Category: 1929

As if I didn’t have enough projects…..

Actually, can you ever have enough projects? I’m leaning toward ‘no’. If there was a smiley emoticon in this editor I would put one here..   😉

Soooo, yeah… I’m working on a Pietenpol Air Camper. A simple, open cockpit, 2 seat, Model A Powered, airplane. Did I mention the original Piet is dated 1929? There’s a thing for 1929 in my life for some reason. Both my Dodge and my Ford are ’29’s, and my plane was designed in that year. Kinda cool. Here’s the general layout for the Pietenpol Air Camper….

I’m starting with the tail since it is kinda straight forward to build and is one of the cheapest parts to build. Therefore, if I’m incapable of this simple bit of woodwork then I don’t need to invest in the rest of the plane. I’m smart that way……

I started out with laying out the vertical fin in full size on a piece of board and then putting in blocks to hold the structure as I build…

I even used a square to be sure I have something close to a 90 degree angle. Next was to profile several of the wood pieces using a router table. I worked for a short time doing pre-builds for a staircase company, so I’m not a complete stranger to woodwork. I had never used a router table before, just a regular plunge router. I’m finding out that I am not a fan of the router table. Something about the 10,000+ RPM blades of death looking at me while whirling at break neck speed is disconcerting. Never the less, I routed the pieces and put them in the jig to see what I had…..

Looks like it will work. I made a couple cuts, did a little sanding, and this evening epoxied the first few joints on the vertical. I’m not totally proud of the joints, but they will work since there is plenty of gusseting around the structure before it is done….

I will also make a test piece for every batch of epoxy. This will be a destructive test piece to make sure that the epoxy mixed properly and cured successfully. This is test piece number one (TP1). If the wood fails and the glue joint stays intact then it will be a good part. If the glue gives way on the test part instead of the wood, then I will need to reassess things.

I’ll update after the epoxy has had full cure time.

How did it ever run?….

Time for an update on the Model A project. I drove it around for a bit, now it’s time to start getting the body squared away. I started by moving the cowl back and lowering the steering column to fit. All of this is mock up and may change as I see fit, but for now this is pretty much where I want the pieces.

This is what it look like with the cowl and steering in the stock position….

The seat is in the same place, only the cowl and steering column have changed. Moving the cowl back will give me a longer hood look that I am fond of. After playing with the location and look of things I thought I would remove the ignition switch and overhaul it since it doesn’t turn the car off when in the off position. The ignition switch connects into the side of the distributor on the engine by way of an armored cable. You can see it in the following picture..

The rusty cable looking thing on the lower right is the ignition switch cable. I wasn’t quite sure how it connects into the distributor, so I figured I would take the top off and see what I could see. There were two things that surprised me. First one was the distributor rotor…

The metal tab on the right is supposed to be bonded to the the other metal piece on top. This is what carries the ‘spark’ from the coil to the spark plugs. The whole thing rotates to make everything happen, and how it worked the whole time I was driving it is beyond me. Between the carb float that never floated and now this, how did it ever run the first time we started it?

The second surprise was what I found under the rotor..

Yeah….. What the heck… Why not a few wasps and a nest. Thank goodness they were all dead.

Oh, and I still haven’t removed the ignition switch.

Went for a short drive on the property….

I wasn’t supposed to receive the parts for the carburetor until after the weekend, so I hadn’t planned on working on the Model A until next week. Since I had a weekend ‘off’ I took my Mom and Grandma over to the coast on Saturday. When I got home I found my carb parts in the mail, and being me, I couldn’t just let them sit there. I was up rebuilding and double checking that carb until 1am, on top of about 6 hours driving earlier in the day.

Sunday morning I was a little slow in getting up, but a few cups of coffee helps with that. I grabbed the carb, starter, a few other small parts, and headed up to the property. The overhauled starter and switch worked good. The carb didn’t leak when fed some gas, so I set the timing and throttle on the steering wheel and it fired up nicely. Now, I just needed to put the seat on it. A piece of plywood left over from the shed flooring worked to mount the seat to the frame and I had a very ugly, but sturdy, place to sit.

Remember… this is just temporary until I work out all the drivetrain…

Yeah, some eye bleach is needed to get that vision out of your head. I’m going to have to post some renderings from my cad drawings of what it might look like some day so no one thinks I’m going to keep it like that.

If anyone wants to go along on it’s first two drives, here’s links to the videos…. Turn down your volume though, when reviewing the footage to post it I found the fuel cap rattling in front of the camera is about all you can hear. I’ll leave the cap off on future test drives since I’m not using the fuel tank to hold gas. Gas is in that bottle you will see hanging from the radiator in the videos.

 

The second video is a drive down the driveway at the property from Dad’s shop, out the second gate, turn around, and back to Dad’s shop. Not once do I leave the property.

On the bright side, no oil or water leaks so far.

 

Maybe that ‘leakless’ seal will actually work.

 

 

 

Inspecting the starter….

After seeing that the starter decided to no longer work on Saturday I removed it, the carburetor, and the battery. I brought all three home since the starter and carb need some love, and the battery could use a charge. I decided to check the starter first because I could have a perfect carb and full battery but neither would do me any good if I can’t turn the engine over. First order of business is to take the bendix off of the starter. The bendix is what engages the engine to make it turn with the starter motor and then release the starter from the motor once the engine is running.

In the pic above the motor is the big thing toward the bottom, the bendix is upper left, and the starter switch is upper right. With the bendix off I turned the motor shaft by hand to see if there was any binding. The motor has a little bit of drag to it, but it wasn’t sticking at any position in the rotation. Looking in the cut outs on the right side of the motor  I could see the brushes and commutator were packed full of carbon. That needs to get cleaned up since it gums up the motor and can cause a loss of power as electricity can jump to areas it shouldn’t be. Time to take the motor apart.

I was kinda surprised that the long screws that hold the whole thing together weren’t frozen in place. The would be the two screws center top in the pic. The end plates are upper left, armature lower left. If you click on the picture to make it larger you can see the end plate with the brush holder is caked in carbon, and a trail of carbon chunks leading from the motor housing up to where I set the brush holder down. What a mess, carbon sticks to everything and you can’t just wipe it off. If you try then you just smear it all over whatever your trying to clean up with.

A closer look at the commutator end. All that black carbon in between the commutator segments can cause your motor to run weaker. It can allow some of the energy that should go to the winding you are trying to energize to go to other windings. This means the winding you want to energize isn’t as strong and other windings can energize weakly, but enough to further impede your starter. All of that needs a good cleaning and a piece of pegwood to dig the carbon out between the segments.

Mmmm. More carbon dust. The field coils look good though. A quick check with a meter shows that they don’t have any breaks in the wire and aren’t shorted to the case. I don’t like to remove field coils that have been in place for a long time.  I’ve found that the insulation can become brittle over the years and sometimes it creates problems that would never have happened if they were just left alone. Now to the brushes.

Well that’s ugly. Every one of them is worn at an angle. Someone didn’t take the time to make sure the springs that hold them in place and press them against the commutator were centered. The concern here is that the brushes won’t be sitting straight in the holder that they are supposed to slide in. By sitting at an angle they can bind in the holder and stop making contact, and then the starter won’t turn. To make sure they didn’t bind I cleaned up the brush holder plate and then tested the brush holders themselves for shorts to ground. The ‘hot’ brush insulators are still good and the ‘ground’ brush holders weren’t insulated, exactly as it should be. once cleaned up and inspected, I put the motor back together and made sure the brushes didn’t hang in their holders. I also tested the brush springs for proper tension and found them satisfactory.  Next step is to take the battery and a good set of jumper cables and see if it spins…..

I’ll let you know once I’ve done that.

Water Pump is Installed…

Friday night I got everything ready. The water pump was in a box in front of the front door, new seat next to the box, bolts for the seat, pump to head gasket, GoPro camera charged, everything I could think of. Saturday  I was up bright and early and headed to the property thinking to myself ‘Today I will drive it”.

I admit, I was in a really good mood.

I got up to the property, unloaded everything and got to work. Everything was just as I left it last weekend, even the cardboard over the water pump hole.

Bolting up the pump is a pretty straight forward deal. One gasket, three bolts, make sure the belt is on it. The radiator is a little banged up, so I’ve been wondering if it has any holes in it, but I still make sure I keep the pump well away from it when I’m moving it around. No need to add any more damage. The pump went in just fine and I’m one step closer to driving it!

I’m not happy with the old radiator hoses still on it though. I have new ones, and the clamps too, so lets just get that part done and over with. 15 minutes later the new hoses were on. I even put a new brass drain on the lower hose just to be thorough.

It was time to see if the cooling system had any leaks. I filled the radiator and saw that there were a few minor issues. I had to fiddle with hose and clamp positions, change the top most clamp from the old style to a new worm clamp, but in the end it sealed up. The old beat up radiator holds water, haven’t seen a single leak yet in it. So that’s a small victory. Next up, install the choke rod to make starting easier. I have a part to change out on the carb first though.

It took me a couple looks at the carb before I figured out exactly why the choke rod install didn’t make sense. If you look at the parts in the photo above you can probably see what the problem was, a whole section of the actuator was missing. I installed the new part and everything makes a lot more sense. That one piece does a couple functions by the way, it controls the choke by pulling the choke rod and it changes the mixture by turning the choke knob.

Installed on the carb with the choke off, butterfly plate open.

In the choked position with the butterfly plate closed.

And this is connecting the choke rod to the actuator. Enlarge the picture to see how they interlock. Then the spring pushes down on the tube to keep the two parts interconnected and also helps push the choke into the ‘open’ position. It’s a slick way to make the whole thing work with very few parts.

Here is a picture of the actual choke knob in it’s stock from the factory location…… on the passenger side of the car.

So, it was time to fire it up and double check the water level after a few minutes. I put some gas and Marvel Mystery oil in the little reserve tank, pulled the choke, and hit the starter. It fire right off and I was happy. Everything seemed to be good for about 30 seconds and then I smelt raw gas. Uh oh. I looked around and saw gas coming out of the carb in a little stream, so I shut everything off and went to inspect. Dad and I had a problem with the carb float sticking last weekend, allowing too much fuel to enter the carb bowl, so I tapped the side of the carb a few times to see if I could get to to unstick. That didn’t work, so I decided to pull the bowl off and see if I could figure out what was wrong. I saw the reason as soon as I got the lower half of the carb off.

That the carb float. It’s supposed to float on a small bowl of gasoline and keep the carb from overfilling or going empty. Obviously it’s not going to float with that big rip in it and all misshapen. After seeing this, I’m surprised Dad and I got it to run so well the other weekend. Thank goodness I filmed it, it proves that they will run even with most of the parts worn out or broken.

At first I thought my weekend had come to a stop until I could order a new float. Then I remembered that I had bought four Model A engines for another project, the Pietenpole engines.

Yup, four Model A engines that I picked up just over the Nevada border for $250. I still grin when I think about that trip, I’ll have to post about it since I have some neat pictures. Turns out one of the engines has the same carb on it.

It’s in rough shape but it had a good float in it. I did a quick check in a bucket to make sure it had no leaks and would do the job. Here is a pic of the good float next to the one that came out of the ‘running’ chassis.

Bit of a difference? Yeah. I put the carb back together and hooked the fuel tank back up. I watched it for a couple minutes and the float seemed to fix the gas overflow issue.

Ok, back to running the engine for a few to see what the cooling system and rebuilt pump are going to do. I hit the starter and …

Nothing. Nada. Not even a hint of life to the starter.

Dad says I must be getting close to being drivable, otherwise it wouldn’t be fighting me so badly.

More parts for the Model A Project….

I got the radiator shell in the mail yesterday. I bought the smooth version without the crank hole or the emblem spot.

 

I also ordered a really cheap seat, $40. I figure I’m gonna need something to sit on when I’m testing out the running gear before I build the body. I have some plywood to put on the frame, but a bucket or a plastic lawn chair aren’t going to cut it. Piled in the seat are small parts like the new radiator hose clamps, lower tube drain petcock, ect.

Can’t wait for tomorrow. I want to install the water pump, radiator hoses, rig up my seat, and see if I can get it running with the cooling system intact. Maybe I can even drive it before the weekend is over.   😉

Rebuilding the Ford Model B water pump…

The original plan was to buy a rolling chassis with ALL original Model A parts. That way things would be easy… open catalogs and order replacement parts as necessary then bolt them on. Easy Peasy, right? . Of course that didn’t happen, I have a Model A motor with a Model B head and water pump that was frozen when I got it. Dad and I managed to get the pump to turn freely and run the engine for a few minutes, but I knew I needed to tear the pump apart and make sure it wasn’t going to seize up again or grenade. If it was a Model A pump I could go to almost any vendor and buy a new pump with new style ‘Leakless’ seals installed and just bolt it up. Not so with B pumps, they are kinda rare and no one makes the castings anymore. I could buy an overhauled one with exchange for $400 plus from one well known vendor, but I can’t see that kind of expenditure when all of the parts (including some spares) cost around $50. Oh, and after two weeks of looking I still can’t find any parts diagrams or overhaul instructions for B pumps. Yay….

Being typical me, I decided lets tear it apart and see just what we have got. So I unbolted the pump and brought it home with me.

First thing I noticed was the 1/4 inch or so of end play on the pump. Thats the amount of movement in the pump shaft from the front to the back of the pump, or how much the fan can move forward and backward without the pump itself actually moving. Model A specs (which I’m using cause I never could find Model B specs) call for .006″ to .010″ of movement. I could move it at least .250″ almost .300″ at some tries. Hmmmm. 25 to 30 TIMES the amount of end play is not a good thing. I was starting to worry just a bit. Time to take the fan off and get to the heart of this project.

Except the F’ing fan was stuck on that shaft. It’s a tapered shaft, tapers to the front, should just take a tap or a nudge to remove, but it’s not….. freaking…. moving. Seriously, I think someone thought that they could take the end play out by torquing the fan nut down and just hammered that fan onto the pump shaft. It took setting the fan on its nose, filling the back of it with PB Blaster, and then letting it sit for over twenty hours before the penetrating oil started to show on the front of the fan. It still took another 2 hours of persuasion to get the fan off the shaft. It was a bitter sweet moment when I got it loose, glad to win the struggle and worried what I was going to find under there.

After a bit of cleaning so I could see the casting I found evidence that the fan had enough movement to cut into the pump body in a few places. One spot around the lower base and one on the front of the grease fitting mount. The one on the grease fitting is the one I was worried about most. If it wears too deep then it cuts into grease channel to the front bearing. Thank goodness it hadn’t reached that point yet. The back of the fan pulley showed corresponding marks and I think the pulley is still good enough to use. Lets see what the internal parts look like.

Overall, not too bad. The pump shaft has some spot that need to be cleaned up, but the rest of the parts look almost brand new under all that old grease. In fact, I’d say the pump was overhauled and hadn’t had many hours of run time. The front roller bearing showed no marks on the rollers and the split race in the casting nose hasn’t worn in at all. Even the steel bearing washers at either end had no wear marks. So I mounted the pump shaft/impeller between center in the lathe and used 600 grit sandpaper to knock off the rusty spots, followed by 000 steel wool, and finished with leather embedded with white rouge polishing compound. Then I gathered my replacement parts and grease.

The only part I’m using that deviates from the original 1932 pump design is a new style seal and nut combination that replaces the original nut and lead packing. I figure I will give it a shot and see how it goes. Worst thing that happens will be that I have to pull the new-fangled piece out because it leaks and use the original nut and new packing.

Also, I have plenty of greases we use on the tractors and other stuff, but I went ahead and bought the grease listed at Mikes-A-Fordable with all the other pump parts since, well…. it was the recommended grease. It looks like this..

Time to put it back together. Not entirely sure if it’s right, but its the best I have based on how it came apart and how Model A pumps are assembled.  I start with putting the steel washer on the shaft that goes between the impeller and the back of the pump rear bushing.

That gives the impeller just a little space between the impeller casting and the bushing, as well as giving a smooth surface for the bronze bushing to ride against. Looking down the pump outlet we can see the impeller nestled back in its  happy place with just the smallest of gaps for clearance.

Before you can put the front bearing in place you have to put the new pump nut on the shaft and install the rear metal cup and felt for the front bearing.

I read that you have to fill the new nut with pump grease before installing it, so it’s packed with plenty on the inside and just a sheen on the pump shaft, I also figured I would pack some around the bushing face for the heck of it. I mean, why not? I got a whole tube of this stuff.

Now on to the front bearing area. The front bearing is located between two metal cups, two felt washers, and two steel end washers. It looks something like this when laid out on the bench.

So first in is the metal cup and felt on the end closest to the nut we just put on. I dislike installing these kinds of cups since they never seem to start straight. One edge always catches and cants them to one side. If you aren’t careful it will cause the cup to distort and you will need another cup. To try and prevent this I usually file the edge to a bevel and make sure the seal driver fits the shaft snugly and covers the entire back of the metal cup. Once it’s in place with the felt and steel washer it looks like this.

Next comes the bearing. Since I’m using the bearing that came out of it I don’t need to remove or reinstall the bearing sleeve that is in the casting. If I was to use the new bearing that I bought then I would replace the sleeve with a new one so that they would wear together. Putting a new bearing in an old sleeve is not a great idea, any wear that the old bearing left on the sleeve could cause premature wear on your new bearing. But, before you can install the bearing you have to pack the bearing full of grease. I was going to take pictures of this part, having been taught to pack bearings properly by the late Bill Lacy who had been packing them by hand since at least the ’30s according to the stories he’d tell if you could get him to. Bill was the ‘Grumpy Ole Man of the Shop’ when I first started working at the Harley dealership. A great guy and chock full of useful knowledge if he deemed you worthy of it. Rest easy Bill, you are missed. Anyway, its hard to take pictures of the process with one palm full of grease and the other holding a grease filled bearing. After the bearing is packed full of grease it goes in up against the steel washer.

Now this end gets a steel washer, felt, and retaining cup.

Grease for the front bearing and rear bushing are provided through the two angled fittings seen on the side facing the camera. Now I get to fix the end play issue. I’m not 100% sold on the idea, but many people and forums say that the easiest way to do it is with a collar. You just put the collar on the shaft, set the end play, and then tighten the set screw. Ok, if it works for them then it should work for me, right? It just sounds too simple and I’m worried one set screw won’t hold it…. but then I tend to overthink everything. Here is what the collar looks like.

The plastic washer goes between the collar and the metal cup we just put on. It’s just a wear washer, something sacrificial to keep a metal on metal contact from happening. It goes on like this.

Then you put the collar on, space it out the proper distance, and lock it down. I went with .010″ on the end play. It’s the max allowable on the Model A pump, but I figure it’s way more in spec than what it was… and since I have all that extra clearance where the pulley wore away the casting….

All that’s left it to put on the fan. I bought a replacement fan mounting hardware kit: new nut, woodruff key, and cotter.  The old woodruff was still in good shape so I used it, I’ll keep the new in the spares box. I am using the new nut and cotter though. I don’t trust the original nut after finding it cranked down like it was. The fan is installed snug but not tight, the keyed shaft makes sure it rotates and the nut is on far enough to get the cotter through it. I will secure the cotter after I install the pump back on the engine. No need to waste a cotter key.