How High's the Water Mama?

Not five feet high yet, but my entire yard is a few inches deep and it's still raining. The ditches are running like trout streams!

This is the wettest autumn in the Texas record books. With 2-1/2 months to go this year, we are already 11 inches above the average annual rainfall!

Worse than the rain is the wintery temperatures. I've never had to turn on the heat before November, but it's now been on for two weeks. When this latest cold front moved in two weeks ago, it was 16 F in the northwest panhandle, and 98 F in South Texas!

Car-wise, I'm still working on wiring. Seems like every time I install a few wires, I think of a better way to route them, so rework is the order of the day. If I could find better schematics online, it would go faster, but the search engines are so biased, whenever I look for Mopar diagrams the vast majority that come up are Chevy and Ford.

Final Answer!

If you’ve followed earlier posts about my steering wheel quandary, it looks as if I finally made a decision about what I want.

I started lacing the leather steering wheel cover in place a couple days ago, and despite many interruptions and a few frustrations, it is finally done.

The reason for a different steering wheel was partly because the Hollywood style rim was crumbling junk, which meant an expensive repair. The optional horn ring was surprisingly nice, but still needed re-plating, and since it’s pot metal, that too would cost a lot. Also, the splines on the stock Plymouth shaft were not the same as the truck shaft, meaning one of the parts would have to be reworked. More expense.

This is the Hollywood style horn ring:

 

Since I wasn’t especially fond of the chest-crushing point on the Hollywood horn ring, I decided to focus the wheel choice on a later, stock Mopar wheel for a base to build on, and do my best to customize it to look a little more like a possible fifties style.

I decided the stock wheel I removed from my ’73 truck was the best choice. It was the same depth as the one in the Plymouth, and it was the same 17” diameter. The other wheels I had available were smaller and without power steering I needed a larger wheel.This is the way it looked in my truck:

The seventies-style plastic-look didn’t seem right for a ’56 interior that boasted lots of brightwork, so the wheel I designed had to better fit in. The main styling feature I wanted to keep was a stock ’55-’56 center cap from the standard equipment wheel. As mentioned in a previous post, I did that using a road wheel aftermarket cap that I cut to fit. Since I also wanted a large expanse of chrome, I made sheet metal pieces to fit between the spokes, and after seeing them plated, I’m pleased to see them look so nice.

This is what I ended up with, and I think it fits in quite well with the modified Fury interior:

If I had used an aftermarket steering column and wheel, or restored the stock parts, the bill would have likely been well over $3,000. Using all Chrysler parts from my collection and mostly my own labor, the bill came to less than $500, including plating and leather cover!

Steering Wheel Status

The chrome shop delivered my horn-bar parts at 0900 this morning, and they did the usual beautiful job of plating. I can't say enough good things about the way they treat their customers.

 I epoxied the mounting hardware in place on the back of the chromed parts, so they will be dry by tomorrow morning and I can fit check everything.

When the mail arrived, I was surprised to find the leather wheel cover in the mail box, especially after the Monday holiday, so it took only two working days from California to my door! I now have all the parts I need to complete the steering wheel, so I got anxious and started lacing the cover in place. It's a slow process, and brutal on the fingers that I use to pull the lace tight, so I'm not sure when I will be done. I'll hold off taking pictures of the wheel until it's complete.

Wiring continues to be frustrating. I'm more than a little bit unsure about the column-mounted ignition switch in the '73-'76 truck column I'm using. I just noticed that the pigtail wire that carries power to the windshield wiper motor is AWG 14 on the hard-wired ignition switch, but the '56 body wiring diagram shows a 10 gauge for that circuit. Sounds like melted wires waiting to happen. The stock truck wiring was not well designed, and melted wires inside the column and fried switches were far too common, so I might have to reroute or add some new circuits and pick up the wiper power from a different source.

The wiring issues are quickly becoming my least favorite part of the project!

Shock and Awe!

More than once I've decided against a part or a modification because of price, but the price I was quoted by Dallas Steering Wheel to install a leather wrap on my steering wheel about put me into cardiac arrest! Their website ads show several European Super Cars, and I suppose I should have expected that those were the target customers for their products. Whatever, their prices are way out of my league.

The shock: They wanted $500 plus tax and shipping for two-tone leather and 1/8" padding. That's $475 more than what it cost for me to wrap the one on my truck. So, I decided to also do this one myself using a Wheel Skins single-color wrap over the 1/8" padding I had left over from when I installed the generic leather cover on my '73 D100. The high quality, custom made leather cover I'll use this time will be around $60 plus shipping. Not quite as pretty as the two-tone would have been, but for ten percent of the cost, it will do just fine!

I got started installing the padding yesterday, and the cover should be here in about a week.

The awe: I took the homemade horn bar parts to the plating shop in Gainesville, Texas yesterday. They quoted about $150 to plate the two parts, and a three-week wait, so I'll be getting back to wire routing for a while. Then, this morning they called and said they had squeezed them in between bigger jobs, and that I can pick them up this afternoon!

I'll go after them sometime tomorrow, and maybe I can have some pictures to post if I can get them mounted on the wheel.

The guy I dealt with at the chrome shop was interesting to visit with. He's eighty-one years old and works as a consultant two days a week after a lifelong career in the plating business. Four years older than me, and still working, while I've been retired for twenty-one years!

What made him interesting was his hobby as a top-fuel and funny car owner-driver for many years from the late fifties until the mid-eighties. It's interesting to hear the stories from the heyday of drag racing. He said he left when it was no longer a sport between friends.