New Year and a New Member Challange. Current garage projects.

1703 steering gear ready for reassembly. John Cislak provided the numbers for the modern lip seals (471744 and 471750) to replace the cork and leather originals. The loose balls are readily available at specialty fastener stores and the lever shaft needle bearings are still a current number (B-2016).

This isn’t a Pierce-specific post, but as it involves a garage fix, some may this project relavent. A couple of my neighbors here in Arizona have redone their garage floors in epoxy paint, giving the floor a beautiful , smooth, clean, and easy-to-maintain surface. The results are terrific, but I’ve always found the whole process to be intimidating. It’s the very first step that’s the problem. Before you can power wash it, and etch the concrete, and paint it, and let it cure, you have to empty the darn place. That’s a big time problem when you have an antique car hobbyist, and an oil painter/metal and glass worker co-habiting the same garage space. There’s just a whole lot of stuff, all of it very necessary of course, squirreled away in there! Here’s the way the garage looked at 8 am today. I’ll post the “After”” photo in just a few minutes.

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You are very fortunate to have obtained a good price on this material. It is very beautiful, and I hear very durable. Moreover, the installation of epoxy and a concrete floor, both old and new is a formidable task. I have a bay here in Florida, where I keep the old cars. When we bought it, I decided to have an epoxy floor installed. The contractor who installed the floor had done it many times before. The process was as follows: strip floor, etch floor with acid, neutralize acid, apply two part epoxy. This floor is indestructible. Outside of dropping an anvil on it, it is as it was. It is difficult to stain. Now, the floor in the garage in my new house in Saratoga also had epoxy installed on new concrete. Although the job is commercially acceptable, little bitty bubbles are visible in many places. Probably the most important part of the process (although if any part of the process is missed, some failure occurs), is the neutralizing and rinsing of the acid etch. This causes paint lifting, or in my case bubbling. The floor must be neutralized, and rinsed. Rinsed many times or the remnants of the acid process remains.

John, the tiles build up the floor by a half inch. Also, I did buy a tapered piece for the entry edge.

Are you missing chrome spears for those vents? I have some – need to be chromed however.

There has been earlier much discussion about the the High Speed Rear End Gears. I some years back bought the gears from Phil Hill. In fact I visited him in Santa Monica together with Irvind Blonder in 1989. Even an amateur as me can assemble that after some advice. I did it last april in my own garage (photo).

On this photo you can see how the ring gear is stuck – no space to turn around. Nobody had told me how to do it – that I had to remove som metal on the inside of the case. In fact I gave up and assembled the old original gear set.