67 Ambassador Convertible

Wow! Can't wait to see it in Kenosha!

Been a while since I posted, but life has kind of gotten in the way, and my goal of taking my car to the National meet and Kenosha homecoming was not obtained. My neighbor fell off a ladder while changing a shutter on his garage, and I lost my assistant at work due to a medical issue, so between doing two people tasks at work and helping my neighbors family with the sale of his house, time to work on the car has been greatly reduced. I was tempted to rush things so that I could attend at least one of the shows, but I know from experience that rushing stuff especially at the end is never a good idea. Work still progresses albeit at a slower pace than I would have liked. Here is some photographic proof that I am still working on my car.

I have installed the carpet kit that I bought a couple of years ago. I believe it was from ACC. I took my time trial fitting the pad and carpet before I glued it to the floor. It took quite a bit of massaging, but I was pleased with the end product. Here you can see the back carpet is installed and the front padding is glued down

Next I trial fitted the rear side panels and rear seats. Somewhere in the cars past a previous owner installed one 6 by 9 speaker in the passenger side panel. The interesting thing is that they only cut about a 3 inch hole for it and then installed the speaker. Guess they only had a 3 inch hole saw when they were doing the work.

Also cleaned up, prepped and painted all the kick panels/vents for the front, and at the same time did the ones for the back so that everything matched

And here is a picture with just about everything in the interior installed. It looks really nice, but I think getting the carpet installed and laying in all the contours correctly was almost as hard as installing the convertible top. I will say that being able to lower the top was a real plus when I was working on the interior though. You might notice that the wiper switch is missing. That is because the wiper motor that I had rebuilt by David Bass would only work on the high speed setting. Any other speed would cause the circuit breaker in the switch to cycle on and off. Clearly there was a short or something in the motor, and when I contacted him about it, he said send it back even though he did the work over a year ago. I sent it back to him, and 3 days later I had it back with everything fixed. He is a real stand up guy who stands behind his work, and puts out a very nice product.

Along the way it seems that lots of little things/problems seen to crop up at various times. While I was working on the interior, I liked to pull the car outside so that I had more room to work, and the heat from the sun also made things easier to form into place. One of the times when I was pulling the car back into the garage, it died and would not start. After pushing it back in, I determined that it was not getting any fuel. The only non-rebuilt part of the fuel system is the fuel pump, so I started there. It is not an original Carter pump, but one of the generic aftermarket varieties, and when I removed and shook it, I could hear something rattling around inside that sounded like it should not be there. Upon dis-assembly, I found that the end of the arm that contacts the eccentric on the camshaft had broken off which I am assuming caused the fuel flow problem.

That is when I remembered that my parts car had an original type fuel pump on it which I removed and checked out. While it seemed to work, I was not about to trust a 50 year old fuel pump on a car that I intend to drive. Thanks to the internet, I found a place called Now and Then Automotive that had rebuild kits for the Carter fuel pumps. So after a thorough cleaning in the ultrasonic cleaner, and all new internal parts the fuel pump looked like this, and after it was installed the car fired right up.




Edited by fhpdave - Aug/07/2017 at 10:28am

You're a better man that me.  I don't do exhaust work.  I would rather fight gravity in a light plane than work under (even a clean) car battling that force with every move.  I think Custom Auto Sound now offers some pretty neat underseat  speakers.  Joe

pacerman wrote: You're a better man that me.  I don't do exhaust work.  I would rather fight gravity in a light plane than work under (even a clean) car battling that force with every move.  I think Custom Auto Sound now offers some pretty neat underseat  speakers.  Joe

I agree, and even told several people that happened to call me when I was working on the exhaust, that even with a lift and brand new pipes, I still hated exhaust work. Couple that with questionable threads for one of the exhaust manifold studs which necessitated the removal of the passenger manifold, and installing a threaded insert, I am doubly glad to have that task behind me.  Another problem that I thought I had fixed, but turned out I didn't was the worn out top latches.

In this picture, the part that is circled in red is damage to the pot metal handle of the top latch. Initially that large hole was the same size as the hole next to in (about 3/16 of an inch) which is the size of the roll pins that all the moving parts of the latch are secured with. The pins that engage the damaged area do not go all the way through, so over time they wear the pot metal away as seen in the picture. My fix was to drill out the holes to 5/16 of an inch and install some 5/16 by 3/16 sintered metallic bushings that I believe are used in R/C race cars. This fix took all the slop out of the latches, and I was patting myself on the back for my clever solution

That is until I installed the top and applied a lot of pressure to latches as I was stretching the newly installed top. After using the latches to get the top shut (there was enough pressure to change the fit of the doors) the drivers side latch started flopping around again Clearly something had failed!  I removed and disassembled the drivers latch, and this is what was left of the bushings that I installed. The Passenger latch was still OK and operating fine.  The big difference between the two, is that after drilling out the handle, the passenger side did not have the large divot of missing material. Because of the missing material,  the bushing on the drivers side was taking all the stress and not the metal of the handle which led to a premature failure.

The solution was to repair the divot in the pot metal  handle, but I did not know what material to use. A search of the good old internet yielded up a product called Muggy Weld which is specifically made to repair pot metal parts. It is a material that is kind of like a brazing rod, but melts at a much lower temp than pot metal. It worked really good and when I was all done the divot was gone and ready for a new bushing

Except that instead of a bushing I found these bearings which I think are clutch bearings for R/C cars. At a buck apiece, they were a bargain, and were the same size as the bushings so in theory they would work

Except that the inner diameter was a bit smaller than the roll pin, so I filed down the end to fit.

And here is the repaired handle with the bearings installed. Once the latch was reassembled it was nice and tight and operated smoothly. Hope this helps others that might have damaged/sloppy top latches.

I can feel it - I am in the home stretch now. I checked my title, I bought this car in 2001, so that means the tires are at least 16 years old, and while they have less than 500 miles on them and are not weather checked at all, I thought that it was prudent to replace them. My car had 2 rims that were painted to match the car, and 2 that were black (snow tires?) and had some extra holes between the lug nuts too. Not sure if they were the same width as the color matched rims, so a quick check of the parts cars seemed to suggest that the rims on it matched the green rims on my car

These are 3 of the rims that I swapped out from my parts car (need a matching rim for the spare too). I had previously stripped and sanded the spare tire rim that came with my car which was much rustier than these wheels and had over an hour in the whole process and in the end decided that even though the wheels are almost completely covered by the wheel covers it was just too pitted to reuse on my car.

There is a soda blasting place a few blocks away from where I work, and when I called them, they quoted 50 bucks a wheel which sounded like a bunch of money until I thought about losing another week of evenings and cleaning the rust particles out of my ears and what is left of my hair. So I dropped them off, and was told that a big job canceled that day, and in about an hour all five were done and ready to be picked up. Best 250 bucks (plus tax) that I spent. An added bonus was that after the wheels were all blasted all the various numbers that were stamped in them were quite legible. They all had the same part number, so on to the next step we go.

After I got them home I wasted no time getting a coat of primer on all surfaces of the wheels. I  did not paint them next to my car, but sprayed them outside and brought them into the garage to dry. Only got a couple of bugs in the paint, so all in all not too bad.

Next I painted the backs and inner parts semi gloss black which was how the green painted wheels were done.

After that dried over night I mixed up some single stage enamel and sprayed a couple of coats on the road side of the wheels.

Here are the new Tiger Paw tires mounted and on the car. Turns out that one of the tires that I replaced had a bad belt, so I am glad that I replaced them all, but I did save one of the old tires for the spare. Next step, clean off the blue protective coating and get an alignment.