The bad, the ugly, and even the good.

   Today was a good day in the land of mechanical beings.  I feel like I made a lot of progress on the van today in a few areas, some of which was simply discovery.  It rained mostly all day and I didn't originally plan to work on the van at all.  Well, my curiousity led me to it, so I decided to fix a few things.  I had plenty of indoor work within the van, so I wasn't too worried about getting soaked.  I did however, find something wrong on the outside during my morning walk around.


I was mildly horrified to see this. Not tryin' to see dollar signs everywhere I look...

    When I got in the van this morning, I sat on the bed platform for a few minutes collecting my thoughts about the work ahead and listening to the rain, getting a feel for the van.  I looked over to the right and noticed what you see in the picture above.  Water was pouring in rapidly.  I went to the other side and saw the lens had broken and the gasket had become brittle, causing rain water to enter.  The driver side of the van was no different, even though that light was working.  Looks like I will have to replace both lenses and gaskets, and one bulb.  The front park light lenses aren't leaking yet, but the plastic lenses are somewhat warped. Time to empty the penny jar and head to the pick-n-pull.


You can see water flowing right into the top of the lens, going right into the van.

  

Driver side was the same. Chit.

   Moving back to the inside, I approached the problem of the lo beam headlights not working.  Tested the dimmer switch (floor clicker) with a test light and no output on the lo beam side.  I pulled the switch and performed a continuity test and sure enough, no beep.  I went out to the yard to see if I could find a working one on something else, but all I ran into was bad switches and spiders...

I can see from here there is certainly not a dimmer switch in this truck...

   Well, let's go back to the van to see what else we can find to spend money on.  The blower motor for the heater didn't work.  I had already tested the 3-stage switch and all wiring up to the motor, and no problem with power.  I pulled the blower motor and discovered the fan was rusted and siezed.  I gave it a liberal bath in PB Blaster and begun to spin the fan by hand. I also ran 400-grit sandpaper across the surface.  I cleaned it with contact cleaner and spun it again by hand until the 'friction' disappeared from the wheel.  I tested it with a car battery, and it would have taken off a finger it spun so fast.  Problem solved by cleaning, no money spent there. That was good.  I also found my windshield car shade and gave it a test fit in the van.  Not bad, not bad.  I also use it to lay on the ground if I have to get under the vehicle out on the road, handy for that. 

Shady Summer Van

   Still waiting to put the dash back on til I replace the defroster ducting and a heater control cable.  I replaced the pcv valve and air filter, both were long overdue.  I'll change the oil and give it a tune up in the next day or two, when I can find some time.  I may have enough primer to cover the whole van, so I would like to start on the body soon.  I'm so ready to drive this thing! 

Can you guess which filter is the new one?

  

 

 

 

 

It's Alive!

   Ok, so let's bring you up to speed, so to speak.  A few days have gone by since my last confession.  Haha, just a jokey.  A few days have passed time wise since yesterday's blog post, so ya gots to know what it been...
  

It didn't look too bad here, other than being a sludge and grime factory. However, something sinister lurked beneath...

       So I pulled the doghouse to see if the field mice had nested inside the air cleaner or anything, but was dismayed at what I saw.  When I pulled the shroud away, 'cotton candy' insulation came down from above, from up under the dash. The picture above is actually taken after being blown out with the air hose.  I leaned in and looked underneath the dash, and the little fucker had stuffed insulation in every nook and cranny within the dash region. That dash was insulated better than a 58-foot Reefer trailer.  I will admit to gagging twice from the smell, and vomiting in my mouth once from a rat turd nearly dropping into my mouth.  They don't call them 'droppings' for nothing.  In retrospect, it's probably best to wear an N95 mask during the first journey into the dark unknown...
   Here are some pictures of the horror which lied beneath.

Not what I wanted to see. On the good side, there wasn't any in the air cleaner housing...

I mean EVERY little nook and cranny was filled with this shit. Literally.

And this nonsense falls down at me, adding further excitement to the scene.

   I knew at that point I was committed to pulling the dash out and going over every square-inch (or every deci-whatever for you cupcakes) and refurbishing this entire 'piss bomb' zone.  As I had suspected, the pink panther had struck, and packed his insulation throughout. And he was even kind enough to chew through a few essential wires, and ruin one heater vent control cable with his urine-fest.  At this point, my tongue was plenty lubed up with cuss.


What lies beneath...

   All in all, it took me ten minutes to remove the dash, including dropping the steering/shift column, and about an hour to thoroughly remove the waste and properly clean it.  I put the cleaner to it and let the garden hose have it's way with the dash area, so it was like new again there, behind the scenes.  Almost. 

Clean and ready to live again.

    By now, I was half-frustrated from the whole ordeal, so to turn my frown upside down, I wanted to hear it run.  I checked the oil level, half a quart low, and didn't look too black actually.  Checked the radiator to see if it was dry, and to my surprise it was half full of antifreeze.  Great!  A visual inspection shown that the rat-sized mice had gnawed the tops off a couple of spark plug boots at the distributor cap, exposing the tip of the electrode.  That, and a little 'condensation rust' kinda thing going on, and everything else under the hood looked to be in order, more or less.

Meet the 292 cid Chevy L6, aka 'the big six'. You can Google this motor, and guys are building them to this day for racing and street. Turbo motors!

   I poured a gallon of fresh fuel into the tank and grabbed a local battery and threw it in the van.  At first it wouldn't turn over due to the battery terminals not making a good connection.  After a litte twisty on the clamps I got it to turn over.  Sounded like an old tractor lumping over on a cold winter morning.  I shot a squirt of ether in the snout and the motor kicked right over.  It took a few minutes of cranking and approximately 30,000 gas pedal pumps with the trigger foot, but eventually got it to run on its own, without the panther piss.  It was alive!  I mean, I was told "it ran when it was parked", but you never know for your self until you hit the key.  The 'three-on-the-tree' shifter was bound up, but I finally got it to go between first and second gears.  So I put 'er in low and let out the clutch and away we went.  Right over the horse manure mound.  Right past the satellite dish duck pond, made it all the way up to the shop, and into freedom.  This was fucking excellent.  I had motor, power, brakes(ish), steering, all the things that make a choo choo boogaloo.  Now I had to fine tune a few things before I took it any further.


Clean machine, and on the scene.

   With the dash out and a plan in my mind, I quickly got to work repairing things.  All wiring was checked and I ended up only having to re-terminate four wires, and solder one back into the headlight switch plug.  Likely, I will replace the headlight switch, but I will try to refurbish it first.  I pretty much have zero budget on this project, so I will try to recycle any item I can from the van or into the van.  With the exception of the necessary items bought at O'Reilly's to make the van run right or be safe, there will be no other items purchased for the van.  My goal is to make it a formidable and fun camper and cargo hauler, if necessary. 
   There won't be any spaceship gadgets or plush-van doo dads here fellows and ladies.  Just the bare bones.  Anything this project will need will have to come from in-house.  Meaning I will have to find it lying around, or build it myself.  Yet my needs are simple.  Utilitarian camping, perhaps.  Whatever it is, this van and I are connected.

  So here is where I am at right now. At my computer.  Haha, just a jokey.  I poured half a quart of automatic transmission fluid in the crankcase and ran it for a while to loosen up any deposits and what-have-you.  The thing sounds like a Singer sewing machine with some clackety going on up inside the valve cover, and the trans fluid mix has already quieted that down.  It now runs a bit rough and backfires through the carb when you get into it, so a valve may be sticking.  I'll run it again tomorrow and maybe run some Seafoam through it.  I have a new oil filter, oil, pcv valve, air filter, fuel filter which I will install tomorrow.  I have already replaced the alternator belt, smoked it off during initial startup.  Other than that, it will still need a tune-up and maybe a tire.  I had to replace a bunch of bulbs in the dash and front turn signal bulbs.  Tracking them down one by one.  I realized that the 'idiot' lights in the dash are not very informative.  Staying within the parameters of the budget, I swiped the gauge trio I had originally purchased over a year ago for my El Camino.  I figured the Elco could do without them for now, since it was having the motor rebuilt.

Factory 'idiot' warning lights.  Pathetic, at best.  Accessory, at most.

Test fire of the dash lights and gauge lights. 

   That's about where I stand at the moment.  I may have an in-dash stereo to replace the 'brick' of a factory radio.  By the way, the dash is now matte black, that blue color was hideous.  The replacement stereo will actually reside in the panel above the original, and accessory switches will take the place of the factory radio, mounted in an ABS panel covering the hole. 

Oh, hell no.

   Tomorrow is Friday and I will have some new pics and maybe a vid of the motor purring. We'll see, gotta lotta shit to do...




 

A nothing worth something.

   I haven't blogged in a while. Life has a funny way of distracting you if you look away for a second.  I've been thinking a lot lately about blogging, and getting back into it. The closest I really get is sharing mechanical knowledge or project updates on Facebook. Well, Facebook is fickle, as we all know, so I wanted to express myself better through a blog. I have a couple of blogs already, one for my book, and one for daily life and oddities I encounter.  But I wanted a blog to better showcase some of my builds and restorations, some of my core passions. I have a couple of projects I am working on right now, but I lack enthusiasm when it comes to blogging about them simply because I bounce back and forth between them, so my blogging would be a bit sporadic. This project will give me plenty to write about, I'm sure.
   Well, recently we were given (yes, given, as in a gift) a 1976 Chevy G20 Van. By all means, please don't let that sound too glamorous, you haven't seen the van; yet.  I had seen this van many times along my strolls through "the woods of classics", it sat five feet from my 1950 Ford F-1 when I drug it out of the woods. I never paid it much attention because for one, it was becoming part of the foliage, and two, it had that 'look' to it. You know, the look which makes it hard for you to decide if it's a 'pedo-cruiser', or a carpet layers van (albeit they could be one in the same).  When I was told the van was ours free and clean, I was ecstatic inside, but in a bittersweet way. I relished the thought of another useful tool we could benefit from. But part of me was saying "it's been taken by the woods and nature, and they may not want to give it back".

This was my initial observation of the van. Oh boy...

The first steps to restoring a car? Weed whacker, Deep Woods Off, Raid wasp spray, air tank, tow chain, and cuss, for your tongue.

I think at first I was more concerned with the plethora of hungry mosquitos than I was with the overall condition of the van.
 

   It actually took me two days to go down there (the back 40) and assess the situation. By then I had already been compiling ideas in my head on ways I can customize this huge vehicle. But I was taking a casual approach to it. See, I had already been working on my '73 El Camino (454) days before that trying to get it road-worthy. After running into a few setbacks on the Elky, I was a bit leary on what a money pit this van could possibly be.
   Rewind a few weeks: I had just hauled my beloved El Camino up from Texas in hopes of finishing it soon and getting back on the road. I had taken the nearly-worthless 350 (sbc) engine out of my Elco and replaced it with the much more brutish 454 (bbc) motor. I hadn't tied up the loose ends on the Elco before I moved (eventually) back to Missouri, so the El Camino was only about 80% done. I got it up here and started to fiddle with it, putting the remaining items on it, such as the radiator, alternator, headers, water pump, when I decided to spin the crank just for good measure. As (my) luck would have it, the (newly rebuilt) engine was completely locked up. Later I found that the hood was sitting high in the back, causing rain water to funnel down into the engine. *(insert FML FML FML here)

I've seen worse, but it all has to come apart. I suspect the rings are rusted to the cylinder walls on a couple, or maybe the wrist pins are frozen. Regardless, a lot of extra work I wasn't counting on.

 

   Soooo, I now realized that the van was a God-send, being that my Elco would have to be completely torn down and some parts replaced, causing it to go to the back burner to 'de-funk and re-rag'.  But wait! I haven't even gotten the van out of it's "less-than-final" resting place. I don't even know if it runs and drives. Shit. Well, time to go drag that big bitch out of the woods and see what she's all about...


All tires were flat, had to replace 2 with ones I found that 'held air'...

   Oh, before I get carried away, I had to set off spider bombs in it before I stepped foot in it. Upon opening the driver door, I noticed 3 brown recluses of good size, and numerous other species of spider roaming freely in the cockpit. Die, octo-bitches!
   After swapping two of the wheels with shredded tires on them for 'good' ones and airing up the other two, I believe the submarine bus was almost ready to move out of the country and into the city, so to speak.  My fiance was cool enough to tug this boat to it's new spot with the Z71. I was nervous, because I had no idea if the transmission, brakes, or wheels were frozen up. I knew the brake pedal was non-functional; frozen solid. The first part of the journey was on a slight downhill incline, so I didn't want to damage the bumper or tailgate of the Z71. I really didn't know what to expect. Ok, so I panicked right off the bat and slammed on the brake pedal, which caused the pedal to become unstuck, so I guess the brakes did work after all.


This lil tree frog was chillin' above the wheel, giving us his blessing for the van. If a frog digs a van, then I dig the van.

   We got the van moved to a spot that was close to electricity and water so I/we could begin cleaning it. The plan was as cKy suggested: Infiltrate. Destroy. Rebuild.  I would finally get to go inside and survey this thing. Not liking what I saw was a fucking understatement.  This thing was a disaster zone on the inside, and riddled with rat shit and the strong, stenchy smell of mouse pee pee.  Not to mention the snake skin sheddings. Oh yeah, that was a lovely find! The following pictures don't do the smell any justice. This van makes me realize that nothing in this world is free.

Overall, it didn't look too bad to me. Another man's treasure...
 

Disguisting inside, but it was free, right?

All that mouse crap, arrgg! I'm beginnign to despise those rodents. And I'm thinking about firing my cats, they are obviously not doing their jobs...

 

Yeah, snake skin from shedding in the back of my van, not cool. Regroup with flashlight and pistol on my hip...
 

And what do we do with all that trash and junk scattered about our van? This right here...
 

 
Not a bad first day for the van (nor I, either). Got the uber-gross carpet out, a lot of the trash, and T even washed the passenger door...

   The G20 van had a very busy first day of re-animation. We accomplished a lot, although one might not tell. I haven't even told you what kind of nightmare I found in the front of the vehicle, I'll save that for tomorrow's blog entry.