It’s Accessible

Last Friday afternoon, the LeMans saw the light of day for the first time in nearly thirteen years. After filling the tires with air (TYL that they held air), it only took an hour to clear a path and yank the car out of its long-term slumber.





I made an attempt at documenting the event on video and have posted it on YouTube (click here).. Part of the video is a walk-around with narrative. A couple movie-making issues I need to address are the remote start/stop fob that came with the tripod and the difficulty in seeing the display outside. I’ve toyed with the idea of buying a dedicated digital video camera, but that’s money better spent on the project. I’ll keep my eyes on Craigslist and maybe something decent will show up for a steal of a price.

Back to the car. All was as I remember it. Dry storage appears to have been kind. Much kinder than the wet storage the car endured during its ten year tenure in Lynchburg. My current priority is pulling the drivetrain so I can rebuild the engine with new pistons, rings, and gaskets (remember this engine only has a couple hundred miles on it, so bearings should be fine). With the engine torn down, I’ll clean out all the passages. The transmission, a Super Turbine-300, will get torn down, cleaned, and reassembled using a rebuild kit. Having done the same thing to a Corvair’s PowerGlide, I’m confident I’ll end up with a nice shifting slushbox when I’m done. I’m not looking to race this car, just cruise, so the two-speed will suffice just fine.

So, the current plan is to focus on the car, not the workspace. The project to refinish the stall behind the garage is stalled. The car will stay parked in the portable garage and I’ll pull parts and pieces into the main garage to refinish or refurbish.

The next time I have a willing helper, I'll remove the hood. That'll cross the next item off my To-Do list.

Prepping and Planning

If the weather cooperates and the tires hold air, I’ll be moving old cars this Saturday morning with the help of family. Between now and then, I need to make sure the all the stuff that’s in the way is moved. That includes boards, car-top carrier, and homemade sandblast cabinet that are piled on top of the car; the wheels sitting on the hood; and the partial Corvair front end, wheelbarrow, garden-cart, and compost drum blocking the car’s pathway to freedom.

Last weekend the lovely Loriann and I tore out the cabinets from our old kitchen. Since we plan on re-using some of them, they went into the garage for temporary, safe storage. Now I don’t have room for the LeMans, so Plan B is being implemented. The new plan has the LeMans taking up residence in the portable garage – front end facing out. The Corvair will go back where the LeMans came from – buried and forgotten until the LeMans is done. For the time being, the garage will be used as a rebuild area. Starting with the engine and transmission and moving to fenders, hood, doors and trunk-lid. As pieces get finished, they’ll be protected and stored in a corner.

For years I’ve been watching, with great enjoyment, YouTube videos of regular people working on their cars, and I’ve decided I’d like to try my hand at creating a video documentary of the working on the LeMans. I’ve bought a tripod and am trying to figure out how to connect my Handycam to a computer or tablet. Two cameras (Handycam and phone) seem to be a good way to go. We’ll see how that experiment goes.

What Happened in Blacksburg?

One of my job changes occurred in 2003 and resulted in an extended stay at a rented home without my family. The lovely Loriann and I decided to keep the girls in school in NY, so they weren’t available to join me in Blacksburg, VA. With time on my hands and a single-car garage at my disposal, I moved the LeMans back to VA. For those of you keeping score, the LeMans had been built in CA, sold in VA, driven back to CA, moving-van”ned” to PA, driven to MD, driven back to VA, trailered to NY, and tow-dollied back to VA - but I digress.























With dreams of painting the car, I purchased my first air garage-worthy compressor and a basic set of accoutrements. With my new air wrench and the help of my best buddy, Bill, we tore down the car removing the bumpers, trim, lights, hood, front clip, windows, trunk lid, top assembly, doors, seats, interior panels, door handles, and the gas tank. Then it was time for some refurbishment. Since it’s been nearly 14 years, I’m a little fuzzy on all I did do, but I know I coated the floor with POR-15, coated the topside and underside of the trunk with POR-15, started up the engine, replaced exhaust gaskets and brake hoses, removed a bunch of Bondo off the tailpanel, and started stripping the paint and Bondo off the left quarterpanel. By the way, the Bondo was originally put in to deal with dents, not rust. It was at that point, I was informed the company I was working had been sold, and new owners were downsizing.

The family was living with me by then, and they all liked the area, so I searched long and hard for a replacement job, but it was a small market and there was nothing in the pay range that I had been enjoying. After getting a generous job offer back in MD, we made the decision to move again.





That meant I needed to put the LeMans back in movable condition. There was no way I could drive it the couple hundred miles to Baltimore, so I bolted on the fenders, hood, trunk lid, and top assembly and filled the trunk with doors and windows and the interior with boxes of everything that was left. She was rolled onto a U-Haul trailer and towed to a waiting spot in the garage at my current home.

What To Buy?

With last weekend’s completed sale of my ’68 Corvair, I find myself with a little coin in the LeMans kitty. I’m still not clear on this whole irony thing, but isn’t it ironic that the first item I buy is a come-along (aka Cable Winch Puller)? The Corvair was parked up against the wall of the garage, so I needed to yank it out in the middle in order to get it off the dollies and rolled into its temporary home in the portable garage and a come-along was the right tool for the job. By the way, it’s very odd to type the Corvair, since it’s been fourteen years since I’ve only had one Corvair.

Anyway, last night, with the help of my future son-in-law, Jeff, the Corvair was moved out of the garage leaving only some tidying before the LeMans can be relocated there. With no rain in the forecast through this coming weekend, maybe that will happen sooner, rather than later.

Back to the real subject of this post, how to spend money. I was on the verge of buying a HEI distributor and high-performance spark plug leads on Amazon, but decided against it, since the first thing I need to do is tear down the engine and transmission, not dress it up. I’m starting with the engine and transmission since I know both have issues (broken piston skirt and balky shifting respectively). Once the car is in the garage, the plan is to immediately pull the engine and transmission and tear down each. That reminds me, I need to remember to back the car into the garage when it’s being moved. Once I make sure the the hard parts are reusable, I’ll buy a set of pistons from Egge, a re-ring kit off eBay, a ST-300 rebuild kit from autotran.us, and an ATF filter from RockAuto. Only after the drivetrain is back in place, will I worry about distributors and spark plugs.

I’m excited!

Making Room

Since moving into my circa-1922 house with detached garage, my main focus of car roadification has been Corvairs. I’ve been able to relatively comfortably fit project, tools, and parts simultaneously into my two-car garage. At seventeen and a half feet wide by nineteen feet deep, it’s not spacious, but I’ve read about folks that have done far more with far less square footage. The footprint of my ’65 LeMans is roughly twenty-five percent greater than a Corvair, so there’s no way I could continue hoarding Corvair parts on the shelves taking up a good chunk of precious floor space. For the last couple months I’ve made a huge dent in the size of my stash – a complete Corvair engine plus spare block, gone via Craigslist; two pickup truck loads of parts, gone to the Corvair Ranch; a big bolt bin full of bits; emptied into small tubs now sitting on a small shelf high on the side wall. Even with this cleansing, I still feel, as you can see from the drawing below, that I’m gonna’ be cramped.

The stall behind the garage will be available once I pull the LeMans out, but my first thought (and the easiest plan to implement) is to put the Corvair that I’m keeping back there, out of the way. That would free up the portable tent garage that sits in my driveway for holding parts and body pieces as they’re pulled off the car. The portable garage is not secure nor weathertight, so I wouldn’t be comfortable moving any of my tools out there, thus they’d still be taking up precious space in the garage.



Another plan I’ve cooked up is to put the Corvair in the portable tent garage and properly enclose the stall behind the garage with T-111 screwed to the six-by-sixes posts to form the walls. Initially, gravel and plywood would constitute a floor with concrete being poured at a later (much later) date. I’d cut a doorway in the garage’s rear wall and hang a 36” door. I’ll put up the heavy-duty shelves for staging LeMans parts and empty the garage of everything except my rolling tool chest and a work bench. I like the looks of the following.

I Saw the Engine

This past weekend, I spent some time unburying the LeMans. The engine hadn’t seen the light of day for many, many years, and I had no idea what to expect. My fear was mice had made nests and chewed up hoses and wires. I did NOT want to have to spend hours cleaning and rewiring. It took a few minutes to remove the stuff that covered the hood. The hood opened easily (no seized hinges, hurray) and the only evidence of unwanted guests I could find was a small nest on the ledge ahead of the radiator and some chewed wires on the harness that powers the front lights and horn.





A while back a Corvair friend passed away, and I helped liquidate the hoard he’d amassed. In repayment for my time and efforts, his widow told me to take something, and I chose this set of Fenton Hustler III wheels (two 14X6 and two 14X7). These will go on the LeMans, and I’ve settled on General Altimax RT43 tires - 205/70-14 for the front and 225/70-14 for the rears. I decided to go with blackwalls without raised white letters, but that could change up until I place my TireRack order. I'll be looking at the lower photos a few times before I pull the trigger.

Heading East, Again

This is a good time to relay the LeMans' first two cross-country trips. She was built in 1965 at General Motors' Fremont, California assembly plant. Coincidentally, this facility (now popping out Teslas) is located less than five miles from the house I grew up in. A few times during my formative years, I was fortunate enough to take tours there and watch them put cars together. I don't remember if any of these visits occurred when I was only four years old (doubtful), but it's fun to think I could've unknowingly watched my car being built two decades before I took ownership. I digress. Once she LeMans rolled off the line, she was loaded onto a train for her first trip to the east. After arriving in Richmond, VA, she was transported to the downtown dealer and sold to her original owner, William Hayes. A few years later, William and his wife drove the car back to Fremont moving into a house just a block away from where I was forming a deep attraction to all things automotive. How did I come to learn this story? I sent the car's VIN and a twenty dollar check to Pontiac Historical Services and they replied with a large envelope filled with wonderful information including the build date and location and the dealer name and address.

Now, skip ahead twenty years. It was mid ’86 and the lovely Loriann and I were expecting our first child. We were living in a rented two-bedroom rowhouse in Silicon Valley with dreams of a home of our own. Thirty years ago, housing prices there were as they are now – astronomical. To help us realize our dream, my father-in-law, Don, mailed me (as in US Postal Service, envelope, stamp) a newspaper clipping from the Jobs section of his local Albany, NY newspaper. The Mechanical Technology Division of my current employer, Westinghouse, was looking for a mechanical engineer. The location? Pittsburgh, PA. I’m not sure how I did it pre-internet, but, somehow, I was able to determine that there was affordable housing there. A phone call with the hiring manager was followed by a flight to PIT, a face-to-face, and, a few days later, a job offer that included a raise and a generous moving allowance – one that included moving both our old cars (the LeMans and a ’62 Corvair).

A month or so later, it was moving day, and the Allied Van Lines trailer was parked outside the carport of our home. Since both cars ran, the plan was to drive the two of them into the trailer, anchor them in place, and then build a platform above them to hold the contents of our townhouse. The LeMans was the first to go in, so I started up the car and got it idling nicely before turning it over to the packer who was to drive it up the rather steep ramps. His first attempt was a fail since the tips of the tailpipes touched the ground. After placing some pieces of 2X12s at the lower end of each ramp, the second attempt went cleanly. Due to the extreme incline, the packer had to really give her the gas to get to the top of the ramps. Sadly, by the time the car was nestled in the front of the trailer, there was a nasty smell coming from the transmission.

A week later, the LeMans was ensconced in its new home in a 2-car garage. It’s sad that I never had time to utilize that nice workspace, but that’s another story. The quality of the photograph below doesn't allow viewing the LeMans, but it was there, hidden behind the closed door.