Here’s a few pics…

Empty bay with the flatty out.

Here’s my engine… It’s a 1958 Pontiac 370 out of a Super Modified 32 (or so?)  ford race car. It’s been bored & stroked, along with lots of other stuff done to it. It was built many years ago, but was always kept inside and covered. My friend said they had it fired up 2 years ago and it sounded great, didn’t smoke or anything. The heads are off a 1960 Pontiac… It has an Edelbrock P303 tri-power intake right now, but I can’t find the carbs I need reasonably so I’ll have to go with a 4 barrel for now.

I bought a 60 Bonneville convertible for a 389 and Jetaway trans, I removed that trans, replaced all the seals and bolted it up to the 370.

I’ll may re-paint the rest of the engine before I bolt it in for the final time.

Here it is just sitting in there. I still have to get it exactly where I want it and make my mounts, hopefully that’ll be done or mostly done on Sunday.

And check this out… This guy drove this car in NJ and the front control arm wasn’t even tight… as a matter of fact, it was even missing a nut off one of the bolts for the control arm. On top of that, the passenger side backing plates only had a thread or two on each nut holding them on so it was just flopping around too.

I know it wasn’t his fault as he just bought the car and drove it and probably knew nothing about it.

I’m going to be sure to go over every nut and bolt on the suspension of this thing before I actually start driving it.

I ended up traded my 1964 Pontiac Catalina that was my daily driver for this 1950 Pontiac Chieftain, the first week of March ‘10. If you have already browsed through the visitors Pontiac’s page, you probably saw it posted there as this car belonged to George whom I got it from out of New Jersey.

The car is pretty much original and has a Straight Eight engine and the Hydramatic transmission. It appears it has been restored at some point, but sat a lot. The engine in it knocks due to a spun bearing. I changed the oil and it quieted the knock down and it picked up some oil pressure and I did manage to drive it to the post office and back.

As far as plans for the car go, I have bought a 1961 Pontiac 389 engine with a 4 speed hydramatic for $250 that will replace the pounding flathead and wake this old Chief up.  The engine is stuck right now, but I got the heads and intake off it and it’s soaking in mystery oil. Hopefully once I get it free’d up, I’ll finish the tear down and get it hot tanked and start the rebuild. I hope to have it ready to drop in by fall or sooner.

And now for some pictures…

Heres a shot of it I took at a gas station on the way home.

Tail-gating…

Here it is sitting in my back yard before I put it under the car port. I robbed the tires and wheels and stuck those on my 52 for now until I got some new whites for it. I also stuck an old visor on it, not sure if I’m going paint it up and leave it on or not. Also stuck some old caps on it that I had laying around.

Interior is in decent shape.

Back shot

I’ll post more updates as I work on the car. Right now my main focus is to get the 389 built and ready for the swap.

It’s an easy job…

After removing the wheel, there’s 2 – 9/16 bolts that hold the drum on.

Once the drum is removed, there are 4 – 9/16 nuts holding the axle in. After you remove those nuts the axle will slide right out. You should not need a puller as the axle should come out easily…

I have a regular seal puller, but I ended up just using a screw driver to remove the old seal. It come out fairly easily. I cleaned up the housing the best I could before I installed the new seal.

The new seal…

I used my slide hammer bar and a screw on tap and a hammer to peck the new seal in.

Took a total of about 30 minutes and I was done.

Tomorrow I plan to replace all of the shoes since they’ve been on there for about 5 years now and it’s getting tougher to stop… plus the left rear shoes are saturated with gear oil now.

About a week ago I went and checked all the fluids and everything seemed fine until I noticed I had no brakes… But I had planned to redo all that before I started driving it again anyhow. I put 4 new wheel cylinders and all new brake hoses on it that I got off of ebay over the winter. I kept trying to bleed the brake system and all I was getting was air and some fluid. After a little while I pin pointed it down to the master cylinder. Luckily, I had a spare NOS master cylinder so I put that on there and that fixed the problem temporarily.

I drove it one day and then the next morning noticed the brakes weren’t’ working again. The pedal was going straight to the floor. So I pulled the master cylinder back off, took it apart and noticed the cup on the piston was tore.  I had already ordered a master cylinder rebuild kit from Autozone (where I work) because I wanted to rebuild it anyhow. I honed the master cylinder and started putting it back together, but the new piston in the kit was just slightly too big and would not fit the master cylinder. I ended up using the old piston with the new cup off the new piston and finally got it put back together.

So far now the brakes are working great and I’ve managed to drive the car 3 days trouble free.

I also noticed I have a rear axle seal leaking also, so I’m going to have to fix that very soon also.

I didn’t get to do everything that I wanted to do this past winter to my car due to the very bad winter that we had, but nwo that the weather has broke, I’ve been gaining ground on the car and getting things done.

I’ve also put a set of bias ply wide white wall tires on my car. They aren’t “new” but they’re in good shape and I think it adds to the overall “look” of the car.

Here are a few updated pictures of my car with it wearing it’s new (older) wide whites.

I also took the fender skirts off my car for now, I may put them back on later once I repaint my car.

Here’s the pictures…

I’ve also been collecting parts for when I sand my car down for a repaint job.

So far, I’ve got…

Nice Rust Free fenders out of Indiana
New Rocker Panels
New Rocker Panel Extensions
Re-chromed Tail light Bezels
Re-chromed Park Light bezels
New tail light and park light lenses
New Master Cylinder

Here’s some pics of my re-chromed tail lights and park light bezels.

And what I’m looking for (if anyone has one of these items, shoot me an email…)

- I’d like to find some good valances (splash pans) front and rear and if someone has one they’re parting out that has a nice tail pan they could cut off a car for me, I’d be interested in that too.

- I’d also like to find me some decent G78-15 wide whites or 710-15 wide whites (same thing basically) in good condition. I plan to buy me a new set, but I’d like to find a decent used set for now.

I had the old one out in a couple of hours

In with the new, now this was a little bit of a pain. It’s not that the job was tough or anything, but my cherry picker fell over and the engine landed on my toolbox and battery – both destroyed. I pulled the ol’ s10 around and chained the cherry picker to it and finally got the new Flathead in and bolted up.

Besides the engine falling over while trying to put it in, the only other problem I had with this project was getting the drive shaft yoke to slide into the transmission. I like to never got that sucker in there. I actually had to take a board and tap it in with a hammer. I spent overall about 3 hours working with the drive shaft. I spent more time on that drive shaft than I did actually putting the engine in.

After I finally got it in, made sure everything was tight and finally fired the engine up… I put it in gear and NOTHING – transmission is locked up! Turns out the 54 Hydramatic is junk…

So I pulled the 54 transmission back out – had it out in 45 minutes!

I pulled the old transmission off of my old engine and finally got it installed about a week later since I had to order the torus gasket. That transmission is heavy by the way… It was everything I could do to get it slid under the car and raised onto a jack to jack it back up into place. I think I had the transmission back in in about an hour or so. Wasn’t too bad.

In all, I had the engine swap done in about a day, but it took me 9 days to complete the project since I had to order that torus gasket before I could install my old transmission.

I’ve put about 2,000 miles on it since I did the engine swap and so far everything is great. The engine runs smooth and the transmission… well…it shifts haha.

I have everything to convert it to a straight drive car which I do plan to do, hopefully sometime this winter if I get a chance to.

I stitched these myself, it’s not the best job out there, but I did it… It took me a while to do all 4 of these though as I didn’t use a sewing machine. I did it all by hand.

Here are the pics…

This was the first door panel I completed. I have about 3 hours tied up in each of these door panels.

The seat covers were found on ebay and are only temporary. Someone purchased them before me and tore them on the bottom cover for the back seat, not really noticable though. These were NOS covers, but age has an effect on them… I think. They didn’t quite fit like they should have, but they look good for now – better than nothing at least.

Here is the dash also… I finally got around to painting the lower half black. This will get sanded and repainted later also when I get around to repainting the whole car.

In all, I think I have about $110-120 tied up in my door panels, kick panels and rear deck panel. That’s not including the trim I piece I lost and had to find and repurchase… that set me back an additional $47

I still have to do my wind lace, headliner and carpet… and I need to have my seats recovered right. I’m collecting parts to get those things done, but it probably won’t be until spring 2010 before I get around to doing that.

1952 Pontiac "Flame Job"

Well, I got bored and drew out some flames on my car a few weeks prior to painting them. I drove it around for a while with the sketch on it until I finally got the nerve to mask it off and spray them. They’re painted on with Krylon paint (cans) and I think they turned out pretty good.

I basically made me a pattern on some cardboard paper and used that to keep both sides symmetrical… I think they turned out decent for my first time ever trying to paint flames…

It was getting dark out when I finished so these pictures are a little fuzzy.

1952 Pontiac "Flame Job"

What my car looks like as of 7.26.07

Lighted hood ornament I purchased on ebay for $152!
What’s been done since the last update:

- New intake and exhaust manifold gaskets installed

- New fuel pump and rebuilt the carburator

- Had the starter professionally rebuilt, and installed new battery wires

- New points and plugs (put 10,000 miles on the last set… figured i’d put some new ones in)

- Found another distributor for the car and put that on it. Made a world of difference

- Found a very nice trunk handle, put that on the car (done this awhile back, not sure if I posted about it or not)

- New exhaust all the way back!

- Greased the front end

- New U-Joints

- Purchased a lot of manuals (Shop, Master Parts, Hydra-Matic, Paint Chips, etc…)

- Purchased and installed the lighted hood ornament

- Made some temporary seat covers using white sheets and pins (actually looks pretty good)

I’m sure there’s other stuff I left out of the list. I’v mainly been doing mechanical stuff…

I still haven’t decided what color I want to paint this car. I’m now leaning tword the Saturn Gold Metallic or the original color of my car; Mayflower blue. If you want to vote on a color for me to paint it, check out my forums as I have made a post there asking for opinions on what color to paint my car.
I’ll be posting more updates soon!

This picture was taken on March 2nd 2006. It’s the first one i’v taken in awhile and the last one as of the moment.
I had the car stored in a garage for the past 3 months to keep it out of the bad weather. Got it out and took it out for awhile.
The day before I broke the tires down and mounted new tires all the way around. Those low profiles on the front had to go! The car is not
green, I don’t know why it looks green in the picture?

This is the latest picture of what the car looks like. Since the last post i’v bought hubcaps and
trim rings for the car. I’v also put a front bumper on the car. The picture is a little dark and hazey
because it was near 95 degrees the day I took it.

Here’s a close up of what the wheels look like on my car.

Updated: 5.29.07

Ok, it’s been awhile since i’v updated, but finally here’s an update.
I haven’t done much to the car in the past few months. This past
week I’v started doing odds-and-ins to it.

I painted the top half of the dash Monday, and the garnish moldings. I’ll be
painting the bottom half later this week. Also if I sell my 57 Cadillac, I plan to finally redo my seats and headliner.

Here’s a few pictures of the dash -