Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Hole in the Firewall

Hole in the Firewall

I have been off Blog the past couple of days. I have been working on my ‘46 Studebaker. Since that has been about all I have been focused on let me share how things are coming.

When I put the Stude on the chassis of an S-10 (Small Chevy Pickup) the fire wall had to be cut out on the Stude in order to get the cab to fit over the engine. This resulted in the engine sitting between the drivers side of the cab and the passengers. For those of you that are not aware, engines emit vapors, some of which are toxic. The toxic ones come from the exhaust manifold and flow down the exhaust system and out the back of the vehicle. There are however other fumes some of which are the burn off of crud from a vehicle sitting around too long and some are more serious.

When I bought the S-10 it had a 6 cylinder motor with a lot of mile….about one hundred and fifty thousand and as a consequence the valves had some burn and when it started up there was an emission of white smoke from the exhaust pipe. I got the valves fixed and should have had new rings put on the pistons….duh! But passed on that. It would have been a much easier repair to have done it while the cab and chassis were separated. When the cab was back on the frame and I started driving it the valves seated better but caused blow-back through the worn rings and that blow back flowed….you guessed it right in through that big hole in the fire wall and was bad enough to gag a maggot.

There was another hole almost under where the valve cover aspirates and the smoke of partially burned oil was particularly bad coming up through the floorboard. I patched these holes and that went a long way towards making the cab more habitable even though the real problem was the rings that must be fixed somewhere down the road. There remained however the huge hole in the firewall and not a whole lot of room to work, under the dash in that particular area. As a matter of fact doing any work under the dashboard of a car all crunched up with a light and wires running every which where can only be described in two words….“It Sucks!”

To accomplish the repair I decided to proceed in the following manner. I cut some one inch strips from sheet metal using the basket making technique….You know how baskets are made using strips of thin wood. Well that was my basic strategy. Now the shroud under construction had to be removable so I started at the bottom, drilled three hole in the base strip and using these as guides drilled into the where the floor slopes up to the firewall. Into these hole I inserted threaded rivets with my fandango threaded rivet squeezer. This tool requires a lot of practice to use well because if you don’t apply enough torque it doesn’t set and if you apply too much it shears the rivet and the tool arbor gets stuck and half an hour job to clear the mangled rivet. This I did about half a dozen times until I began to get the hang of the process. The advantage of a threaded rivet is that it is much easier than just drilling a hole and trying to put the bolt in through the floor and then tighten it from underneath the truck.

Anyway once the base strip was in place I was able to do the same to the sides and framed the hole. From outside under the hood I attached more strips and bent these over the protruding distributor in the rear of the engine and attached them to the base strip. In this manner I put a cowl basket framework over the hole and the engine. Tomorrow I intend to pop rivet some fiberglass cloth to the framework and this weekend apply the epoxy resin and hopefully soon have the cab sealed off from the engine.

I know my army of readers finds this blog extremely interesting but this has been my life the past couple of days and what I do is what you get.