1962 Mercury Monterey Project

People come over to look at the car and ask me "How long to get it back to running & driving?" I hear the question as: [to put the engine back together and reinstall it if I had all the parts?] So I say I could get it back in place in a couple weeks. That is not a fair calculus of what remains to be done - so here is my backlog of work-to-do:   Engine pistons - they are out, but the rings are gobblarnjimmyjammed into the grooves either remove all of the rings/ring pieces from the pistons and replace with new ring - you can translate 'remove' [apply solvents, lubricants, fires, and beatings until they let go of that crack they are holding onto] (a couple weeks) or replace the pistons & rings with new and press the new pistons onto the old connecting rods (not counting ordering + shipping - I need to find someone with a press, or figure out how to get them in place with my vise, a...

There is a scene at the begining of the third act of "Avengers: Infinity War" where Captain America, Natasha, and Black Panther go over to the magic shield around Wakanda and talk with the purple lady with the horn head & the big dark guy with the grabber weapon. I don't remember what she says (the dark bad guy only grunts), but Black Panther's response is - [You are in Wakanda now. You will have nothing but dust and blood.] I think Black Panther had recently found a car that had been parked in somebody's garage for 37 years. I suspect Tchalla was a AMC man. Today I went to work on the brakes - at least the fronts where I don't have to pull the axles to remove them. I spun off the lug nuts and jacked up the car. That was pretty much where my efforts to expose brakes came to a halt (pun intended). I could not figure out how to get the drum to move off the hub. I did not heat it with the torch, but I gave it a severe beating with a mallet - even that didn...

Since I got my truck running I was finally able to go empty my used oil at the part store. The collection pan has been FULL since I drained the engine and the transmission on the Mercury - and I needed to get rid of some more in my oil pan & parts cleaning bin. The truck runs fine, but I can hear & feel the power steering pump breathing its last. It vibrates through the steering wheel and sounds like it is humming a tune as I drive. It seems to work ok for now, but there is clearly something not happy about it. More on that adventure later. Lady E came out to help. She climbed into the engine bay with a plastic pan (like you use for collecting coolant) and several scrapers and set about cleaning up the front cross member, suspension, steering box, and clutch linkages. She squatted in the hole for 2 hours and scraped and scraped and pushed grease and dirt off the car until some parts turned a new color. She discovered suspension pieces that had not seen daylight in 60 years. Her...

As you know - my pickup lost its water pump when I went over to Doug's house to get the hoist & stand. It made sounds like a rusty swing set - except at 700 RPM - and unceremoniously lost control of its bladder all over Doug's driveway. It sat there for a week until I towed it home. That was Halloween. Today - it ran again & the heat worked. So - an entire month of distraction from the Mercury. First off, I did manage to find an OEM service manual I could download. I followed the diagnostic procedure - and after I refilled the radiator - I quickly realized that since the water pump was spraying coolant everywhere, that was probably the first culprit. I decided I would replace the thermostat too inspite of the fact that it passed the diagnostic test and wasn't in the way for the water pump. I ordered the pump, fan clutch & thermostat from RockAuto. I should have ordered all of the other parts too. I made myself a list that was 95% correct, but for what ever reaso...

It was more like one apathetic and one stubborn and 6 who just needed to be told what to do. The OCPOTI* gave me LOTS of good advice about why the motor was stuck. Some of it I was even able to follow. pistons are rusted to the cylinder walls, why not check the rod bearings, and that timing chain looks rusty. So I pulled a couple of rod caps and looked at the crank journal. Not only do the crank and bearings look pretty good - I think it is so cool that they stamp the "FoMoCo" logo and a registered trademark symbol on the underside of a piece of metal almost no one is ever going to see. A nice show of pride there. Mid-week, Other_Doug dropped by to look at the machine. I told him I was having trouble removing the crank bolt - and so he asked if he could borrow my breaker bar, put it on the bolt and threw his shoulder at it like he was doing the shot put. It turned right out. That seemed to ignite a flurry of activity - and so while the engine still world not turn, we removed ...

Now that the engine is on a stand, I can do a better job of figuring out why it won't turn. So, I took a coffee break today and opened up the bottom of the engine. The deconstruction probably took 30 minutes. I turned off the umpteen oil pan bolts and managed to lower it without spilling the sump. Actually - it looks pretty good. A lot less sludgy than I was expecting after 60 years. I did drop a wrench in there by accident - and gladly it neither splashed everywhere nor did it completely swallow the tool before I grabbed it. I had to remove the oil pump in the process. This weird thing has an oil pump outside the engine. You can see it in the upper left corner of the picture above. It seems to turn - so that is positive. I also removed the fuel pump. It is mechanical - with a lever that slides into the front cover and is pushed up and down by an eccentric wheel somewhere in there. I don't have the front cover off yet - but the pump and fuel filter came off without incident. I ...

 This past week I bought materials to make adapter arms for the engine stand. I got some 1-inch steel square tube for the arms, some 7/16 grade-8 bolts to attach from the arm to the engine, and some washers to make a bushing for the bolts and so everything was steady in place. I was going to buy a cutoff wheel for the grinder Dave loaned me, but it turned out that Dave had some so he dropped a few off on my front porch late one night. On Saturday I went over to Doug's to borrow his drill press to put some holes in the square stock. It turned out that Doug also had a bandsaw, so I used that to cut the square tube into 6 inch pieces instead of the cutoff wheels. Then we went to Doug's drill press. As these things go, he only had the 7/16 drill bit I needed. He did not have the bit I needed for the other side. So I ran over to the ACE hardware store near his house and eyeballed a good 9/16 bit for the larger bolts. I drilled one of the 7/16 and sized up the hole to make sure it wa...