After work I went out to troubleshoot my issues from yesterday.
Time to start the car….
She lives! Don’t worry about the stumble. It is pretty cold and I did not let it warm up at all. So the ignition, regulator, and generator are all wired correctly. So everything works! I let the car warm up while I cleaned up a little.
I only had a couple hours today to work on the car but I got into testing. Of course there are problems…
The next step was to turn on the ignition. No smoke there either. So I started testing.
Turn signals work! Gas gauge does not move so I probably got those wires backwards in spite of my best efforts. And for some reason the passenger brake light does not work. Since the turn signal does work that is a bit of a mystery. However the Climatizer and defroster fans work. I am out of time but I will troubleshoot this and then try to start the car.
This is the first free time I have had this week so I went out to work on the car for an hour or so. The goal is to get the old main chassis harness out.
For my future reference and maybe to help others this post will have the terminals on all the switches on the car. I have taken thousands of pictures of this car so you would think I would have better ones than some of these. But they are good enough.
I had a about half a day to work on this so my goal was to get as far as I could under the dash. It actually went very well. First I checked out the wiring on the ignition switch that worried me yesterday. Sure enough they were backwards, but as it turns out it does not matter. The switch is set up so you can’t wire it wrong. Nice. Moving on…
After a week I got back to work on the wiring with more work under the dash. Lots of labeling and disconnecting but finally was able to start pulling the harness out through the hole in the firewall.
Last year I had a short in the headlights and decided that it was really time to replace the wiring harness. I did some shopping around and decided to go with a authentic reproduction wiring harness from Lark Works. The car’s original wiring was all insulated with woven cotton. The reproduction harness will use modern vinyl insulated wire with cotton woven over it so it looks original. I went with Lark Works because they were competitive on price and are Studebaker focused. Their harnesses are designed from factory drawings and use Studebaker part numbers. Plus they were super responsive and helpful when I contacted them. I went with a stock harness with the addition of turn signals. It was a pile of money but the harness is beautiful and the documentation is excellent. All this was late last year. I was going to do it over last winter then we moved. Next I planned to do it after the Delaware car show in July and that got delayed until October. Now I am out of excuses. Time to start.
The harness is in several sections. The big one is the main chassis harness. That is most of the instrument panel and under the hood. So it goes through a lot of tight places. The main chassis harness ties into the rear chassis harness that runs under the car to the gas tank and tail lights. A separate rear compartment harness in the trunk connects all the lights to the rear chassis harness. I want to start simple so I am starting from the back and move forward.
So a word about the 1-1 bullet connector splices. The new harness came with a bag of new connectors. This is one of them disassembled. The new splices do not grip the bullet tightly and the brass tube is very short so pushing one wire in can push the second wire out. Disappointing. You can see in the second connector a tiny dimple which is the only thing “snapping” the bullet in the splice. I can improve them by tightening up the brass tube but still not great. I can reuse the original connectors but the ones that have been riding under the car for 80 years are just FULL of dirt. Honestly I am not sure what I am going to do. If the originals clean up well I will use them, if I have to use the reproductions I will pull test them to make sure the wires are connected well.
Now for the rear chassis harness…
I also identified all the terminals on the ignition switch, headlight switch, and the gauges. I removed the grommet in the firewall and the clamps holding the harness to the firewall. So it is about time to bite the bullet and pull the harness out from behind the dash. But it is super late and time to quit. More to come!
The car show is usually in July but we had severe thunderstorms predicted for that day so the organizers postponed it until October 9th. We woke up to dense fog but my new neighbor fired up his Mustang and I followed him though the pea soup to Delaware. Once the fog burned off the weather was perfect!
We moved back in January and the new house has been taking up all kinds of time. So I did not get to the sprint maintenance until early summer. Saturday, July 3rd to be specific. Oh well, these things happen. One down side is that it was REALLY hot so after a while I just stopped taking pictures. Usually I start with an oil change but I am gong to shift the oil change to fall so the car has clean oil in the winter when it sits more and gets hot less.
Well this is a bad start. Looks like I have a radiator leak. With any luck at all this a pinhole in a tube and an easy fix. It is just seeping out so I am going to defer fixing this until after car show season.
First thing to do is check the fuel sediment bowl. As usual a little bit of crud in there. Then I used this gas and some kerosene to clean the air filter. On to the plugs!
All six plugs looked great. Grey insulator, no oil fouling. I cleaned and re-gapped all the plugs to 0.025″. All were a little open. These plugs are getting older and will probably need replaced in year or three. For right now I put them back in.
Next I checked the distributor. I have been having some eye trouble and I really noticed it here. I could not see the points gap. I used a magnifying visor and a bright light and checked the gap. It was a little small so I adjusted the points. Here you can see the .020″ feeler gauge in the gap. If it looks like the points are not lining up well with each other that is because they don’t. Never have and I am afraid to mess with it because the car runs so well. After getting the points gapped I cleaned and lubed the distributor lobes and put a drop of oil on the felt wick in the shaft. With the distributor back together.
I lubed all the lubrication points under the hood (mainly the generator and steering box). Then I checked the battery electrolyte levels and cables. Then it was time to jack up the car.
At this point it was really getting warm out. I greased the chassis and adjusted the brakes all around. Here is where things went a little pear-shaped. First the rear universal joint on the driveshaft was installed backwards sometime around 1987. Because of that you can’t get a grease gun on the grease fitting. So to lube the joint I have to unbolt the driveshaft from the differential, lube the joint, then put it back together. This generally takes about three minutes and the only tricky part is holding the u-joint together so the grease gun pressure does not blow it apart. This time I could not get the u-joint to fit properly back in the yoke on the differential. After much fooling around I realized there was a little chunk of debris in a corner of the yoke. After cleaning that out it went right back together but it was frustrating.
All the brakes adjusted OK except for the passenger side rear that brake was dragging a lot.. I just rebuilt these back in April and they should not have been dragging. I did a lot of fooling around and tried to re-center the brake by feel which I am not 100% convinced actually works. But eventually I got it pretty well adjusted and it feels pretty good. I still think something might be wrong with this wheel so I will check it again later.
The 17 year cicadas just died off but this one left early. For some reason it looks like it was surprised when my giant shiny green car snuck up on it.