so likely a window from a different year had been swapped in at some point.
The rear vertical seal went in on the driver side without issue.
With as big of a job as it looks like it’s going to be to tear the doors apart to replace all these other rubber and felt seals and scrapers, I’m not ready to take that on at the moment either. Also, the kit for both doors was over $350 and the first seal I tried to mount didn’t fit and was clearly not the right size.
That doesn’t instill much confidence in how the rest of the process is going to go, but that has basically been my experience with aftermarket parts for this old car. Nothing fits right and I can’t ever tell if it’s because the original part that was on the car wasn’t from a ’68 model or just that the aftermarket is a criminal enterprise these days.
I used to carry a spare quart of oil and a can of brake fluid in the spare tire well. The brake fluid tipped over at some point and a couple of drops of juice leaked out the top. The new paint I had sprayed in there was ruined. Turned to goop and wiped off with the brake fluid.
So, I cleaned it all up and roughly masked off the stuff I didn’t want to over-spray.
Put down a couple of coats of primer
and a couple of coats of fresh paint.
This is from the same cans of primer and paint, but for some reason, the color was off from what I had sprayed before, which was really noticeable when I pulled the masking tape off.
Note: I apologize in advance for the pictures in this post. I didn’t have a whole lot of day light left when I started this process and couldn’t get very good before and after pictures. Decided to go ahead and post this up anyway for posterity.
So, there are lots of whiskey dents and dimples in various areas of the car, but overall, she’s sound. That old steel is thick enough, I felt pretty good about my chances of being able to massage them back out.
My toolbox for this session was this hammer and dolly set (Amazon link).
Starting with the left rear fender:
The last time I washed the car and slathered on the mix of boiled linseed oil, mineral spirits, and WD-40 was a few weeks ago now. It’s spring time and the pollen has been thick. The worst thing about that oil finish is it’s forever tacky and rain doesn’t help to wash the gunk off. Instead, it just sets it in like concrete once it dries.
The progress pics below show what dirty hand prints and hammer/dolly mess looks like in that sticky old oil…
Moving from front to back in the picture above:
Minor dent to a minor ripple. Not too bad.
I worked on this one the longest. I was able to get the crease at the top-right smoothed out and the lowest spot is now about half as deep as when I started. Definitely not a win, but we’ll call this one a draw.
Also, fun fact, this fender has a surprisingly thick layer of body filler over the whole thing. Hammering away from on top and below, this stuff didn’t crack or fall off at all. The paint was crazed to begin with. I have never seen body filler this resilient. I don’t know what this stuff is, but it’s quality!
I am considering this one a win. It is completely smoothed out, save for the smallest low-spot crevice. It is creased pretty hard down in there and I came at it from every angle, trying out several different combinations of hammers and dollies from above and below. I think the body filler was fighting me once it got down to such a fine crease.
There is still a lot of work to do on this fender alone, not to mention the rest of the car, but I’m pretty happy with my first attempt at metal massagery and what I was able to accomplish in only 40 minutes.
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