Thinking of converting your Bugeye to wire wheels? Please don’t buy a bolt-on conversion kit. Please! These things are still for sale by some vendors (not us!), and they are very dangerous.
Witness the rear axle shown here from Ed’s car from Michigan. The idea is that the splined adaptor bolts onto your lug nuts over the drum. However, every one that has come to us has had loose bolts, and when they come off, the wheel comes off along with it!
Old cars are getting older, just like (most) of us folks who love them. As a result, that shiny classic you spy online may look great, but in reality there is always more to the story.
This car looked good enough for our client to “click the mouse” and buy it. He was also wise enough to have it make a pit stop at our building on the way home to Minnesota. We found about 151 issues to repair and improve.
Now, that we’re done, he’s got something!
Check out the tour of the improvements in the video below:
If your tach isn’t working, join the club!
There are perhaps 10 different reasons why it quit. I’ll review many of these possible faults in this post.
Tachometers are often non-functional when Bugeyes arrive in our building. The mechanical tachs on the early cars are particularly problematic, because they rely on a number of parts and any one of them can fail. (We sell an electronic tach that’s more reliable and might help you get good information in your cockpit). Our electric unit is also very useful if you have an alternator with no mechanical tach drive. But if you insist on using that original mechanical assembly, this post will help you make it all work.
Above you can see one of our generator/alternators with the tach driven off the back of the unit, just like the original Bugeye and Mark II Sprites. As the generator or alternator spins, it spins the inner cable which transmits the rotational energy to the gauge. If anything gets in the way of the smooth transmission of energy, the tach will stick, jump, or otherwise fail to work.
[Read more…] about The Path of Least ResistanceDetails, details! It’s always the little things when it comes to building and restoring classic cars.
On this particular car, one detail missed or omitted by the restorer was the flange on the rocker panels. Understandably, this is out of view at ankle level, so who cares? Well, as these cars rise in value, these details also rise in importance. And should you have the car on the lift with this flange at eye level, it takes on a new significance when it is starring you in the face.
So the point here is to make absolutely certain that the bodywork is done before the primer goes on. A little more work here and the issue would have disappeared. Now, it is baked into this nice paint job on a very attractive car, as you can see below.
Hopefully, the rest of us can catch these issues on our own projects before the paint begins to fly!
King pins and swivel axles are a constant focus here, because we want tightness, and this is a common source of loose. We talk a lot about bad bushings, and front end play, and lubing the bushings, but the up/ down adjustment is commonly neglected, and when that happens, you get the play you can see in the video below
Old English car issues are sometimes very easy to diagnose. When stuff leaks, there is a problem, except, of course, when it’s leaking oil, which is inevitable, and which is only really a problem when it floods your driveway or stains the tops of your shoes.
[Read more…] about Masterful diagnostics
