THE ’49 TRUCK rolled home from Maine yesterday, after a bit of frozen-knuckle wrenching at 4 degrees Fahrenheit, 15 below zero Celsius. Easy to diagnose, that helps: a borderline battery and a faulty path to ground. We’re soon on our way.
It’s a whirlwind. Up on Saturday, back Sunday, 700 miles. The bride wants to check in on her mother in Bangor, so I hitch a ride with her to Aunt Roberta’s, in Sullivan. The truck’s been sitting in the field behind Roberta’s house since D2’s wedding reception in October.
We arrive at sunset…
It’s never good for a vehicle to sit unused. Especially not on a saltwater shoreline in Maine. Mice had already moved in.
A look back up the hill, where Roberta’s house shines in the golden hour.
Then comes a frosty Sunday morn.
Time to get this buggy started. We need to roll 350 miles today.
The mice figured nobody’s ever coming back for this jalopy…
Battery’s got a little juice. Not much. I find a charger in Roberta’s tractor shed but the battery doesn’t seem to want to accept a charge. Or maybe the charger’s kaput. Looks like an old one. It has a 55-amp starting assist, so I try that.
The flathead V8 will barely turn over. Has a path to ground, then seems not to.
I have no idea when I installed the battery. Didn’t bother to remove the month and year indicators. ‘Cause why on Earth would you ever want that information at your fingertips?
The plan is: solve Problem #1 first, then move on to the others. The NAPA in Ellsworth is open. I buy a battery and a fresh set of terminals.
Install the new battery and… nothing. Truck won’t turn over at all now.
It hasn’t been an easy morning on the starter. I might have gotten the final bit of life out of a number of components.
The solenoid on the firewall doesn’t even click. But I see there’s no horn or lights, either, so, problem solved: find the bad ground.
Here it is… Ground cutoff switch.
I take one cable off, put it on the same terminal as the other cable. That takes the faulty switch out of the circuit.
The old truck turns over strong then, fires right up—Huzzah! I get to save a little frozen-knuckle fun for some other day.
Now the truck is up the hill, but not to say in its finest running form ever. I’ve got a few slow coolant leaks. Knew about that before I drove the truck here in October.
She’s acting as if the carburetor float might be a little sticky, from sitting idle. It’s intermittent. I figure that’ll clear up as down the road we go.
And in the next 50 miles or so, it does.
It’s shaping up to be a cold ride, for a whole host of reasons.
The last time I had the cab off the chassis (to weld-in a new floor and shoot a fresh paint job), I never installed weatherstripping on the doors. Breezy in there! Especially when a tractor-trailer goes by.
There are no heat ducts or vents, just a heater core with a fan behind it. It blows heat on your knees, as long as you’re the passenger. Driver gets no direct heat.
Coolant’s running cool, 150 degrees. Typical winter behavior, despite the 180-degree thermostats in the heads.
I’m running an aggressive five-blade fan off a big truck, circa 1949. In the winter I usually remove the fan. Or remove the belt and bungee-cord the fan, so it doesn’t pull air by freewheeling.
No shroud. And I mounted the radiator as far away from the motor as possible; in the straight-six position instead of where the Ford engineers wanted it in a V8 truck.
No shroud, farther away, that should make the cooling system inefficient. The truck should run hotter.
In the summer it does, if I get stuck in traffic. No effect in the winter that I can see.
I’m cold and have 350 miles to drive. Don’t want to pull over and futz with the fan so I dig a tee shirt out of my pack, hang it on the radiator-saddle brace. It’ll block some of the cold air going through the core.
Pretty soon I have 180-degree coolant. And the passenger I’m not carrying has decidedly warmer knees.
Here’s where to hang your tee shirt in a pinch…
Wore my EMS mountaineering mittens… They helped.
One of those coolant leaks. When I installed the new radiator a few months ago the only hoses I could get (get here fast, on deadline) were silicone. They don’t clamp as nicely as rubber hoses. Sometimes the more you tighten them the more they leak.
Always something to fix around here. Add this to the list.
I was sorry not to visit friends in Bangor—Alix, Tom, Donna, Greg, Julie, and so many others. We were in town for all of 90 minutes. (Or I was; the bride drove back up to Bangor after a night at Roberta’s, stayed over with her mom last night.)
We grabbed a quick lunch at Geaghan’s Pub and Craft Brewery. We both had the Crowley’s Black Irish Steak Melt; saw it on the menu, thought of our friend Cathleen Crowley, ordered it just in case the Geaghan clan had named it after her.
Note the Irish irony posted above the matriarch’s portrait.
Check out how cool these guys are, seated under a Snow & Nealley double-bit ax. Not for nothing, oh Danny boy, but I know a freak-accident news story waiting to happen when I see it. Let’s hope the trophy maker stuck the ax to the board with extra-sticky chewing gum.
I had the house Smiling Irish Bastard Ale, very nice. And there’s the bride’s chardonnay.
The bride of my youth… Humoring me since I was 17, for some odd reason.
She arrived home just now, a day behind me.
Tony DePaul, December 10, 2018, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
