Hello All,
It seems that, once again, apologies are in order for dropping off the face of the earth for an extended period of time. Not long after my last post, my life kind of got turned on its head, as I'm sure it did for a lot of people, with all of this COVID stuff. On a Monday in March, rumors began circulating that faculty were making plans for the very remote possibility (Ha!) of a shutdown in the face of the pandemic. That was about all there was until the following Thursday night, when they told us to be completely packed up and moved out by the following Monday, and that classes would continue online. The storage facility where I have my shop is independent of the school, so thankfully I didn't have to haul all that off with me, because there was no way I was going to be able to haul everything back to Virginia in one pickup load. So, I had to leave the truck and most of my tools out here over the summer, which meant I was not able to get any work done on it at all. I did, however, keep myself occupied over the summer by doing some rust repair on my grandpa's newer F-250, so I was glad to get some practice in.
At any rate, school has started up again (in person, thank goodness! It's kind of hard to learn things like upholstery and engine rebuilding over a computer), so I am back in Kansas now, and work on the truck has finally resumed, although not exactly at a lightning pace.
Over the last couple of weekends, I have been working on reassembling the engine. The first step was the valves. The school has "Open Shop" most weekends, when the students can buy tickets to bring their projects in and use the school's tools and get help from professors if need be, so that is how I've been getting a lot of my engine work done. I was able to reuse the Intake valves after grinding new faces on them and cleaning up the seats, but the exhaust valves had to be replaced, and new guides and seats installed for them, which I was able to do myself on the school's machines. The valves are now reinstalled in the head, which is sitting, wrapped in plastic, on my workbench, waiting to go back on. I installed new cam bearings that came in the engine kit that the machine shop ordered for me, and gave all the lifter bores a quick run through with a hone made out of some emery cloth and a piece of welding rod (an ingenious invention of one of my professors) to remove the little bit of surface rust present. I also installed the freeze plugs. The next step is to install the crankshaft, which I will check bearing clearances on, as much for my own experience as anything, and cam shaft, which I plan to do this weekend. My goal is to have the engine reassembled and all the vital systems in place so that the truck will be able to move under its own power by the end of this fall.
I also have plans for the seat this semester. I took an upholstery class last spring (although it had to be finished online after only a few weeks of shop time), and I am in the advanced class now, which means I have the ability to work on a personal project when I finish my assigned work, which should be in the next week or so. I have an original seat in decent shape, although it has a couple of broken springs, which I am still trying to source. Over the summer, I was able to buy most of the materials I would need to make a factory-style deluxe seat cover, which will be slightly anachronous, as it will be installed over the standard spring seat base rather than the deluxe full-foam one, but It will still look good. I looked into converting my seat to full-depth foam, but apparently the frames are different, and this, combined with the prohibitive cost of foam, was enough to discourage this idea. It is a little early in the restoration process to be doing this step, I know, but the opportunity presented itself, so I shall have to do my best to keep it clean and intact while I finish the rest of the truck.
That's all I've got for now, other than some pictures. I thought about waiting until I had something really big to report, but that may be a while, so I'm going to go ahead and throw this out there. Again, I'm sorry for disappearing for so long, thank you all for your patience!
Engine Work:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/r4nnCuu8skmYENr46Seat as it sits:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/cYfkc5h5uf5FVqcg6
