My Bel Air still has an old oil bath air cleaner. I’d never seen such a thing, and my previous 1956 Chevy had a standard flat air cleaner.

The concept is that you get the air moving very quickly towards a standing pool of oil. When the air turns to go around the corners in the filter, the particles of dust in the air shoot into the oil and get stuck. This one is fairly simple, just one bath, and one path for the air to flow through.

All I had to do to switch it out was to pull the whole air cleaner off, drain out the oil, and then wash the whole thing thoroughly. There are paper air filters that you can just drop in. This one I got from Danchuk (part # ), but I’ve heard that there is a standard tractor air cleaner that fits. I’ll have to track those down for when I need to change out the filter.

The one reason to switch away from the oil bath to a paper filter is that your engine will burn a little bit more cleanly (as it’s not sucking in small amounts of oil to be burned in a not useful place). Probably for the same reason, a paper filter is supposed to help fuel economy slightly.

On the other side of things, if you race in dusty areas, it sounds like oil bath air filters work better at trapping large amounts of sand and dust. So I’ll keep that part around in case, um, I happen to enter the Pikes Peak rally. Or this cool little Spring Thaw!.

I hadn’t been taking good photos of the car, so that’s what this post is about. I’ll actually take photos of the air cleaner and the engine compartment soon. I haven’t been able to drive the car for a while as it has a knocking sound on the lower end. It needs to be rebuilt. I’ve gotten estimates for the rebuild, and it’s going to make the most sense to have the shop do everything to the engine. The shop that is going to do the rebuild doesn’t deal with cars, so I’m going to have a shop that is closer to me quote how much it would cost for them to take the engine out and put it back in once it’s rebuilt. If it’s going to cost much, I might just do that with some friends.

Anyone in Seattle feel like helping pull and install an engine?

The 1955-1957 combination shop manual and seals and other various parts showed up from Danchuk. The shop manual is very nice and descriptive! I was just reading through the carburetor section and it describes every possible piece of info about how it works, including different ways of talking about vacuum (as a point of low pressure) and on and on. Good stuff.

Since I had the car working perfectly, I took it on the freeway and when I got home I had the oil light on. Trying to find how to test the oil pump. Breona said her dad had a shop for me to take the car to for the engine, so I will probably do that to be safe.

I realized that the headlights already in the car are halogens. They are sealed though, so you have to replace the whole thing, as opposed to just a halogen bulb, and one of them had a chip broken out. It likely got oxidized or maybe just dirty inside the lens. I realized after pulling that headlight that I shouldn’t have messed with the adjustment screws, as you don’t have to. When I get the lights back in, I will have to adjust that.

To get the new, replaceable bulb, headlights in, I have to trim down the piece that attaches to the lights that then attaches to the headlight buckets. So I went looking for a sheet metal nibbler. I have tin snips, and somebody at the hardware store suggested aircraft snips, but both of those cause bad ripples from my experience, so trying to find the nibbler. I think I finally found a place that might have those in town, Graybar, which is a telecommunications wiring supplier. If not, I can order the thing. It’s just a $25 manual one (Klein 76011B, if you are curious).

Replaced the indicator and taillight lenses, which made me realize that I need to get some more replacement bulbs, as their finishes are wearing off. There were also two screws which didn’t want to leave their spots in the metal and snapped off. Trying to figure out a good way to drill those out and then pour something like JB Weld in to re-tap the holes for new screws. I think I need to make a jig and put the whole light assembly under a drill press, but then, of course, some of the screws holding the light assemblies are stuck. Didn’t mess with those yet. I put the new lenses on for now, there are just a couple screws I will have to figure out later. They look much nicer and I’m sure they wlil let through much more light. I’ll have to ask around to see if any friends have had to re-tap holes before. Might mean I need a tap and die kit. I think I need to find some car buddies to share a garage and some tools with.

As if I didn’t have enough to do, I ended up buying myself a 1956 Chevy Bel Air 4dr Sedan (that’s the one with posts in the center, ie frames on the upper parts of the doors, as opposed to the Coupe, which just has the roof floating above) a bit ago. I used to own a 1956 Chevy 210 4 dr wagon when I was in Boulder and I have missed it very much. This car should fill in the gaps a bit. I was about to just send a ridiculously long message to my dad and realized I’ll probably have a bunch of messages about the car, so I added a ’1956 chevy’ category.

The car is about in twice as good of shape as my previous one. I drove it straight for a few weeks there and didn’t touch my Saturn besides to move it every few days so it wouldn’t get towed. Had to tweak the carburetor a little bit, which took more time than it should have. I’ll be getting the shop manual to help with that type of thing.

I’ve found that it leaks and I will have to replace some seals. I ordered the door and trunk seals, and realized that I will have to order the rear window seal as well. That should be fun. I really should grind down the rust under the rear window as long as I am doing that. Those are a few of the worst spots on the car, along with a spot on the back right end of the car and a bit under the headlights. Seems pretty good overall, but I now have to figure out how to keep the car out of the rain. Looks like I’ll have to get a car cover and potentially a garage spot somewhere.

I love these cars as they are, but there is one thing that could use some heavy improvement. The gas mileage. It’s about 10 mpg as is and not so great on emissions. Here are the current ideas:

Something like a Chevy Volt without the batteries, similar to how a diesel-electric train works. Or getting an engine from a Ford S-Max minivan European Turbodiesel and transmission. Should get easily over 70 mpg with better performance than my current 265 V8. The S-Max idea would be much easier, but I am enthralled with the diesel-electric idea. I’ve never seen it done in a car without batteries though, so I have no idea if components exist at this point to do something like this, compared to doing a normal electric car conversion.

White Zombie, World’s Fastest and Quickest Street Legal Electric Car

Here’s a comment I made on the NPR site about a story they did. A person from “The Detroit Bureau”, said that electric cars need to get up to 100 miles of range before EVs will be bought. Which ignores the fact that GM doesn’t try to sell EVs yet and so can’t actually have much data on this.

Here’s the show, so you can listen for yourself:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97295908

My comment:
“First of all, even if “The Detroit Bureau” is an independent auto news service, given their location, I can hardly believe that they would be anything but pro auto industry. What the industry doesn’t need is apologists, what it needs is can-do people that realize that in order to exist, not even succeed, they have to change with the times. Those times are coming to the point where it’s getting to be pretty irresponsible to own Hummers and Suburbans in their current condition. If you look at the average amount of energy expended by US citizens, it’s on the crazy side of high compared to other citizens of Earth and it’s not sustainable. For that matter, buying a Prius or Tesla isn’t sustainable, but they are at least steps in the right direction. What GM and the others should be doing is trying to change minds.

Right now most people in the auto industry think that people need a 100 mile range. That’s patently false. Most people, like myself, only need a fraction of that amount of driving most days. Even Bob Lutz, who doesn’t believe in global warming, agrees with this fact. Most days, I only go downtown on the bus, and/or up to my girlfriend’s place in my car, maybe down South. That’s 12 miles round trip, maybe 16 miles with errands. Any home built electric car can make 20 miles of range, and highway speeds, fairly cheaply. It’s just a little more work to get 40 miles of range, and some home built EVs can get this “holy grail” range of 100 miles. The car industry should be able to best these home built EVs by a huge margin, but all we hear are complaints, whining, and how they need more funding and bailouts. If I ran my business like GM, I would expect to go out of business. They were tanking before this economic downturn, and they’ll still be tanking if they’re given a bailout, unless they are forced to change their ways.

To respond directly to Paul, on what it will take for electric cars to succeed? Professional, wide-spread, advertising, promotion, and availability of electric cars. Whining and complaining never sold a product and it shouldn’t be expected to now. Switch half of the market over to electric cars with even a 40 mile range and have everyone hearing how little their neighbors spend on gas, seeing ads during the superbowl about how normal/fast/quiet they can be, can look good, and can save you over the cost of your car if you keep it for X years, and you will definitely see people buying them.

Feel free to respond on NPR’s site, or add your own 2 cents. Do you need to drive 100 miles every day?

Ian

1956 Chevy All Original!

"Ford Made in U.S.A." Front Grille Stamp

Ford

The people that have driven or even experienced in some way the EV1 and RAV4 want to buy these vehicles if they were only given the chance. After seeing my only EV1 in the wild and hearing shredding tire noise and no engine as the car left the stop light I was sitting at I also wanted one. That’s all it took. That’s your commercial. I had the biggest smile on my face. I would have bought any car that did something similar, but there was nothing available.

Go grab one of the couple EV1s that you guys have floating around by test tracks or wherever. Sit in the car. Turn it on. Take a few laps around the track. Go off GM grounds and get a coffee or a shake in the car and sit outside drinking your beverage. Listen to the comments of the people that ask about the car. Don’t discount people’s opinions about the car or GM’s actions, even if they’re negative. They aren’t directed towards you or anyone you know, they are directed at the frustration they have at being told they can’t buy the car you’re driving. They want in. Think about yourself being the proud owner of the car and hearing the amazed people talking about it and asking where they can get one. Think about the possible numbers if this many people in a tiny random sampling are interested in the car. Is there actually a market for this? Let your mind think of some of the basic things that could be done to produce the car more cheaply and think about how much money those simple changes would save. Go back to GM, and have a closed door meeting with some engineers and ask them each for their five easy money-saving ideas for producing something like this. Is it actually feasible?

A pdf of the page with my photo on it.

I’m proud to announce that a photo of mine will be printed in the Spring issue of Yes Magazine! Their focus is on sustainability and positive things that are being done and that can be done. Too much in the media these days is negative, and it’s great to have people putting energy into getting all of the good things their fair share of attention.

I’m happy that my photo will be in the magazine for a couple reasons. One is that the photo is of the EV1. I think this car was a game-changer that GM let go. I really think it should have been mass-produced. I also happy that this is a photo above an article by Sherry Boschert. She has been a long-time voice in the EV world and somewhat recently put out a book called “Plug-in Hybrids, The Cars That Will Change America”. It’s worth a read.

Check out Yes Magazine:
yesmagazine.org/

I shot a bunch of pictures of one of the cooler cars out there, one which I think holds a lot of historic significance, a GM EV1 (though they would possibly rather none exist in any capacity). They let a few universities get a hold of some to use as test platforms and will only let them run in hybrid orientations, apparently.

This car is mostly functional, and will get some sort of small motorcycle engine tucked in that will kick in on the highway to be able to cruise indefinitely (well, with enough gas that is).

You can see that quite a crowd came out in freezing weather to see this car. I felt like we were having to clandestinely come see the car in an alley.

Click any of the images above or this link to see all of my EV1 photos on flickr.

I don’t know which university this is below, but it feels a bit crazy to be hacking apart 1 of about 40 vehicles in existence. The youtube post says that they have theirs running as a turbojet/electric hybrid.

(for some reason the first turbojet video address got changed)