Seahawk 356 project:

[Racerbvd]

Great pix!!! Keep up the good work..

[speeder]

Well, lots of work done with no time to blog here about it. The time I spend on PPOT is generally a few minutes in the AM when I'm having my coffee. The car is virtually finished now and hopefully will start and be running tomorrow, then off to the alignment shop while breaking in the new rings for 100 miles or so. I'll definitely post tomorrow when it starts. (Fingers crossed for no complications).

I'm going to fast-forward through the last month or so, lots of pics with small captions. When I left you last, I was cleaning off old sound pad material. I had quite a problem with the replacement sound material sold for the car, it was absolutely not similar in any way to the original stuff plus the pre-cut pieces did not remotely fit. We decided to source some raw material and just make my own pieces. Redbeard suggested McMaster-Carr on my separate sound pad thread and we ordered their urethane coated material. It is not exactly original looking, (a bit thicker), but nothing was going to be correct so we went with functionality for a good price. I'm very happy with it. Here it is installed:


About that time, the car was removed from its long hibernation and actually moved outside for the first time in many months:



The car was leveled as well as possible in preparation for the torsion bar/spring plate adjustments:




The rear T-bars wound-up needing a lot more adjustment for proper camber once the engine was installed but I needed to start somewhere and had to install transaxle. A fairly involved job was installing the rear wheel bearing carriers with new bearings and seals. Have a look at the schematic on these suckers:

[speeder]

The rear bearings have shims for pre-load and since we are installing new bearings, I could not simply re-install as they came out. There is a procedure that involves measuring the thickness of the backing plate/bearings/inside and outside carrier and shimming for correct fit. Here is the measuring:



Here are the pretty new bearings, it will be a lot quieter now. The old bearings were shot, one was totally galled:




Here is the transaxle assembled w/ new bearings and what they look like up close:





BTW, those rear backing plates came out really nice from the powder coater.

[speeder]

Have to turn-in for the night but will post a big update tomorrow. G'night...

[YTNUKLR]

Are you having fun yet, Denis?

This is beautiful stuff.

[Tobra]

I am always impressed when an old car with the pipes going out the bumper like that is so pretty and shiney. So, good for another couple hundred thousand miles?
That pad does not look that bad to me, but it is not a great pic


Speaking of pics, Paul had better bring a laptop or a whole handful of memory sticks for the camera on the trip home.

[speeder]

I love that sound pad material. It looks like it will actually do what it's supposed to do, as opposed to the paper thin, over-priced stuff that is sold as resto material. Here is the roll of it from MMC:



I think that is cost us about $30.00 shipped for enough to do the entire car compared to ~$250 for the "replacement" stuff.

When it was time to install the transaxle, I dug out the box of mounts and associated pieces and of course they did not match the shiny new look of the rest of the parts so I cleaned them up and painted them. Before:



After:

[speeder]

The engine was now ready to have sheet metal and intake/exhaust fitted, then installed in car. There were several niggling delays and small detours along the way but I'm going to race through this part of the story.



Beautiful PC'ed sheet metal in boxes:

[speeder]

At about this point, the car needed to be moved from its cushy resting place to a new cushy resting place, from Hancock Park to Mullholland Dr. where I would finish it at another generous friend's garage. I realise that this has little to do with the actual assembly of the car but it's part of its journey so I'm including it in this journal. Loading up the car:

The flatbed was behind me, (following me to new location), but the 356 took a scenic drive without the wheels turning. Through Beverly Hills:




Through my favorite canyons in town:




And up to Mulholland in Bel Air. Ugly place:




And finally, at its new spot:

[speeder]

With the engine installed, the task of indexing the rear torsion bars for correct camber began. There is not a ride-height adjustment per se, the height is completely determined by the camber since it has a swing axle suspension. I needed to get it dialed-in before assembling the rest of brakes/shocks/etc. and taking car in for alignment or there would be hundreds of dollars in additional labor for the alignment shop to tear it all apart and move T-bars. The factory camber spec is zero degrees w/ a small tolerance. This makes sense because the camber changes as the spring plate/T-bar is compressed, going negative on the compressed side in a corner. Also, when passengers get in the car, it will squat (negative) slightly. The rear toe-in is also zero or very close and it changes as well when suspension is compressed. (Toes-in on compressed side).

I used a straight edge filed down to perfectly fit in rim and a level to determine zero camber. (Level). Every time an adjustment was made, we had to re-assemble the rear suspension and roll car back and forth to settle suspension, then measure. I wish I could tell you that I'm so good, (or lucky), that I got it on the first or second try but I can't. I suppose if you worked on this part of the car all the time as a vocation, you would know exactly how many degrees on the spring plate = given degrees of camber. I did not, so many small adjustments were made before getting it right. I also had to get the toe close enough to drive car to alignment shop, (plus break-in the new rings and motor), that is a little easier since no major disassembly is required. Still, the axle does not just move easily along the spring plate once the bolts are loosened. The two parts are extremely spring-loaded to each other and it's tricky.

Here are some pics including the beginning of my hillbilly alignment rack using parallel 2x4s next to car.

[azasadny]

Great work! This is a fantastic project, thanks for documenting and sharing it!

[speeder]

I promised Paul that I would give him working heat on this car and that proved a challenge. The heater boxes were trashed, (covered previously), and the whole system was inoperable for many years with stuck flaps and bent pieces, etc. I'm proud to say that I got one side functional, (drivers side), and passenger side just needs a new cable to be working. It will not be at 100% because of flaps on box that do not close completely but it will definitely make heat/defrost and be able to be shut off. Here it is, first I had to free-up the flaps on the body heat controls. After lots of WD40 and working them back and forth, they move pretty well:


Here are the levers/cables that operate the heat from a knob on floor of tunnel:




And lastly, the flaps under the hood that open to provide warm air to carbs for quick warm-up. They are controlled by a thermostat that is broken and not easily replaced, (expensive and NLA), the good news is that they break in the *flaps closed* position. As long as linkage is present, hot air will not blow into the engine compartment. When I picked up the car last summer, the linkage was MIA and probably like that for years considering the state of maintenance of the rest of the car. The previous owner had a mechanic that did not actually fix anything. He simply told the owner that the parts were NLA, (I'm guessing), and then left things inoperable or broken. Having these flaps open all the time completely defeats the design of the air-cooled engine and almost certainly caused a hot running condition. I was able to easily source the missing linkage parts from a business whose name shall not be mentioned (or typed) here, , here it is all buttoned-up:

[enzo1]

cool! cool! cool!

[Seahawk]

Originally Posted by speeder

Here are some pics including the beginning of my hillbilly alignment rack using parallel 2x4s next to car.

Odd.

In the bill it was described as, "an environmentally sound, variable angle, horizontally opposed parallel precision alignment tool"

[speeder]

Engine installed:

[speeder]

What's in this box? Beautiful, shiny new fully-adjustable Konis.

[RWebb]

thx for all the pics

can you post who or what MMC is? re the sound pad material you liked

[Tobra]

where is the adjustment on the konis? Screw on the end?

[speeder]

Adjustment on Konis is simple: you unfasten the top of shock, fully compress it and turn the top half left or right to make firmer or softer. The beauty of them is that you can have a fairly soft ride on the street and then crank them up for the track.

On the padding, MMC=McMaster Carr.

[azasadny]

Any updates?