Antique & Classic Cars Blog

Several years ago, a man read an article I wrote for the paper talking about the 215 V8 engine going in my TR6. He had the same engine in his ‘62 Skylark and was looking to have it rebuilt. He needed a rebuilder and, since they usually don’t pull the engine for you, some help on that preliminary chore.

Have engine hoist, will travel. I said I’d pull the motor for him and recommended Adelmann Engine, which rebuilt my 215. Conceptually, removing an engine from this era is not hard, but there was some grease involved. When I got home I looked like I’d spent the day on the Exxon Valdez cleanup.

Rebuild and resto turned out nice, but there were two imperfections still dogging owner Tom Veilleux. One was a tendency for the engine to get hot when it stood for too long on a summer day. The other was the grille, which had gotten cracked somewhere along the way and was crooked to boot.

I had an extra six-blade fan to replace the stock four-blade item and Tom had picked up a nice stock grille at Sonny’s Auto Salvage to swap out his broken one.

So we drained and pulled the radiator, unbolted the four-blade fan, and swapped in the six. The blades on his original piece were longer, so there’s some question how much more air the six-blader will move. We concluded that a shroud would be a big help. I also noticed that the gap of 2 inches from the blades to the radiator was too much. At about an inch, he’d get better cooling. A spacer would correct that and I have a 7/8 inch one that would be about right. Unfortunately it was on my garage shelf.

The car won’t be on the road quite yet, though, so the spacer can go in shortly.

Straightening the grille proved more time consuming. It’s a three-piece item–the wide center, with a two-headlight piece on each end. The Sonny’s center and driver’s-side headlight pieces looked best but we reused Tom’s passenger-side headlight piece because the headlight bucket was very rusty on the replacement.

(Gaps were worse than this–this is after a little fiddling.)

The driver’s-side headlights were low, while the other side nearly touched the top of the grille cavity. Loosening and repositioning with the stock holes wasn’t enough. I kept out the bolts, positioned the grille in a spot where Tom, viewing from the front of the car some ten paces out, was happy, then marked with a Sharpie the additional sheetmetal surrounding each mounting hole that needed to be removed to allow it to bolt up straight.

In his 46 years with the car, Tom doesn’t remember the grille being crooked. Somehow during the recent body restoration, things got out of kilter. But no problem–we got things squared up and bolted down.

The final touch was to adjust the rubber stops on which the hood rests. These were threaded in too far, allowing the hood to rest too low. We backed each one out until Tom was happy with where it sat. (Sharp, well-informed eyes will notice that the front radiator mount has been bent out on its back piece, which now projects over the fan when it should sneak in front of it parallel to the grille. This suggests that someone may have run into fan interference and bent it out of the way. Perhaps they removed an important spacer at the same time to create too big a gap for proper cooling.)

All the minor adjusting pushed this job out to five hours, but the car looks a lot better and when the sun is shining and you’re out cruising, that’s important peace of mind.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 7:30 am and is filed under Car parts, Car stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.