My father took a look at this spectacular 1936 Ford Convertible that has not been driven for 40 years. It is all original but as you can see, it needs everything. I always fantisized about going through all of the mechanical units and leaving the cosmetics as they are on a car like this since everyone seems to want perfection and gloss. I’ll take crappy original to over-glossed restored!

Ford V-8 1936

This is quite a rare car and we are going to buy it to stack in the rafters with all of the other cars we seem to never get around to fixing.

Our customer enjoyed his 1984 512BBI on the track last month at the Ferrari National Event in Wisconsin until the rivits broke and allowed the front of the belly pan to come loose and drag on the ground. It must have been quite spooky.

Karl did a beautiful job re-making this part and carefully duplicated the bead rolled detailing.

Boxer belly pan

In Aluminum, nice detailing Karl

Finished belly pan ready to install

Here is a photo of Homer’s Ford Taurus Station wagon. It used to be his wifes car, now it is his to beat on!

Just dont get into a head on collision!

Ford Taurus Loaded up

Homer helped me finish up the disassemble of the Ford CL-35 Skid Steer Loader after work the other day and after a 6 pack of my favorite beer, Otter Creek Brewing Copper Ale, we yanked the hydraulic assembly out. I was not sure how to get these components out of the machine independently because you cannot get to the hose ends with a wrench so I decided to take the motors and the pump out as a unit.

We found that the RH drive sprocket had broken the key way on the motor and someone did a terrible job repairing the damage. They went through the effort to replace the key but did not tighten the large nut or the brake disc so to our advantage, that side came apart easily. The LH side was a different story. We grappled onto the 1-5/8 nut with a 3/4″ drive breaker bar and had to come up with a way to keep the motor from spinning. We could not do anything to keep the motor fixed so we let the compressor charge up the tank and used our biggest air-impact gun which got her loose. Next we had to remove the sprocket with our huge 3 jaw puller. We had tons of force on the puller and the sprocket would not budge. Now is time for the heat!

I managed to get the sprocket red hot and the puller maxed out and let me tell you, that sprocket popped like a canon when it let go. Thankfully it did not drop in the chain oil bath because it could have started a major fire.

The pump is EATON Cessna and the motors are EATON Char-Lyn. I have been looking up different hydraulic components and guess that EATON factories make the parts and the Char-Lyn is the town that the factory is in? Another EATON hydraulic division is Vickers, when I get a chance I want to look up the meaning of these names.

Ford CL-35 EATON Components

Eaton Cessna and EATON Char-Lyn Hydraulics

Homer is really closing in nicely on the burning man time machine art car, he has the clock like gearing nearly finished for the carousel and the 20′ tall wheels that  can be broken down for shipping to the event are outrageous. Ruby, Roman and I stopped by after a swim in the river to see the progress and were blown away by the size and strength of the wheels. David at Mainly Metals has a water jet cutter and is making all the gears so they can get just the right speed of the carousel, one turn to every 7 turns that the 20′ wheels turn.

I have volunteered to come up with the propulsion and was toying with having a diesel engine run a generator that would run electric motors but this seems a bit much for me. We settled on hydraulics to get her moving slowly in the desert and pawed through a number of catalogs to come up with the components necessary to get us rolling.

After looking at all of the components individually and seeing the huge variation of gallons per minute rates, pressure capebility and overall compatibility of hydraulic pumps to valve bodies to motors I had a great idea, cannibalize a skid steer loader! Someone else engineered the relationship of engine to pump to valve size to motors. Even the hose size and fluid reservoir are thought out for the flow and cooling capacity that we need.

Jeff used to work at our shop but now works closer to his home at a farm equipment sales and service place. I called him to find out where I could buy a cheap skid steer. He had me call Jon in Bridport and for under $3000 we had a operable machine that I began to disassemble right away. The 3 cylinder engine came out easily, in fact I slid it out of the machine and right onto the hydraulic lift table by myself. Now I have to find a way to remove the pump and hoses without having to undo all of the lines so the system stays clean and I can identify the scavenge side and the pressure side.

I am excited to work tomorrow to strip the motors for the wheel movement to see what we can use for the art car. With the chains and jack shafts that are in the drive housing maybe we need to do very little to hook the motors up to the wheels.

Burning man sculpture part

Here is Roman standing near the wheel

3 cylinder diesel engine

Hydraulic pump to be used in art car