The big thing is that we took the heater core enclosure and the brake master cylinder off the firewall.

This serves a couple of purposes. The main one is that, with the firewall cleared, we can clean and paint it (might need to pull those wires back through for a minute). Also, they both had to come off anyway. We thought the heater box needed to be cleaned out and the master cylinder replaced, but after investigating a bit, it seems likely they both need replacing.

The reason for replacing the master cylinder is the same as it was on the Impala--in 1966, they were still using single master cylinders (you can see in the photo that there's only one tubing line running up to where it used to be), and replacing it with a dual-cylinder unit is sort of a bare-minimum safety improvement.

The heater's a little more complicated. We knew it needed to be cleaned out; when we took the top cover off to examine the core, we found acorns on top, and sure enough, the cavity underneath was full of rodent nest. The core's all corroded, too, and almost surely needs to be replaced, and we found when we tried to turn it that the blower fan had seized.

The weirder part, though, is that upon closer inspection, the core enclosure itself is the wrong one! In 1966, Chevy pickups were available with a choice of three heating systems: the Thrift heater, which is incredibly basic; the Deluxe heater, which is only not "incredibly basic" when compared with the Thrift one; and air conditioning, which in those days people in Maine pretty much never ordered.

Our truck has the control panel and interior ducting of the Deluxe heater, but when we got it out and compared it to the shop manual, we discovered that the controls cables were hooked up incorrectly, in such a way that they basically converted the system into a jury-rigged equivalent of the Thrift version--because the part that most sets the Deluxe system apart is not present on the core enclosure. It's not just missing--the core box that was in the truck plainly never had it. It's the core box from a Thrift system.

Owning these old vehicles always comes with mysteries, and here's our latest one: why does our truck, which plainly had the Deluxe heater from the factory, have a Thrift core box in it, which someone bodged up the Deluxe controls to work with? Did the original rust out, and the only one the owners at the time could find was from a more basic truck? That's the only scenario I could come up with when we made the discovery.

So now we have a decision to make: do we clean up the Thrift box, get a new core for it, and set it all back up in the half-assed way it was when we got it, or try to find a Deluxe box and core someplace and put the system back the way it's supposed to be? (Sadly, AC is not really an option. There are really good retrofit kits out there, but they cost a thousand dollars and up. Back in the day, I think we paid 800 bucks for the whole truck! Admittedly, they were 1989 dollars, but still.)

In other news, we've ordered a new set of gauges and a bracket for them. Sadly, the classic Sun gauges we had in there before are no longer in production, but the AutoMeter Sport-Comp series looks similar and isn't too expensive, so we went with those. The full set hadn't arrived yet, but a couple of them had, and they look good, but I forgot to take pictures, as usual.

Here's a fun side benefit, though. The AutoMeter gauges come with a couple of colored covers for their backlight bulbs, in case you want your dash to be red or green. We're going to leave them white, to match the rest of the dash backlights...

... so I stole the green ones for the turn signal indicators. I'm properly pleased with that little brainwave, I have to admit. :)

That's all we had time for, but more supplies have arrived, so there may be more that's worth reporting next time. For now, let's close out with a little safety message:

My father has a snow-thrower attachment for his tractor, which he uses to clean up his driveway and the area around the shop. The other day, while he was cleaning up after the latest snowstorm, it sucked up a crowbar some previous tenant had left lying around on the ground out back of the shop and did this to it.

Dad didn't even notice it had happened until he realized that the auger had stopped and he was just plowing the snow, not throwing it. When he investigated, he found the crowbar wound around the center shaft, which he had to turn backward to get it out. Apart from snapping the sacrificial shear pins, it hadn't done any damage.

Do not take these machines lightly, is all I'm saying.

--G.
also, don't just leave crowbars lying around on the ground
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.