1962 Mercury Monterey Project

  This is how the day started: steely eyed and ready to work. A little militant even. Get the truck back, deal with leaves, pull an engine.  On Friday, the tow truck people made an appointment for between 10~11a on Saturday morning. At 8a on Saturday, they texted me that they were ~90 minutes away. At 830a, the guy called me to tell me he was 10 minutes away. Breakfast got cut short  -  but the truck is home. She runs, but she is angry about it. My guess is water pump + the sympathetic damage to the serpentine belt. Leaf collection is boring - but I did break the case on my leaf blower in the process. That added a nice rythmic 'wonk wonk wonk' to the process. I got the hoist into place and ready to work. That is the short version. I really have a lot of space when it comes to parking cars in my garage. When it comes disassembling them - not enough. I hauled the gas tank and drive shaft outside into the front yard. I swapped out the janky front left "driving" wheel/ti...

I thought I wanted to remove my valves and valve seats. To do that, I needed a spring compressor tool. These things come in lots of shapes and sizes. Some of them look like a bent fork and rely on having the rocker arms in place (or at least the studs). Some of them look like a giant C-clamp that connects on both sides of valve. They rely on the heads being off. Some of them look like the Recognizer from the movie Tron - with a screw on top and hooks down the side. They range in price from: free for loan at the autoparts store to this thing with umpteen parts for $75. I was going to borrow the one from the parts store - but it gave me the willys. I looked at it several times and kept coming to the conclusion that I was going to hate using that tool or get injured in the process. Oreilly's and Autozone loan the screw-hook Tron thing, but the hooks are not well designed for gripping a heavy duty spring. I am sure with a hose clamp to secure it I could make it work but I didn't w...

I was stalled for a week or so. Life is like that sometimes - too many obligations or chores or just opportunties for distraction. So I went a whole week without touching the car. In my head, I had planned to borrow the hoist & stand from Doug a week ago, and that was what I was going to do next. But even though other stuff kept getting in the way of that objective, I just didn't go to the next things on my list. A couple of nice things did happen to me in the middle of the week. My friend John offered to do some 3D modelling for some of the trim parts. Namely the 'after burner' tail lenses. He sent me one of his models and I printed the shell just to see. They are so cool !! If you want to nit pick, they have lots of things that can and probably will be adjusted before I resin cast an actual part, but I think it is super neat to be able to design, print and test fit a prototype. Additionally Dave dropped off some gifts for the project. He loaned me a very nice angle gr...

Why does this have to be so hard? What is the point of inventing Google if it can't even decode your manufacturing stamps on your transmission? My transmission has LOTS of numbers on it: the transmission body: AF 7006 D 21 the side-cover: AB 7222 B the tail: WAR 7651 A And would YOU like to guess how many of those YOU can use to look up which parts YOU might order for a rebuild kit? NONE of them. If you want to know where to buy parts to do a rebuild on the 3-speed, manual transmission in your 1962 Mercury Monterey 4-door sedan, you can go through the following steps: spend 45 minutes looking up numbers that are flat wrong because the pictures you have are just not very clear until you go outside and take more pictures check - and try not to transfer the oil to your face when you go back in - it causes your daughter / the project manager to ask questions that have no answer know a guy who just knows check - that didn't take long to find the answer was "nope" know a gu...

Sometimes when engineers are trying to make a car go faster they will shed weight. They trim unneccesary items. You would be surprised at how much acceleration you can get when you rip out extra stuff like carpet. Since I plan for this to be high performance 6-person sedan that weighs 2 tons, I set out to eliminate that unneccesary carpet. Besides, my garbage can was only half full this week. I put on my respirator and started to razor knife around the edges. After about 3 minutes I realized that the carpet was rotted enough that using a knife was too good for it. I just ripped it out and balled it up. I found a PCV valve under the front seat. I do not know what car that valve was for, but certainly not this one. This car's idea of positive crankcase ventilation is to suck air in via the oil fill tube and vent out from a habit-trail-like pipe that goes out the top of the valley, hooks a hard left and down under the firewall near the passenger's feet. It is called "road dra...

My father-in-law came over to work on the car today. He brought with him pluck and determination. He also reaped the benfit of the penetrating oil I had sprayed before him. Once we had coffee and got ourselves situated, we went to work. Of course it took him several minutes to understand what I had been talking about regarding the offending transmission bolts. Those 2 holding the transmission are really hard to see if you aren't looking for them. Even more so when you consider the distraction caused by the nine other bolts which are right in front of you. He immediately pointed out that we needed more room to crank. So we raised the car another 2 or 3 inches. In the front, I am using 2 jack stands I bought years ago that are pretty good, but we are 1 notch down from as high as they will go. In the back I am using 2 jack stands that came with the car. They were probably made before I was born and are 3-legged. While 3-legged is a good way to frame a metaphor about balanced expectati...