Page Sixty-Eight - Some Consolation

 

How to restore Alphie’s “reasonably original” console.

I have three consoles – one from the black Alpine, one from the Organ Donor and one from Bob (the guy who gave me Bob’s Butt, remember?)

1. Find the lock that fits the rest of the car; remember, one key fits the ignition and doors while the other fits the boot and console.

2. Picked the console with the best (meaning least rusty) sheet metal, took it to bare metal and primed it.

3. Carefully peeled the original vinyl from the sheet metal so I could make a pattern later.

4. Cut a piece of tool box drawer liner for the non-skid, rattle-smoothing bottom liner, no glue, just laid it in.

Tool box drawer liner works great! 

5. Laid out the old vinyl on the back of the new vinyl and drew a pattern.  Foreseeing me screwing up, I cut the vinyl leaving a generous margin for error – important step!

Old vinyl as a patttern for the new vinyl

New vinyl ready to glue

6. Did many, many test fits – another important step! 

7. Got out the stinky contact cement, loads of clamps, binder clips, paint stirrers and popsicle sticks (lolly sticks for the Brits) and set to gluing the vinyl to the metal.  See the pics.

Wrapped, glued and clipped to dry.
(The popsicle (lolly) sticks keep the clips from denting the vinyl.)

8. The console lid gets a specially sewn cover from the gang at Sunbeam Specialties, but I stuffed some extra polyester batting between the foam and the cover because the foam didn’t fill the space as well as I wanted.  LOTS-O-TEST FITS and glued it to the cover plate.

I forgot to take pics during the process, but here's the finished lid.

I bought some stainless #6 oval Phillips head screws, as short as I could find, and some #6 finish washers for the underside of the cover.  No Rust! and they look spanking!

The lid on the cleaned and painted console sheet metal

9. There’s a little square (trapezoid if I’m being precise) of cardboard, which vinyl wraps around to create the top piece at the back of the console, behind the console lid.  Mine was buckled, so I cut a piece of sheet metal to replace it, glued it up and placed weights on it to smooth out the vinyl.

Old, warped cardboard on the right, new sheet metal on the left.

Vinyl wrapped and ready to glue down.
The dots are where the hinge will mount.

Glued up!

Underside of the lid with new stainless fasteners.
(I'll clean up the tag ends of the vinyl, don't worry.)

    10. Glue and clamp the little trapezoid to the console metal and attach the lid with new #10 stainless screws.

11. Cut out the hole for the lock and mount it in place.  Fiddle with the lock until it locks and unlocks easily.

And the lock works!
(I see the little bulge in the vinyl, but it's too late to fix it. 
Don't look that closely!)

ALPHIE LIVES & BREATHES - after forty-five years (maybe more)!

Clint (previous owner) tells me that he thinks Alphie last ran around 1979 or 80, and I brought him home six years ago…

That’s a long sleep! 

(Apparently I need a computer science degree to get a video embedded in Blogger - go to the More Stuff column on the right for the Alphie Lives! video.  BTW, The whirring sound you hear before I crank Alphie are fans blowing the exhaust out of the garage.)

The video isn’t the FIRST start because, of course, I had some problems. 

1. I burned Pertronix Ignitor when I hooked it up to a 1.4-ohm coil, it requires a 3-ohm coil. More on this below.

2. I had the plug wires in the wrong order – duh! 

3. The timing was WAY off, and I couldn’t get it to idle slow enough to set it.

4. The idle was high because I had the “secondary throttle barrel” (as the service manual calls it) of the carb open, so as soon as the engine hit, it raced.  Fixed that.

5. The timing isn’t as easy as it should be.  Alpiners know there is a timing adjuster thumb screw on the vacuum advance, BUT the distributor has to be turned to a ballpark timing because the screw adjuster can only adjust so much.  Getting the little clamp that holds the distributor to the block is a bit, shall-we-say, fiddly, but I persevered and got it. 

6. BEFORE I tried to fire up Alphie for the first time, I discovered that I had the wrong fittings on the fuel line out of the tanks and into the fuel pump.  Care to guess how I determined they were too small?  I only poured about a quart of gas on the floor. 

I discovered I needed a better engine ground when I burned my hand on the clutch hydraulic line.  Fixed that. 

I also found some oil and exhaust leaks during all this.

I should readjust the valve too.

So, he's not quite ready for the road just yet.

Back to the fried Ignitor: I was pretty sure I had cooked the Ignitor because I had spark, and Alphie was chugging fitfully along with his wrong firing order and WAY too advanced timing, but when I tried to fire him up again, I had no spark.  I spent two days (maybe more) checking everything with the multimeter then double checking, then triple checking but couldn’t find anything wrong.  The coil was obviously not tripping, but I couldn’t figure out why.  I suspected the Ignitor, so I ran the Ignitor unit test on the Pertronix website, but the results were confusing. 

I spent about 2.5 hours on the phone with the Pertronix guys before we got the test done correctly and determined that I had blown the first Ignitor.  (Turned out I had the multimeter leads wrong for the positive ground test.)  

The voltage is supposed to drop from 12-volts (battery voltage) to zero (or at least below 3-volts) when the magnet is turned past the Ignitor unit.  Mine went from 12 to 4-volts, bad Ignitor unit.  The Pertronix tech guys were great, by the way. 

I bought a new Ignitor and 3-ohm Flame Thrower coil and Bob’s your uncle, plenty of spark!

I shot the video AFTER all that!  You can tell that Alphie still needs some fine tuning; he’s kind of chugging a bit during the video.  I can hear an exhaust leak, and I can see some oil drops on the floor, so there’s more work to do before Alphie can leave the garage.

Shiny Knockoff Spinners!

I LOVE 'EM!

The pic at the top of the post shows an old spinner next to the rechromed one so you can see just how much better they are!

A huge shout out to Joe DelVecchio at Red’s Parts Attic & Chrome Plating for re-chroming Alphie’s spinners.  They look AWESOME!

Red’s Parts Attic & Chrome Plating, 23220 Laura Lane, New Caney, TX 77357.  (713) 299-1555 or joe@redspartattic.com