The Poet Creek Express - Foamie Hybrid

[KCStudly]

Why wait?

Have I told this story before? It’s a classic worth telling again!

A good buddy of mine had a ’69 Skylark coupe with Buick 350 and, IIRC, a 2-spd Powerglide (“power slide”) that he used to commute to college. After going thru 2 or 3 ‘glides and swapping to a BOP TH350, the cam lobes went flat.

Well, he needed to get to school; we were young and underfunded; and he had the inline Chevy 250 six that he had taken out of his ’67 Camaro when he swapped in a big block (the car that was later shown racing at Bonneville on the wheel standing ambulance episode of Monster Garage). In a weekend we had the 350 out and the 250 in with motor mounts built. The only clutch and trans set up we had for the Chevy was a small front journal 3-spd out of an early Chevy II (pre-Nova, IIRC a ‘62). So in it went. The xmbr was easy. The clutch linkage and pedal was non-existent. Soooo, we cut a longitudinal slot in the floor with a four inch grinder; bent a piece of flat bar for a clutch pedal; mounted it thru the floor using the pieces of a gate hinge from the hardware store as the pivot; and rigged a zigzag block and tackle set up under the floor from wire cable and pulleys to pull the clutch lever in. The shifter handle was an old twisted tire iron with the tip cut down.

Over time the open clutch cable would stretch and get fouled with road debris and such, so to preserve its lifecycle we would shift clutchlessly by matching gears and rpms. The loose trans didn’t mind and we got pretty good at it!

The biggest problem was that the car was so heavy and the 250 was tired, so performance suffered. My buddy is old school, and had been raised on the theory that if you can’t afford more power, make you car lighter; so stuff started coming off of the car. Remember Hot Rod’s “Caddy Hack”? Not quite that extreme, but if you can picture a circle track car except w/o a roll cage and with the glass still in it, you would be close. Out came the rear seat replaced by a thin sheet of aluminum to close off the trunk and a throw cushion with blanket. Out came the dash with the instrument cluster zip tied to the steering column. The bottoms of the rear quarters were rusted off, so he fashioned a cleaver from an old leaf spring and drove it thru shearing them off even with the frame rail. Inner door panels; gone. Inner fenders; gone. Inner door and trunk lid structure and lots of other internal bracing; riddled with hole saw holes. Bumpers; large slots cut with a smoke wrench.

The thing had actually gotten pretty peppy again, just by taking weight out, then things got really fun. I had started working as a wrecker driver and came across a lot of cars heading for the bone yard. There was a big float boat Centurian with a 455/BOP TH400 that had hit a tree so hard the passenger side of the main xmbr under the oil pan had come back far enough to twist the drive train to the point that the tail shaft housing on the trans broke clean off, not to mention that the tail shaft got bent.

Fortunately, the engine didn’t take the brunt, but the car was totaled. In those days we got $25 a piece for any car that we were able to haul to the bone yard (after all of the paperwork had cleared), so I offered my boss $35 dollars for the engine and used a wrecker to pull it out. He still got his $25 for the car, too! Then I used the tilt back flat bed hauler to bring the engine to my shop and gave it to my buddy as a B-day present. He built front motor plates to get it mounted in the chassis and gutted the trans to swap in a short tail setup from another TH400. You should have seen the illustrated sketch in exploded view that he drew as it was coming apart, so that he would know how to put it back together again. Remember, this was back before the days of wide spread internet use!

It was kind of funny. After all of that, when we first fired it up it sounded like a rod knocking, but after a short investigation we found that the oil pan had been bumped in slightly when sliding it down off of the hauler. All he had to do was knock the pan out a bit and reinstall it.

It had the factory cast iron exhaust manifolds and 2-into-1 crossover pipe, but from there we went straight 2-1/2 inch pipe with a Cherry Bomb muffler.

On the first couple of test drives it wouldn’t run right. Whenever he hit the gas it would bog big time. After a little tinkering he figured out that the big heavy Centurian was tuned with stiff mechanical advance springs in the distributor. All it took to wake the thing up was lighter springs, and boy howdy did it wake up!

It would idle around nice and low like a tug boat on the small primaries of a spread bore Holley 780 double pumper, but when you hit the gas and opened up those big secondaries it roared like a top fueler. Bwaaaaahhhhhhhh.

The good old days of my youth.

[OP827]

Looks Great KC! c

[KCStudly]

Thanks OP.

Tonight I pulled the hatch hinge back off and got Karl's help to lift the hatch back down to where it is sitting on edge on the floor. It's not that it is that heavy, it is just heavy and big enough at the same time that it is awkward to handle by myself.

Before doing that I scraped and sanded the edges of the hatch down by the bumper just to make sure that it didn’t crunch the flap of glass and do any harm when I closed it to remove the hinge. I didn’t do the whole edge, but rationalized doing the bottom area as a good place to get a hand hold.

Next I took some measurements and decided on how I’m going to do the upper front wall and roof radius glass; then laid it out directly on a suitable piece of the 6 mil plastic.

I took a couple of pictures but will add them in next time.

[KCStudly]

Pics from yesterday:
Hatch back off again.


Measured, planned and laid out the glass details for the upper front wall and front roof radius.



I already had a drop piece of plastic sheet cut that was about the perfect size for the front layup, and got that marked out, too (no pic).

Today the weather was supposed to be cooler, but that didn’t happen until later in the afternoon. That’s okay; I still had plenty to do to get ready.

I jacked up the front of the cabin and washed amine off of the front locker bump out, which I had been putting off for other priorities. Then I sanded the rough edges all around that, including under the front edge of the floor. Unfortunately I burned thru the glass on the curb side corner of the locker. The corner dart didn’t overlap super tightly at the very corner and it was just one ply. I had almost put bias patches on the corners as a first ply, but thought the darts would overlap better and omitted them on the fly. So I prepped a small bias patch that I will lay on while I’m laying up the front wall. The street side corner was tighter and came out fine (no pics).

Next I reeled off and cut the glass for the front wall, rolling it up in the plastic sheet for safe keeping.

Since I will need as much space on the bench as I can get to wet out the rather large PMPP for the front wall, I needed to break down the glass cloth reel; so I took the time to measure, plan and cut the cloth for the roof. Here is the sketch I made to help avoid mistakes and get all of the cut dimensions correct.


I guess I have been pretty efficient with my glass cloth usage. Either that or I significantly over estimated how much cloth I was going to need. All that’s left to get out of this is the cloth for the doors. Looks like I will have quite a bit leftover.


Kind of makes me wish I had a way to glass the underside of the floor. I had thoughts of building the hoist rig and testing it out by flipping the cabin onto its roof (after glassing it) so that I could.

It was finally starting to cool off, but by now I didn’t feel like I would have time to get the front wall done this late in the day, and certainly didn’t feel like pushing myself that hard and risking a foul up. Better to have everything prepped and start fresh the next day.

I still had some time and energy, so I moved back to the hatch and cleaned up the street side edge. First the scrapper to knock most of the edge off, then the small sanding block to bring it fair to the sealing lip. Finally, just a little bit of a brush off along the sharp corner just to make it not so sharp. First pic is from the bumper looking “up”. Second is from the hinge spar looking “back”.



Last thing was to sand around the license plate recess to fair the hatch skin glass back into the area of the plate that was previously “jambed out”.



While I had been working the front I had the cabin jacked up about a foot (a milk crate plus a 4x4), then lowered it down onto just the 4x4’s plus a 2x. This pic was meant to show the later, but I thought it also made a good overall progress pic.


Maybe it doesn’t look much different from so many of the other earlier pics, but if you know what to look for and have been following along, then you might just be able to see all of the progress that has been made. Add 6-1/2 hrs of work for today.

[ratrod71]

Looking good. Nice overall shot to show the profile. I admire your attention to detail.

[KCStudly]

Thanks RR, I appreciate the support.

[GPW]

It all visually comes together with a coat of primer ( or paint)

[Ned B]

You're getting to the (rolling) Home stretch KC! Next thing you know it'll be time to mate the cabin to the frame!

[Wolffarmer]

You're getting to the (rolling) Home stretch KC! Next thing you know it'll be time to mate the cabin to the frame!

And the frame to the highway.

[KCStudly]

The other day I kept day dreaming about Elk City. There was (is?) a little Podunk restaurant... if you can call it that... with two stools at the counter and one plywood booth. I had the "Lumberjack" burger, which was about as simple as a Micky D's cheese burger except it was almost as big around as the paper plate they served it on. It was midweek (probably week 2), Dad and I had made the trip into town to do laundry and have a shower at the laundry mat, get ice, peer in the window of his friend/coworker's sporting goods (gun) store, if you could call it that. It was more of a pipe dream hobby which was never open because his friend lived and worked back in Richland.

Across the street was an inn that looked like something out of an old western movie, 6 rooms with no vacancy, and a single old style gas pump out front. The pump was the art deco style with rounded corners that kind of looked like the Chrysler Building.

It will be interesting to see how much things have changed... or stayed the same after almost 40 yrs.

[Wolffarmer]

Need to add Elk City to my bucket list. And Poet Creek.

[KCStudly]

Randy, Elk City isn't so much of a destination as it is the scenery and adventure along the way. It is, however, the last jumping off spot on that side of the Magruder. As I recall, the Red River Road runs up thru the valley along the river and is a nice trip in itself.

Stay tuned for today's update coming up shortly.

[Wolffarmer]

When I decide I can take more time off I plan on spending some time in that end of the state.

Randy

[KCStudly]

That’s it. That’s the best I got. I’m at the limit of my fiberglass layup skills. It just doesn’t get any better than this for me, at least not without doing like the airplane builder guys and using a filler slurry for the base wet coat.

I have to put in a special thank you to Karl for sticking with me today and assisting. There were several instances where having a second person really helped keep things moving promptly, and I just wouldn’t have been able to place a sheet this big as accurately or neatly as we did.

Thanks to Michael/Atomic, too, for the tip about using two people to stretch and place larger sheets.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Today the weather was much cooler, about 50 degs F, so I could still use the fast hardener. It was a little drizzly out, but the hygrometer in the loft said 40/ct so I wasn’t worried about humidity.

After playing cobbler and gluing the heel pad back onto one of Yvette’s work shoes, I rearranged the bench so that I could get to both sides w/o the table saw getting in the way. Here you can see all of the support equipment for glassing at the near end of the bench and the PMPP for the front wall all laid out and taped down at the far end. It has actually been a while since I have done one of these, so I completely spaced out and had the larger 2nd ply on top, which would put it against the cabin first; whereas it should have been laid down first so that it would overlap the edges of the smaller first ply for a neater layup. Not to worry, I caught it in time to make a correction, but not until after starting to wet it out.


Another thing I forgot to do was fold a corner on each of the pieces of blue tape temporarily holding the glass plies in place. That made it really difficult to peel them back off of the glass once I had most of it wetted out and well stabilized. How quickly we forget.

Another little prep thing was to lay cardboard drip catchers on the floor around the work area. I didn’t drip that much this time, but there was one really big goober that I was glad landed on the cardboard.


Once the epoxy started flowing the gloves were on and the camera lay dormant. This is where having Karl at hand really paid off. He was able to get out another piece of plastic, cut it down to size and squeegee it out on top of the PMPP; while I was able to stay focused and continue wetting out the cabin front. That allowed us to invert the sheets before peeling what started out as the bottom piece of plastic, so that the larger ply would be on the outside as planned, and saved time. It was a big help having Karl help peel the plastic off, too, while I tended the edges and made sure that none of the loose strands pulled away with it.

To wet the front I used a brush some, but mostly just poured the cup onto the brink of the radius and used the squeegee to trowel it fluidly down and across the front. The brush was useful along the edges, across the top of the locker, and along the inside corner of the fillet.

With Karl’s help, we got the glass with plastic placed exactly where I wanted it, squeegeed down and the plastic peeled off. After some more squeegee work, he ran the disc roller over it while I stippled with the cut down brush. Once we were pretty happy with it, we placed a strip of plastic (that I had cut earlier) along the stepped edges at the top and across the top of the locker. I figured that at the top this would help minimize how much sanding and/or secondary fairing fill would be needed for the next lap, and anything I can do to avoid sanding between cured glass and soft foam is a plus.


The 403 filler always seems to end up a little pock marked, kind of lumpy like potato salad, so despite having sanded the fillet between the front wall and locker top, I had gone back and forth trying to decide between having this layup extend down onto the locker top, or not. I had held the locker top glass back from the fillet and had the option of using the 2 inch tape in a separate operation. I could have also just mixed a little filler into the wet out here to help the flap bed in, but I’ve had problems with that pushing around and causing lumps. In the end I decided to let the wall layup run down and have the plies stagger on the top of the locker where it would be relatively easy to sand fair later. In hindsight I could have let this run all the way to the front edge, making it easy to sand back to the radius edge (more Atomic advice), but instead I decided to use another strip of the plastic peel ply technique.


Here you can just barely see how the plies run just below the side sparette and are staggered by about an inch. Also, the peel ply interfered with adding the little patch to the corner of the locker, so I will do that another time.


I couldn’t be happier with how the fillet turned out.


Here’s a better look at the plastic strip across the top of the front radius.


And a little closer overall shot. I stayed on the stipple brush for about an hour trying to get a few pesky air pockets (I like to call them “fisheyes”) to stay away, and probably got most of them; but once things start to really tack up that’s all she wrote and you have to walk away. I’m extremely happy with how this looks like it will finish up.


Again, my math said that this much cloth needed about 17oz of resin, plus hardener. Thinking back IIRC I did (2) at 6oz, (2) at 4-1/2oz, and (1) at 3oz for the bench top work; then another 2 or 3 at 3.5oz to wet the cabin. The math says that’s awfully rich by a factor of 2x, but when I look at the finished result it doesn’t seem to be; so I’m still good with it.

Later this evening the rain had picked up and the online weather said the humidity was up to 80/ct, but it usually stays drier in the loft, and it was well into kicking when I left, so I think it will be okay.

Choo choo train kept rollin’.

[Atomic77]

Wow looking good man... You've gone pro.

Michael