Fixing up a '71 Grand Safari

My '73 just went through the same brake problems in July. Nothing like getting out in the 97F and 90% humidity weather replacing calipers, pads, cylinders, hoses, and bleeding the entire thing...

 

I never had access to an oxy/acet rig, since the shop was part of a gas station, but I know heating and then PB, Kroil or even paraffin when hot unlocks threads, and the brake fluid is unharmed.

 

Yeah, and watching them race to see which one hits triple digits first.

 

Dang! You certainly have been busy. Thanks for taking the time to document it all and share it with us.
I can't believe how much you daughter has grown!

 

The heat and humidity have been terrible here. Suddenly, it's almost too cold now. It's funny because when I look back on the pictures it's easy to forget how miserable it's been not having shade to work in.

Orthmann, I know! She's growing so fast that on a day to day basis I can still actually notice it. My 2nd daughter is now over a year old and growing equally fast. If it'll help them sleep through the night and go to the bathroom themselves, it's worth it!

I was on my way to pick up Rose because the babysitter called and said she had thrown up when I heard, and felt, something let loose in the rear of the car. It had the feel of something under sprung tension letting go. Then a rubbing noise came from the rear. I assumed something had let loose in the rear shoes. I managed to limp the car home and found that I had incorrectly installed the auto-adjusting shoe lever. When I got back I took both rear wheels off and found the lever had fallen off and was bent. I straightened and reinstalled it. In this picture you will see the spring goes from the back of the shoe to the lever, which is installed behind another lever. There is supposed to be a piece of the lever that fits on the front side of the top bracket.





I checked and the other side was the same way so I reinstalled it correctly. Below is a picture of the correct way to install the lever.





The powercoater finally finished with all of the parts so I went and picked them up. I'm working within a pretty tight budget with the insurance money, but I believe this step was necessary to have a finished product to the standards that I want the car. I checked all the parts I got back with pictures I had taken before to make sure nothing was missing.







One good side effect of having everything powdercoated is that they aren't just protected well, they're shiny.





All the sheetmetal and front end fiberglass was present. The core support looks a far sight better than it did.







April called on her way to work and said that steam was coming from under the hood of the Suburban. I loaded up a bunch of tools and went to her work. Fortunately, the only problem was the clamp on the new heater hose fitting had cut into the hose. I cut the end off, pulled up some slack, reinstalled the hose, added some fluid and it was fixed. Unfortunately, this ruined any productivity for the day.





The fender is back, devoid of paint or rust.





Notice the top left of where the patch panel has been cut. There are some pinholes there that didn't show up before the sandblasting. The only correct way to fix this is to cut out more metal.





A closer look.





Once again, I'll use the piece I cut out as a template to make a new piece. You can see the rust on the brace, though it doesn't show up in the picture as it does in reality. Unfortunately I found this out after, and because of, the sandblasters. I went to Lowe's and bought some sand so that I can sandblast this area myself. I could not find the Honey Coat that I used previously but did some internet research and found a 3M product called 3M Rust Fighter, which is a paraffin wax product just like the Honey Coat. I'll prime this area with weld-through primer, coat it with the 3M product and weld it back together.





Then the fuel pump went out on the '57. Getting a new one isn't as simple as just ordering one, because there is a lot of controversy over which pump actually fits. After reading a lot of stuff on the internet I ordered one I thought would work best. It took a few days to arrive.





The old pump was leaking gasoline from where the top and bottom part of the body was crimped together. After a test, the new pump showed no signs of leaking.





Also, the overdrive has not been disengaging as it should with the installation of the new transmission. After a lot of reading I have determined that when the pedal is pushed to the floor and the kickdown switch is activated, it not only disengages the overdrive, but it also grounds out the ignition coil for a brief moment. The torque of the engine will prevent the prawl from disengaging if a load is kept on it, so a momentary "miss" is created by grounding out the coil through the overdrive solenoid and then as soon as the prawl in the solenoid is disengaged the ground is broken causing a seemless disengagement of the overdrive once the pedal is pushed to the floor. This is the kick-down switch and bracketry I made a while back. I printed a couple online Borg Warner overdrive manuals from the internet so I'm going to be following them to diagnose the cause of the problem. I'm hoping it is not this switch because they aren't cheap or easy to find and I'd just as soon replace a broken wire than try to rebuild a broken switch.

 

I had to read your description above a couple times to understand why it was important to ground the ignition (I may be slow but I'm slow); hopefully, it'll just be a connection issue.

 

I've tried to describe this a few times and I've determined that I'm not good at explaining the situation. I've tried different ways, but I can't seem to articulate what's going on. I had a time of it today. I was going to sandblast that wagon fender brace, but I forgot to cut open the sandbag I bought yesterday. Lowe's always stored their sandbags outdoors, but now they're in an area with no roof, so the sand had a lot of moisture. I had to spread it all out on a bunch of paper and try to dry it. It still didn't get fully dry. Since I couldn't move forward with that I tackled the '57 overdrive problem. That took all day and what a mess.

 

What was the '57s final outcome?

 

Well, since you ask...

This past weekend I intended to get the patch panel welded into The Clam's holy fender. First, I had to sandblast the area behind the new piece I had just cut out. Lowe's has decided to store their sand outside, under no roof, which means that their sand has moisture in it. I forgot to cut the bag open and dry it out so the sand was very wet which makes it unusable for my small blaster. I dried the sand out by laying it out on a newspaper end roll, but it still didn't dry out even after sitting there most of the afternoon. Progress on this front was dead.





I had printed out a couple Borg Warner overdrive manuals because the '57 wasn't kicking out of overdrive properly when I would push my foot to the floor and this was a good time to tackle the problem. Driving the car in some areas was a nuisance because in order to kick the car out of overdrive you had to push the pedal to the floor, let up off the gas and then floor it very quickly. This was not a smooth process and was annoying.



This Borg Warner overdrive unit was essentially the same no matter what transmission it was bolted behind. They basically took the tailshaft off of each manufacture's transmission and adapted their Borg Warner behind it. As a result, the manuals are basically universal for all applications of each particular make and model car. The Borg Warner model that was on the 1955-1957 Chevrolet's were a Borg Warner R10H-1.





Up in the air it went to see what was going on underneath.





According to the manual(s), the first step to diagnosing a non-kickdown-from-overdrive problem was testing the solenoid. The solenoid engages a pawl, which is what engages and disengages the overdrive. When you push the accelerator to the floor it pushes a button under the hood which disengages the overdrive for passing gear. The pawl cannot be retracted as long as there is torque still applied to the transmission so the ignition must be momentarily disrupted in order to allow the pawl to disengage. As soon as it does, the ignition can resume operation and the car continues with the overdrive disengaged. It achieves this by grounding out the ignition coil through the solenoid by using relay contacts inside the solenoid. The coil is grounded out by the contact of the pawl to the lock out shaft. Once the pawl is retracted it breaks the ground and the ignition continues as normal. To test this you must ground the ignition-cut-out on the solenoid, which is the #6 screw.....





then as the engine is running, push the button under the hood by hand. If this kills the engine, that means there is a problem with the solenoid. If it does not kill the engine, there is a list of other things to test.





Pushing the button killed my engine, which meant my solenoid was faulty. I took the solenoid off the car and went through the testing procedure to determine what was wrong with it. The strange thing is that everything tested fine with the solenoid. The pawl engaged properly. Using a test light, I determined the ignition-cut-out contacts were working properly. The spring had the proper tension on it. This was all very confusing. I continued to recheck, reread both manuals and check continuity between all the wires and connections. Everything was perfect.



Eventually, I found that an animal had been under the hood and chewed through the ignition-cut-out wire that goes from the kick-down switch under the hood to the coil. It still had contact, but the insulation was gone and some of the copper was chewed away. I also found a small footnote that said that this wire must be connected to the side of the coil opposite of the ignition switch. Mine was wired on the same side as the ignition switch, however it had worked with my previous transmission so I'm not sure what the difference is. Either way, I moved it where the manual instructed. I pulled the entire overdrive harness out of the car, cut the tape off and separated the broken wire, the one that runs from the kick-down switch to the coil, and replaced it.







This meant removing the wire from the kick-down pigtail, removing the old solder and resoldering the new wire back in place.





I was hopeful that this would fix the problem, but it didn't. Not knowing where to go from here I began testing all the other systems in the unit, like the kick-down switch. Everything checked out good. All the wires were good. All the connections were good, but each time I tested the solenoid, it was good. I went online to see if I could find how to disassemble the solenoid and noticed in the picture that something was off. If you look closely, you can spot it.





The end of the pawl is supposed to have a head on it. Theoretically, I knew this, but I assumed that it must be inside the solenoid and I couldn't see it. I assumed it must work in a way I didn't yet understand, but after seeing the picture I realized that mine was broken. I removed the solenoid from my other transmission and it was in tact. I got mirrors and an extendable magnet to make sure the head of the old pawl wasn't stuck inside.





I installed the new solenoid and it worked perfectly. I was glad to have that over with. Later that day April and I drove to church, which is about 37 miles away. Halfway there the kickdown feature stopped working again. I was very afraid that the new solenoid pawl had been snapped off as well. If that was the case, not only would I have to find and buy a new solenoid, I wouldn't be able to install it because obviously this transmission has a problem that causes it to shear solenoid pawls. I couldn't even imagine how that would be possible, but I didn't rule it out as a possibility because it seemed the most likely issue. We got home around 11:30 that night and I knew that if I didn't take the solenoid off then I wouldn't be able to sleep with my mind racing trying to figure out what was going on. After the first transmission going out and then having it rebuilt only to find it was incorrect, finding the new one and three years later finally getting it sorted, I was beyond dejected and fearing the worst. I removed the solenoid and found that the pawl was not sheared. I tested the new solenoid and once again found all of it's components to be in correct working order. I did remember that one potential cause of these issues was a bad connection with the wires. The only thing I could imagine was that the problem with the old solenoid had been a broken pawl but the new solenoid had a bad connection at one of the wires. Two different problems that would cause the same issue. I cleaned it a little and reinstalled them. I took it for a test drive, now around midnight, and it didn't work. As I turned around to come home it began working and has been working since. I am assuming that there was a bad connection and it finally made contact. I'm going to see if it continues to work properly and if it goes out again I'll make sure to clean all the contacts thoroughly in the daylight.

 

Whew! Just got caught up on all the auto shenanigans around your place. Great report, the devil is in the details they say. Where's Jacob been? I didn't see him helping out any on these projects?

 

"Devil's in the details." One of my mantras. The reason why the interrupt wire has to be on the dizzy side of the coil (COIL NEG) instead of the ignition switch (COIL POS) is that when the interrupt circuit works, you only want the spark energy directed to ground but the coil's primary winding still energized. Hooking that wire to the positive side of the primary grounds all input power, turning the coil off, and stalling the engine.

 

Anyway, here's to hoping the system works for a long time. But if the pawl is replaceable, you should source a few to have on-hand.

 

Believe it or not, Jacob is 16 now and driving. I don't see him much because he is involved with more sports teams than I can count. When he was younger I had tried to get him to save up his money and told him I'd help him build a car, but he's more interested in other and more immediate things. He's kind of turned into the "why don't you just give it to me" kind of kid. I really hope he grows out of that.

I'd like to get a few extra solenoids. I have ended up really, really liking these factory o/d trans and how they operate. So if you grounded the positive side, would you have an excess of voltage that was trying to ground through the solenoid and it could damage the solenoid?

 

*shakes Magic 8-Ball* "My sources say no." Realistically, if the circuit is momentary only, there'll be a little heat in the wire and the solenoid winding, so as long as you let off quickly, I don't see any real harm. But, as long as that wire's attached to the negative on the coil, you should not have any problems.

 

No, but if my understanding of how this circuit works is correct, you'll interrupt the coil circuit but it is still potentially charged, leading to a stumble\misfire as the coil still has energy in it to fire the spark plugs for a few cycles. Grounding the negative side of the coil is the same as grounding the output lead to the distributor and will keep the coil from firing the spark plugs without such hesitations. Modern cars with spark control ground the negative side of the coil to keep the engine from firing on command.