Tag Archives: wallace delong

August/September 2005 – Windshield, right door

This entry ends the third year of restoration work on the car. It’s been a long haul.

Windshield

The Cat Cage in Rougemont had a visitor from Oklahoma in early September. Wallace DeLong, also known as “Dad” and “Grandpa,”visited for a couple of days, and I set him to work in the garage. The right side door needed its insides put back into place. The left side door was enough of a challenge that I figured it would be a good weekend project for us. And we got rolling along and decided to set the windshield into place as well.

It was good to see Dad again, and he was able to see some progress on the car from the last time he was here.

The windshield is the original Triplex clear laminated glass. When we removed it we did not take off the chrome finishing strip that sits on the top edge of the glass. The glass shows some reparable scratches from the windhsield wiper frames that must have rubbed the glass a bit over the years. This can be buffed out, since the scratches are indetectable with a fingernail, except for a small section on the left side. Cleanup was quick — some 409 cleaner followed by the “Cerama Bryte” glass stove top cleaner took small scratches and the accumulated crud off quite nicely. One puzzling note: We noticed a dark blue deposit on the paper towel that we used to rub off the Cerama Bryte. This was only on the outside-facing side of the windshield and the right-side door window. It may have been a chemical reaction of some sort, though it might have been as simple as some ancient blue overspray from a body shop somewhere a long time ago.

I’m going to try the Cerama Bryte on the wiper scratches. I did a little hard rubbing on the left side blemishes, and the relatively gentle grits in the stuff seemed to work to make the scratches less visible. I figure a buffer might do a good portion of the job, gently applied.

I got the windshield seal from Classic Jaguar, and the first thing we noticed was that it was apparently intended for a “FHC” — Fixed Head Coupe. The seal was circular, so it was intended to go completely around a piece of glass. I figured there were two possibilities: the seal was mistakenly sent or there was a trick to doing this. I wrote to Dan Mooney, and within a half hour he replied that the seals for the convertible are no longer available and the seal I had on hand could be trimmed to fit nicely.

We looked at the seal in order to determine where the corners were, a task that wasn’t quite as easy as you might think. The seal is molded, but because of the corner curves, it twists in packaging. So you think you find a corner, but it turns out to be a deceptive twist. And then, of course, you need to find upper and lower curves, too. The whole thing moves as you search, so getting a clear idea of where you are on the seal is not so easy.

I tried to mount the seal without cutting it, but I found that was nearly impossible. So I went ahead and cut it in a place I figured (wrongly) was somewhere in the middle of the top edge of the FHC windshield. It turns out I was extremelyclose to the top curve on the right side — about two inches of rubber from cutting into the seal I needed to preserve!

Despite this little near ineptitude, the seal went on well.

One thing that I noticed is that it is best to do the final trim after the windshield is completely in place, because the seal naturally moves down the “A” post as the glass moves downward into position. I initially cut the left side what I thought was rather long, but it turned out to settle down to just barely long enough. My suggestion: trim above the upper curve, and then cut it to size after the windshield is completely in place. The curved seal on top won’t get in the way.

Setting the seal starts in the middle, and setting the chrome strip that’s nestled inside the seal starts in the middle, too. You do get better at alignment as you go through this process. Be careful to get the chrome finishing strip right in the center, because you won’t want to take it out to reset it. The Jaguar shop manual shows a bent wire tool that’s used to set the rubber around the glass and the chrome strip. I didn’t use it, but I found a bent coat hanger to be very useful even though it might have been better if it were a little thinner. The picture below shows it sitting on the car in front of the installed windshield.

Right door insides

I took on the left door earlier this summer, and it was a bit of a job. For the most part the tough part was rediscovering the order of installation. First, do the felt or sound deadener and the water tube. Second, install the lock mechanism. Third, install the window slide frame. Last, install the window and the slide mechanism. A movie would really do the trick to show how these (sometimes big) parts slip into that little slit at the top of the door panel. You just need to think about many angles. For getting the windows and the riser into place, at one time we had the window perpendicular to the flat of the panel. You might be tempted to bend the slit a bit wider, but you don’t need to.

We cleaned up the glass with the same stuff, and we noticed the same dark blue residue on the outside face of the window. Strange. Be careful with the flat connection from the door handle to the latch mechanism. It’s easy to pinch in the anchor for the window rising mechanism (the thing that is firmly set with four nuts). I managed to do that on the left side door, and Dad and I repeated the error on the right door, too.

Dad and I have different philosophies about grease. I am liberal and he’s a conservative. We both ended up looking as though we were liberal with grease, much to Dad’s dismay.

I figure it’ll delay rust; he thinks it’ll just get on the windows. I bet we’re both right.

March 2004 – Bonnet test fit, plating prep, cylinder head cleanup

Bonnet test fit

The garage had a very special visitor over this weekend. My dad, Wallace DeLong, came up to North Carolina after making the rounds through Florida to see relatives and participate in a travel exchange with people in Sarasota. I was a little worried about suggesting that we take on a project with the old car, since I didn’t want to impose my restoration work on an unwilling participant, but it actually turned out that Dad wanted to do exactly that.

As I mentioned before, Stefan Roundy provided a fine replacement for the bent bonnet subframe. That piece, along with the replacement left subframe from Bill McKenna, meant that the front frame could be put together with sound pieces. The bent up bonnet frame meant that the bonnet itself hung badly, and I was anxious to see whether the new bonnet subframe would straighten out the bonnet fit.

So, Dad and I installed the front subframes and mounted the bonnet on its hinges.

It fit squarely off the front bulkhead (firewall), though the bonnet measured just shy of an inch forward of the bulkhead — a bit too wide a space. We figured we needed to get the space to about a third of that.

We made some makeshift shims to insert into the hinges at the top. Basically, to bring the bonnet back, we had to make sure that the hinges were tightened until the hinge touched the area on the lower valance where they fit. No shims there — we needed to get the bonnet back as far as possible. Shims at that point would move the bonnet forward. Once we had done that, checked to see how the bonnet fit against the lower sections of the bulkhead and the upper sections. Things were slightly wider at the upper part than at the lower, meaning that we could raise the bonnet to even things out.

We did the raising in two ways: we raised the bonnet subframe by inserting a small shim between the subframe and the “picture frame” at the lower connections. And we placed shims over the top section of the bonnet hinge that pivots on the subframe. These two things did the trick. I do not think both will be necessary when we actually fit the bonnet after the suspension is in place, since the dynamics of the frame will change, and the bonnet subframe will probably sit slightly higher as a result. Roger Los mentioned that his bonnet fitting was simplified after installing the suspension pieces that fit into the picture frame. When I first read that, I felt it might be a little dubious, but seeing how the structure fits and acts when bolted down, it is very probable that the rigidity of those pieces will support the frame in the right places, with the result that shimming will be less of an issue. I think we’ll still need to shim upward, though.

The final gap between the rear of the bonnet and the front bulkhead ended up being about 3/8 inch — about a half centimeter, a little wider perhaps. I’m reluctant to go much narrower than this, simply because the thickness of the primer and paint will make things a little tighter. The gap is about right. It is amazing to see what a new bonnet subframe will do to the gap, at any rate. When we first mounted the bonnet back in August of last year, the gap was a crooked disaster.

Front suspension parts for plating

Although I didn’t subject my dad to the gritty glories of sandblasting, we did weigh and organize the front suspension pieces that are due for nickel plating. There is still one suspension fitting that needs disassembly and cleaning. It has resisted my efforts to extract some pretty rusty bolts. It’s soaking in penetrating fluid now. We have 64 pounds (about 30 kilograms) of metal to be plated. I’ve decided not to send off small parts like washers and nuts. These I will probably plate myself, as I’m leaning toward ordering a nickel plating kit from Caswell Plating. Bill McKenna says it’s actually less putzy than zinc plating, and that seemed simple enough.

The platers is located in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and UPS wanted almost $90 USD to ship the parts. I figure that the trip will be a pleasant drive, and I should know what the charge will be without having to spend $180 USD on shipping, roundtrip.

Cylinder head cleanup

The final thing we did was clean up the insides of the cylinders where the valves are located. Five of the six chambers had a good deal of grime in them, and the remaining one (number one) was not too bad — which made me suspicious. I think that the fuel mix was set rich, probably to avoid pinging? Wire brush attachments to the drill made quick work of the grime. The valves were obviously in good shape, and my dad and I wondered if the valves were recently replaced in an overhaul. Dad looked pretty closely at cylinder wear and the valves and felt that the last overhaul wasn’t that long ago, and the engine didn’t require a massive amount of work. We did not look closely at the crankshaft (most of which is still in place), and there is a high probability (in my mind at least) that the rebuild of the engine was focused on the top, and not the bottom. Even though the bearings for the piston rods weren’t bad, the keys in my mind are the crankshaft bearings. After all, it’s fairly easy to replace rod bearings, but to replace the crankshaft bearing you have to remove the crankshaft. Wear related to that is heavier on this engine, so I’m suspicious. When we get to the engine in earnest, the crankshaft comes off and the measuring begins.

Here’s what the chambers looked like after some cleaning: