’59 Chevy HEI Conversion

Cars and trucks are a necessary evil. With that said, if you’ve gotta have one (and motorcycles were my sole transportation in life until a few years ago) you might as well have a cool one that can haul motorcycles if necessary. I’ve had a ’59 Chevy Apache for about five years now. It was pretty raw, but evolves slowly as I make incremental improvements. This latest round had me adding a vacuum advance and rebuilding the stock AC/Delco distributor to house a much more recent vintage HEI ignition. The idea and motivation came from Young Dan, who had done it to his ’59 Ford. Thanks Dan.

Per my usual approach, I did my best to hide these modifications and to use as many original or factory parts as possible. It’s not like you can’t tell it’s there, but I didn’t want some big honking red MSD box hanging off the motor either. Wouldn’t seem right. So about two weeks ago we were hanging around the shop and I dug in. Ripped the distributor out after marking some reference points and started taking things apart. Up until that point I had been running fixed timing as I’d previously welded the two timing clamp pieces together due to a shot advance can. A little surgical grinding and they were free again and ready for reuse.

Without getting too much into it, here’s a little background on what changes were made. You can lookup the benefits of vacuum advance elsewhere. The HEI controller is a contact-less pickup and coil controller (makes the coil fire the plugs at the right time) that costs about $20 at any auto parts store. Dime a dozen. Easy to replace. These means no more setting points, more stable ignition, smoother idle and no regular adjustments of any sort required.

Parts used were the stock Delco distributor, a new advance can, a Chrysler slant-six reluctor and pickup and an aftermarket HEI controller and heat sink. I think the whole project cost around $60.

It came out great. Starts right up and runs like a whole new truck. Details in the pictures.

Jason

First step was to remove the point cam and grind/file it down as round as possible. Couldn’t use a cutter on the lathe as this part is hardened and precision ground. Once reasonably round, I made a somewhat thin brass bushing and pressed it over the eccentric area. The bushing deformed to some extent, which is what I wanted. Then I mounted the part in the lathe and turned the bushing perfectly round for an interference fit with the reluctor. Some people use epoxy to mount the reluctor, which might be perfectly functional, but you know I don’t glue things together in the shop! I was careful to mount the reluctor peaks where the old point cam peaks were for proper indexing.

The newly modified reluctor carrier mounted in the distributor with the centrifugal advance weights rebuilt and checked. This particular weight set allows for 31deg of mechanical advance (actuated by increased rpm).

I had to machine the original points plate so that it would fit over the new reluctor while still allowing for mounting the reluctor pickup. One requirement of this project was that all internal parts still be serviceable. Some people (you know who you are) install the reluctor after the weights and plate are installed, leaving you with a permanent alteration and no way to service the weights in the future.

One of the challenges of this conversion was to index the contact rotor (which carries the secondary coil voltage to the appropriate spark plug wire post) properly so that it is adjacent to an internal terminal post when the coil fires. Seems it’d be tough to figure just where the rotor was while setting things up so I made an inspection cap with a hole hogged out (technical term) in it. This made things much easier. Note the scribed line on the rotor and reference marks in yellow on the cap. This allowed me to check rotor phasing while the motor was running with a timing light after all the other work was completed.

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Soap Box Derby Racer

So if you’ve ever read this blog before or met any of us, you already know that if it has wheels, we dig it. Better still, we’d probably like to rebuild it, change it or even make it from scratch. Not that motorcycles ever get boring, but it’s nice to mix it up from time to time.

We’re having a father’s day soap box derby on our block this weekend so Casey and I decided we should put something together for it. We talked about it sporadically over the last few weeks but didn’t actually get anything done. Last week, when we intended to build it, we sat around the shop sidewalk drinking beer with our friends and neighbors all night rather than actually accomplish anything. This was apparently much needed as we’ve all been working our asses off at our jobs lately and just didn’t have it in us to exert any effort on a project.

This left us with four days remaining to come up with something, sketch it out and build it. We started Tuesday night and ended up staying until 2am. We didn’t want to leave until we had a rolling chassis. I think that was an important decision, otherwise it might never have gotten finished.

Our friend Al up the street donated an old beater bicycle to the cause and I snatched the wheels off my old Stump Jumper which hasn’t been ridden in years. Using a single length of square tube we had laying around, we created the entire frame. The bicycle was cut up to yield three forks: The original front fork, the rear seat stays serving as a pair and finally, the rear chain stays with the drop out tabs serving as a pair. We notched the square pipe after marking our angles, bent it upward into place and welded it shut. We flattened out the notches we removed to use as gussets on those joints.

Last night we added handlebars, a deck, a brake and welded a cantilevered seat the rear section so that two people could ride it. As this race is for neighborhood kids, we set it up so kids could sit on the deck with the adult on the seat doing the steering and braking. Not shown is a foot rest/wheel guard on the front to keep small feet out of the front tire.

We had a great time making this together and look forward to running it this Sunday.

Jason

Finished product, less the foot rest we added at the very end.

Casey doing his best speed pose on the rolling chassis.

Gotta sign your work, right?

Bottom bracket and chain stays now serve as rear fork.

Seat stays serving as other rear fork. A little "smash & weld" going on to make it fit.

Frankenstein neck tube. Strong like bull!

Rolling chassis at the end of the first night. Still figuring out seating arrangement.

Wes on the finished cart. He hooked us up with handlebars and grips last night in addition to helping a bunch.

Weekend Ride to West Virginia

Happy Dan, Young Dan, VSL and I set off for a weekend trip down to western MD and WV on Saturday morning to meet with with Mitch (Kik) and head to his friend PeeWee’s for a party.

Despite it having rained all night and morning before, it cleared up beautifully for our 8a departure.

We were riding along through farm roads of southern PA smiling our asses off, feeling lucky to have gotten these two days together when suddenly we note the absence of Vinny. He’s prone to daydreaming, wandering or just plain doing his own thing so we figured it the usual and he’d be along shortly. He wasn’t. After rebuilding his ignition timer (’49 pan) and checking valves and compression, we got it started but something sounded a little off. Then his oil light came on. Uh oh.

Wrecked timing case gears. A big old mess. He had just paid someone a pile of $$$ to build his lower end.

We sat around for five hours waiting for a fetch from Philly. Vinny took it as well as could be expected but we could tell he was pretty sad. Young Dan and I set off to pickup some hoagies and beer for lunch while we were waiting. Twenty miles later we had the sandwiches strapped onto Dan’s bike and a half-case of beer in my saddlebags. Little consolation for Vinny, but at least we didn’t have to sit around hungry in the middle of nowhere while we waited. Oh, did I mention it was a stunningly beautiful day? It was. We were itching to get going, but not willing to leave one of our own behind.

After Vinny and his bike were safely in a truck with his friends, we got back on our way and made it to PeeWee’s just as the party was wrapping up (ring a bell?). Nothing left but drunks, crazies and a bunch of people who, to our best estimation, were under the influence of LSD or similar. It seemed that way, at least. We had fun fucking with them (good naturedly) and making new friends.

There were SICK old bikes all over that place. Pics below.

Mitch and Timmy, our hosts, made sure we had all the cold beer we could stomach and all the food we cared to eat. We even had a late night Waffle House stop for good measure before checking into the Day’s Inn. We’re out of practice with this stuff and are not much for sleeping on the ground lately.

Plus, we wanted to get up at 6am and head to WV and catch up on some lost riding time. Mitch and Timmy looked upon us with suspicion when we told them we were getting up at 6 to go riding. They were even more surprised when we woke them up the next morning ready to go, and good for our word.

I think they had some business to attend to that day and saw us off.

We spent the morning rolling through the Catoctin mountains just west of Frederick and even hit some goat paths with stone washes and spring water running across the road and even a few critters. Hit a small town for breakfast and then decided to head over to West Virgia for lunch and to dip our feet in the hot spring there.

Then we hot-rodded it home on the highway for four solid hours.

It was a nice weekend, if too short. We rode somewhere around 550 miles.

‘Til next time.

Thanks Mitch and Timmy and PeeWee.

Sorry, VSL. We’ll have you back up in no time.

Jason

Angry Dan, Mitch and Young Dan having a sunset beer

Beautiful red knuck at PeeWee's


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