Whittling Down Some Small Parts For The Barracuda On The Unimat Lathe

It's not often I have a project small enough to use the Unimat DB200, so when this project presented itself, I took advantage of it. The rocker molding on my 1966 Barracuda uses nylon/plastic "push rivets" to hold the bottom edge of the molding to the car. They are small plastic things that have fingers which are pressed through a hole in the molding, then through a hole in the car's rocker panel, after which the center pin is driven in with a hammer to expand the fingers outward, keeping the rivet in place. A flange on the outer end of the rivets holds the molding flush to the car. Below is a photo showing an original white rivet next to some black ones I found at O-Reilly Auto Parts.

Tranters Patent Parlor Pistol - Grip Repair

This antique gun has seen better days. Not surprising, given how old it is. My guess is it's circa 1880. In a previous blog, I did some other repairs to this gun, seen here.

Yesterday's task was to repair the left grip that had a chunk of walnut broken out. I'd previously glued a cracked part of the grip together, but the repair done yesterday and today will hopefully get it to look somewhat better.

1930s Harrington & Richardson Trapper .22 Front Sight Repair

I have this old .22 revolver from the early 30's that had a funky replacement barrel on it. I happened to find a old original replacement barrel online so I snapped it up. Upon receiving the barrel, I noticed the front blade sight looked to have been replaced by someone in the long-ago past. I think the sight is supposed to be blued steel, but this sight is made from copper. For all I know, someone flattened a penny back in 1960 and soldered it in when the original broke off. Whoever did the repair really ladled on the solder but it didn't have good adhesion, so it had cracks and gaps in many areas. I didn't get a good photo of it but here are a couple of the best ones I could find, looking through my photos prior to the repair.

1966 Barracuda Post-Paint Reassembly

The long and tedious job of reassembly is next on the to-do list for the 'Cuda. One of the first jobs was to put the windshield back in. I used a new rubber seal. Later in this post I installed the lock strip.

1966 Barracuda Emblem Paint Refurbishing

The front and rear Fish emblems used to have paint accenting the fish. It's getting quite thin. The top emblem goes on the front grill and the bottom piece goes between the rear glass and the trunk lid.

1966 Barracuda New Paint - Part 2 of 2

The dastardly deed is done. Painting is complete. Well, almost. The trunk lid still needs a lot of work. The rest of the car is painted though. It wasn't without problems. The main problem is that I'm not a good painter. I do it so rarely that I don't know what setting to use if I run into issues, like I did... I attribute it to my using a brand spankin' new Harbor Freight $12 HVLP paint gun and my lack of knowledge. It is what it is... There is massive orange peel and several runs in the paint. And flies. Lots of flies. If there were a million flies outside, there were at least half a million flies inside the closed garage. They must live in there.

Anyway, after doing the underside of the hood and door jambs outside, I installed the doors, then drove the car back into the garage to paint, you know, to get away from the flies....

1966 Barracuda New Paint - Part 1 of 2

I've put off doing the major bodywork on this car for a long, long time. A couple of previous posts from two months ago and had me doing the left front fender (fender)  and the left rear quarter panel (quarter panel) of the car. That work was actually done in July of 2018 and February of 2019, respectively, so I didn't get to the right side of the car until four years from the time I did the front fender. Four years to get all the bodywork done shows how much I dislike bodywork. But as I mentioned in a previous post, I wasn't about to hand over $15,000 to a body shop to do the work, and my philosophy is that if I am able to do the work on my old car, I should do it. After all, isn't that what us car guys do, work on our cars?

Well, the long, and sometimes painful, hours of bodywork have paid off. I've actually started painting the car. The Chrysler paint code is RR-1, Yellow (yup, plain ol' Yellow). It's what came on the car from the factory and I wanted to stick with the original color. Here's the first bit of paint on the inner door frames and gas cap:

1966 Barracuda Trunk Lid Repair - Part 1

Time to tackle the trunk lid rust. This trunk lid has less damage than the one that came with the car. Below is the driver's side corner partially complete.

1966 Barracuda Right Side Body Panel Repairs

(Work actually done 7/20/2021) From a distance, the car didn't look that bad on the right side. Upon closer inspection, there were several areas that needed significant attention. The first being the right rear quarter panel and fender.

1966 Barracuda Front Suspension Strut Rod Bushing Replacement

(Work actually done 7/1/2021) Do these strut rod bushings look ok? Nope, time for new ones.

1966 Barracuda Driver's Side Rear Quarter and Fender Bodywork

(Work actually done 2/27/2019) Time to start work on the rear quarters. Oh, joy. Bodywork is not my forte. But I figure that someone with an old car needs to put in the time to fix up things if they can. Sure I could hire it out but that's not my style if I can do the work myself. And my brother recently told me that when he had the car, he took it to a local well-known body shop (John's Auto Body in Poulsbo) to ask what they would charge to do body and paint. The guy looked the car over and said, "Tell you what, bring me $10,000 and I'll let you know when I need more."

On that note, here's the better of the two rear quarters that needs fixing:

1966 Barracuda Driver's Side Front Fender Repair

(Work actually done 7/12/2018) The fender on the Barracuda needs a little help. It has a boo-boo.

Duncan Model 60 Parking Meter

I picked up this gem a couple of months ago while on a small anniversary celebration trip to Fairhaven, near Bellingham. We were walking around town and came across a small hole in the wall eclectic store that had quite the assortment of "stuff". Amongst the stuff was this parking meter. I've always been intrigued by them, so the $35 asking price sounded very reasonable. Home it came.

Unimat-SL DB-200 Motor/Spindle Bracket Modification

I may have said in the previous post that there would probably be no more projects on this lathe. Well that didn't prove true. I decided to do some whittling on the motor bracket. The reason for this bit of work is because the hunk of steel that encompassed the spindle was way too stiff, and the screw that clamps the bracket to the main spindle needed to be tightened a bunch for the clamping action to do its job. I figured if I removed some metal on the bracket, it would be easier to clamp. Here's what I started with. The red is the main part I planned on cutting out, plus a few minor touch-ups.

Unimat-SL DB-200 Tommy Bars and Marking (Zeroing) Pin

7/4/2022 update:

I did a little fiddling on the lathe today. I made two more Tommy bars. What I started with were two punch blanks that my dad had picked up from somewhere eons (50 years?) ago (or maybe he even made them in school shop, who knows). They had never been hardened, so I used two of them as a starting point.

Unimat-SL DB-200 Teensy Weensy Micro Mini Lathe

I'm not sure I can call this a real lathe but it was marketed as one. And it does make chips. Very small chips. Someone online said, "it makes steel wool." I now know what they mean. But this lathe wasn't bought to make stuff on a regular basis. I mainly got it because it is so cute and comes in its own little box.

1957 Petter Diesel Engine Gets A New Air Cleaner

Prior to buying this engine, I'd called the previous owner and asked him some questions. One was about the air cleaner, or more accurately, about the missing air cleaner in the photos. I asked if he had the air cleaner. He said something to the effect that it does have an air filter but not the original. When I went to buy the engine, the below photo is what I found mounted on the engine. It's the white pleated thing. He said it was a vacuum cleaner filter (!) but it works fine.

Installing The Choke In The Cushman

Well that didn't go as planned. Yesterday when I made the choke screws, I figured I'd have the choke butterfly installed in a half an hour, tops. What I failed to remember was that not only the choke butterfly and screws were missing, but also a choke rod spring was missing. Ok, so no big deal. I'll just rummage through my small assortment of springs and find one that works. Not so fast, cupcake. I did find a spring that looked like it would work, but upon further inspection, it didn't fit over the choke rod casting. No big deal, I'll just heat up the spring, anneal it, bend it around some, then re-harden it. After two failed attempts, I finally realized it would be faster and easier to just re-shape the spring without all the annealing/hardening business. Fortunately, the spring I'd found was long enough that I could sacrifice two failed attempts and still have enough spring material to make a third one. This first photo shows the finished product and the two failures.

Cushman Carburetor Choke Butterfly And Screws

When I got this Cushman, the choke cable had been disconnected from the carburetor. The previous owner said the cable was rusted stuck, which it was, but he failed to mention to me that the choke butterfly and screws were not in the carburetor. He said he'd been through the carburetor, so he knew the butterfly was missing. No matter, I was sure I could find the missing parts online. Nope. Apparently this Keihin carburetor is maybe specific to this type of engine, I don't know. The engine does start fairly easily without a choke but in the wintertime, I'm sure a choke would be helpful. So what's one to do? Why, make the missing parts, of course. Here's what I had to start with:

1985 Cushman Turf-Truckster

A couple weeks or so ago another toy followed me home. This one needs some love. Quite a bit actually, as do most things that follow me home. This is a 1985 Cushman Turf-Truckster.

1957 Petter AVA1 Diesel Engine "Overload Stop"

If anyone having an older Petter diesel engine has read the starting procedure in the manual, they've no doubt come across something called an Overload Stop. Folks may not understand what this mechanism does. I was one of those folks when I bought my 1948 Gibson D tractor that has a Petter AC1Z diesel engine on it. There was this funky lever that the instructions (and previous owner) said to move down and release. I (and the previous owner) had no idea what it did but I found out later that it is called "Overload Stop". And not until I got this new-to-me AVA1 engine did I realize what the Overload Stop actually does. On the AC1Z engine, the fuel injector pump rack is enclosed so I can't see what is going on, but on this AVA1, the pump and rack are hanging out there for all to see, and the Overload Stop is also right there. Well, if my engine had one, it would be right there, but unfortunately the Overload Stop contraption was missing. Not having anything better to do while recovering from rotator cuff surgery, I decided to make one today on the Smithy mill.

1957 Petter AVA1 Diesel Engine Welding Broken Cast Iron Pump Gland Clamp

One of the cast iron clamps that seals the Gardner-Denver water pump shaft on the Petter engine's trailer is broken into three pieces and is missing some chunks. Someone had brazed it together in the past and filled in a lot of voids with what looks like JB Weld.

1957 Petter AVA1 Diesel Engine Loose Flywheel

Ok, it's not as bad as the title sounds, but the flywheel was slowly working itself outward on the crankshaft. Thus the interference with the fan shroud that I'd noticed the first time I started this engine. I had previously spent a day tweaking the shroud around so it didn't scrape on the flywheel and I'd thought to myself that the shroud was sure a close fit to the flywheel, but it didn't dawn on me that the flywheel could be the culprit. Today I started the engine and noticed the rubbing noise again. Hmm, there must be something going on. I then realized the flywheel had moved closer to the shroud. Time to take action.

1957 Petter AVA1 Diesel Engine

Another project followed me home recently. And I fully admit I'm a sucker for small (a somewhat relative term in this case), older hand-crank diesel engines. This particular engine is a British Petter model AVA1 single cylinder diesel engine, and dates to approximately 1957. Maybe 1956. Without further ado, here's a photo:

Craftsman 313.54403 Oxygen Regulator Leak and Fix

 I bought a Sears Craftsman oxy-acetylene welding kit back in the 1970s. For the most part it's worked fine over the years but maybe 15 or 20 years ago the oxygen regulator began leaking such that the low pressure side would slowly creep up in pressure from the set point if the oxygen wasn't being used. A couple of days ago I decided to search the net to see if I could find a rebuild kit for the regulator. In the process I found a site where someone showed where he'd taken the sealing part out of his regulator and sanded it down to make it work again. Kind of. He said that the pressure still slowly crept up, 5 psi in 15 minutes, but that it was better than before, although he didn't say how quickly the creep was prior to the fix.

My regulator did a lot of creeping prior to me fixing it. The gauge went from 25 psi to 45 psi in 1 minute. Whoa. I knew of the issue so I just had to keep an eye on it when I was using it, and had to turn off the oxygen supply if I had to let the thing sit for any length of time. That got to be a pain. Time to take action.