Nails! They're tough! Getting this car out of the ground and out of her grave and rolling has been just as tough as nails....nay, a WHOLE KEG of nails!
Sometimes an idea is wholly legit and yet, in practice, it falls flat on its face. When you think about it, this really only means that if the idea is completely sound....maybe you're just not doing it right! Such was the case with my
Break-The-Drums-Loose-From-The-Brakes contraption.
To quote Derek on Vice Grip Garage: If it's a dumb idea, but it works, is it really
dumb?
After our epic fail in manually freeing the drums from their brake shoes, and rust (and whatever the hell else was going on in there)
JUST DIDN'T HAPPEN, I took a little time away just to mull it over and see if I might better understand what I was up against. The design of these Ford brakes was a post-1939 style and among the VERY FIRST style of hydraulic brakes Ford used on mass-produced automobiles. They were even referred to as 'Juice Brakes' by hot-rodders who were very keen to improve their chances of living another day by upgrading their car's mechanical brakes with truly modern, effective, and hydraulic (hence the name 'juice') brakes.
What has this to do with our big black sedan? Well, those brakes (poor as they may seem by today's standards) relied upon a pretty large amount of braking surface to get the job done and it was precisely
that that was hanging me up....especially the sections of the brakes that had been below ground and occasionally below water. In fact, just one properly functional and engaged brake would almost surely keep an already stopped car from rolling. Once you get your head wrapped around THAT, the idea that we could just waltz in with our long pipe and make a thoroughly rusted-welded brake break free seems pretty DARNED ridiculous,
BECAUSE IT IS PRETTY DARNED RIDICULOUS.
But it was worth a try...
...and trying is what gets you across the finish line. I even bought a universal hub puller because, at that moment, it seemed like a good idea but not such a good idea after a while. (It will come in very handy later.) So, how could I reduce the braking surface area and improve my chances of getting things moving again? Well, the first thing I did was adjust the toe adjusters (those at the top of the shoes) so that they were as slack as possible. I was not so naive to believe that the shoes would actually retract away from the drum because the shoes are not attached to the eccentric lobes of the toe adjusters....i.e., the shoes would likely remain where they have been for the last 60 years. But backing off the adjusters would provide some elbow room for what was to come. The heel adjusters were most certainly rusted up solid and then there is also the business of wheel cylinders that have got to be utterly petrified. But, any port in a storm. Just doing backing off the toe adjusters felt right and that made me feel better....which is worthwhile, I suppose.
Still, I had no illusions that we might break things loose by hand. Nope. That surely wasn't going to happen. Besides, the pipe I had been using was bending despite the fact that it was very thick-walled pipe so it was going to take a LOT of energy to make this happen. How was I going to make the pipe stronger? I went out and puttered around my piles of salvaged steel and looked at stuff like a kid in a 5 & 10 cent store...and I came up with some industrial-quality jack hammer bits that some cheapskate (me) had acquired on the sly because those things are made of REALLY GOOD STEEL and are as hard as woodpecker lips.....and they just happened to fit ever-so-nicely inside my thick wall pipe. NOW we were getting somewhere because having a reinforced pipe meant we could put some real power on the pull. Namely...
HORSEPOWER!
In adherence to my policy of Nothing-Goes-To-Waste, I took several of the badly rusted, bent and abused shackles that we had recovered from the M37 and battleship-welded them; one to a section of hammer bit and another to a section of pipe. With those nested into one another and then slid into place in the square steel tubing I had attached to the old rim, we how had an anchor point for chains, top and bottom...to attach to trucks, fore and aft;
Longfellow (my F350) and
Occasional (Bill's half ton Dodge Ram).
Bill's truck got its name because a great many things on it only work occasionally.
Much as we had done on the M37, which had Budd rims and hand-holes to which chains could be attached, we set up our chains so that one vehicle could pull on one end whilst the other acted like an anchor.
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Blue tape was a witness mark that allowed us to judge if we were making actual progress. Later on when we made more energetic pulls, it would not be needed because movement was immediate, and massive.
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Our hammer-bits and pipe slid inside the square steel tubing from opposite ends, forming three independent layers of steel and I reckoned that having a bit more length of pipe on the pulling end might lend some mechanical advantage to the effort. There was a fly in the ointment, of course (isn't there ALWAYS?) and that was that our hammer-bits (plural) were not of a length that allowed for a single piece covering the entire length. So, there was a point where the pipe might bend if certain circumstances arose....
....which they most certainly did.
We made a pull and we bent a pipe...this time, a
lot more than last time.
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BUT! In the doing of it, we got one hub/drum broke free and then followed that up by working the wheel by hand with another long pipe until things loosened up to an acceptable degree. In fact, we found that once the drum rotated 180 degrees and the part of the drum that had been above ground was resting on the compromised lower half of the brake shoes, it was pretty much free sailing. Ah HAH! So, the backing off of the toe adjusters HAD worked! Just working the drum back and forth and around a bit at a time resulted in quite a bit of ground up rust and dirt dribbling out of the small gap between the drum and the backing plate.
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The pipe was bent but I wasn't ready to cry Uncle just yet so we simply replicated the process on another hub. Alas, the metal of the pipe simply bent some more. Hooray! Break Time! (Ya gotta think positive, fellas!) So, we plucked the whole rig off the car and hustled back over to my house for another quick fabrication session and some really lovely ice-cold water, served over ice, with a side of ice and a topping of ice over that.
My fabrication amounted to simply cutting off the bent piece, which shortened the pipe (obviously) and set up our hammer-bits so as to assure they met in the middle and provided reinforcement across the full length of the thing. Friends, with that done, all the pieces literally and figuratively fell into place. We went back and proceeded to have success after success until everything was moving. As my father would have said, "Now, we're cooking on all four burners!" Yes, we had to make harder pulls and that is what it took. No more pussy-footing around. Believe me, we slapped that old keg of nails around like a rented mule to achieve that success.
But, we DID end up with four rolling wheels and the old sedan received it's nickname -
NAILS.
For those of you who might find yourselves in similarly unfortunate circumstances some day, you might ask,
Why two halves coming together over the the length (or should I say, width) of the wheel? Why not just one piece welded up to the wheel? Well, there are a couple of reasons, actually.
First, the shackles cannot be pulled through the square steel tubing attached to the old wheel as they are too large and IF we had put the whole thing together in a more permanent fashion, if we ended up bending something while we were learning how to use the idea to its maximum potential, we would have to cut everything off just to start all over again. Remember, I came up with the design (such as it was) but, I didn't actually know how to use it...so there was a learning process at work here.
The second reason was that once the drum had broken free, the square steel tubing on the wheel, which began nearly vertical, was now essentially horizontal and as you might have already guessed, the opposing inserts can indeed pull free from the square steel tubing. This allows for a margin of error in the pull (the pull is short and very energetic) that prevents the car from being pulled off the wood blocks it is resting on and/or damaging the sedan in some other fashion because the bits with the shackles pull away before anyone is killed. They don't fly out. They just sort of drop to the ground and the pull is terminated before the driver even knows it.
The third reason is, we were finishing off each break-free effort by hand and that meant pulling the shackled pieces out of the square steel tubing and inserting a long pipe for manual use.
So, I made some educated guesses (not all of which proved to be correct) but most were pretty close to being spot on and the system worked well once we had the confidence that comes with experience.
One of the things I didn't mention was the importance of having the chains and the vehicles lined up in as straight a line as possible from one another. It was sometimes frustrating getting this set up but it ensured the maximum amount of power was achieved per pull. Try to take a stuck lid off a jar of jam with your wrist bent vs. lined up nicely and you'll see how this works in practice. With everything properly in line, it works like gangbusters.
Once everything was freed up, we celebrated. We hooked up a chain to the car and with Longfellow providing the necessary motivation, we paraded it around Frank's place like a couple of droogs. Bill and I both took a turn behind that ridiculously large steering wheel (Frank declined) and we listened for any sounds that indicated the wheels were about to come off. We dribbled the rusty contents of the drums as we went. When Bill came to a stop on my final 'drive' around the place, the chain went slack and the car simply rolled back (slightly downhill) until stopped by the chain which was evidence enough that she was ready to roll.
ROLLER ACHIEVEMENT BADGE, AWARDED!
Frank was looking very pleased with us but I thought I detected that he was a little bit sad to see the old girl go. We had reached that benchmark where the writing was on the wall. Nails was definitely going to a new home. Frank said he might have something for me and excused himself. When he returned, he handed me the original (and ancient) title with several years worth of registrations stapled to it.
WOW.
Thank you, Frank!
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and not nearly so daunting. Oh boy would I love to put the original wheels back on it (with tires and tubes that actually hold air...and hubcaps...and beauty rings. 