Jalopy repairs, expensive yes but basically a one time cost and therapeutic for my soul

About 4 years ago I picked up the Jalopy, I was almost ready to buy a motorcycle when I came upon it. Now I am kind of a car guy so when I saw this car, that I did not even know they made in 1958, I just had to get it. I have been to countless car shows and have never even seen a Ranchero older than 1960 when they started using the Falcon body style. The first year for the Ranchero was 1957, two years before my all-time favorite car – the 1959 El Camino, those fins are just magnificent.

I had an opportunity some years ago to purchase a 1959 El Camino from the original owner. This is when I learned that in fact, money talks and bullshit walks. I came upon this beauty with a for sale sign in the window in rural Virginia, I immediately stopped. The transmission went bad several years ago I was told and now the engine will not turn over either. Undeterred, I looked the car over and found the body and interior in very good shape. Everything was old and faded but was not rusted out or dented up, and he only wanted 600 bucks. This was in the mid 80’s, before an ATM on every corner and actually before they became popular at all. I told him I would have to run to the bank and get the cash and I should be back in a few hours. Well off the bank I went and on my way back - what passes me, a pickup truck pulling a trailer with that El Camino on the back. When I got back to the place it was for sale I asked, why did you sell it out from under me? The old man’s response is still ringing in my ears – money talks and bullshit walks.

So when the opportunity on the 1958 Ranchero came up, again from an older gentleman, who reminded me of the “money talks” man I knew I had to act quickly. The car was far from perfect, there had been some body work and the car was loose. By loose I mean I could tell it would be needing some suspension work, engine work along with the eventual body work. For me that mattered little, why you might ask? Because I knew this car was going to become a project car, a never ending project that I could work on when it needed worked on, or and more importantly when I needed to work on it. Don’t get me wrong, it was drivable and all but I knew there was enough work there to keep me as busy as I wanted to be for as long as I wanted to be busy. One thing you learn driving an old car every day is patience, in spades. There will be times it will not start, there will times it will not move and there will times it will leave you someplace. Those are inevitabilities, you can’t get mad, it is just a fact of driving a Jalopy. I just keep a tool bag and some critical spares in the car and anything else I can call friends.

I find it very cathartic to tinker around on old cars. My job is, like most folks, a never end sea of too many things to get done with no end in sight. TV and Radio are never ending and in some respects more monotonous than delivering the mail. The Jalopy allows me some mindless thing to do, not that working on cars in mindless, but for me it is. Never will I have to worry if this piece of hardware will no longer operate correctly when a new update to Flash player comes out. Never will I have to worry about a satellite feed being adversely affected by sun spots, taking the broadcast off the air. Never will I have to worry about a power supply filter failing and placing just enough ripple on the DC voltage to cause a weird intermittent popping on the digital radio channel. In 1958 things were simpler, no computerized anything, no software compatibility issues, no anti-locking anything and no way was someone from Onstar going to unlock my doors, shut off my car or even determine where I am located.

Bride humors me on this, sometimes barely but she does and I love her for it. I use the logic of comparing all repairs to a number of car payments if I were to go and buy a new car and that works, she likes Jalopy riding so that helps as well. So about 7 months ago I started pondering what needed doing next and I came to the suspension and steering mechanisms and after crawling around under there for a few hours I determined it all needed replaced. WOW I remember thinking, this is going to be a big project. At that time I also started wondering if some upgrades might not be in order. Maybe a conversion to front disc brakes, something that was not even available in 1958. The Thunderbird was the first Ford that disc brakes came standard and that was not until 1965. I knew that would require big changes. The factory tires and rims were 14” and the disc brake mechanisms would not fit inside that rim, I had to change over to 15 inch rims. No problem except that I wanted to keep the original 14 inch hubcaps. I ordered new steel rims and then had a metal fabricator create, and weld in, some rings that would suspend my 14 inch hubcaps in the center of the 15 inch rims. A quick trip to the powder coater for a shot of red powder coating (to match the car) and the first part of the project was complete.

Next was the rear suspension, new shocks and new spring mounts and then mounting the new and much larger rims and tires. That also required some modifications to the fenders to allow them to fit, although none of that is visible by looking the underside required quite a few hours of work. I also reworked the original drum brakes that were on the rear, I wish they had the automatic adjusters that were available starting in 1959. I have since found a conversion kit for that that is cheap – 40 bucks but requires me to pull it apart again to install, I already order the kit so that will be coming soon. With the rear done I moved onto the front, first ordering most of the parts in a “front end” kit from Kanter Automotive. I also order new springs and an updated stabilizer bar from Concours parts that far exceeded the factory original. Next was the conversion kit for front disc brakes from Master Power Brakes. Once I had all the parts, I planned the disassembly. The underside of the front end was horrible, 52 years of dirt, grease and grime was fossilized all over everything. My best friend Mark came by to assist with the tear out. It was every bit as nasty as I had anticipated and I greatly appreciated the assistance, thanks brother.

We were able to get the entire front end pulled out in one day. There were three weeks of scraping and cleaning and primering and painting and powder coating of the parts I was going to use. Once everything was clean and all the new parts were installed I was thinking this should be pretty easy. After installing the master cylinder and brakes lines, which is one of my least favorite things to do by the way, we were on to reinstalling all the parts. That actually did go pretty smoothly, the only big mistake was I installed the lower control arm bushings backwards which required about an hour each to remove and install correctly and yes there are four of them. When I went back to the shop manual there was a line that was BOLDED and in all CAPS that said, be sure to install bushings with the flanges on the inside, yes I had read that whole section before I started. Once past that little snafu everything else went pretty smooth and it went back together pretty quickly.

I knew that I would need to get the front end aligned at least close enough to drive it to the shop for a front end alignment and to get the new tires installed. I remember a trick I learned from my 11th grade auto mechanics teacher at Ohio High Point joint vocational school to get close on a front end alignment using sticks (3 foot yard sticks) and a piece of string. Well I thought, this is 2010 I should be able to accomplish this task even a bit better. So I broke out the laser pointer, a stick, a string and dusted off Pythagoras’s theorem for a 21st century version of that old trick. Well sir, I surprised even myself with that one and the alignment was, I believe, closer than what it was before I tore it apart. I am going to ask for the before and after numbers from the alignment shop to see exactly how close I came. It drove fabulously, without a shimmy or a shake and the new disc brakes stopped very strongly with no pull to the right or left.

She drives like a brand new 1958 Ford would have, and that is a lot better than what it was driving like before I started. I was amazed that it still had the factory original upper ball joints, I know that because they were riveted in and none of the aftermarket ball joints, even from Ford directly were riveted in, they were all bolted in. The project took, all told, about 150 hours spread over 6 months. Since I did not want to stop driving I performed the work in stages with the longest period of outage being about 4 weeks while I had the front end out. I spent in the neighborhood of 4 grand, or about 8 car payments but that money was spent replacing items that were mostly 52 years old, they will not need replaced again in my lifetime so I my opinion it was money well spent.

The biggest bonus is this, I got to spend male bonding time with a great friend and I got the satisfaction of fixing the jalopy and I got to get my mind off of work for a while. I am already wondering what is next, I may have to learn to work sheet metal and body filler as well as how to paint. Who knows, I might replace the old and tired 110 horsepower six cylinder with a Boss 302 with a supercharger pumping 500 plus horse power. Whatever is next, it will have to wait for me to replenish the “car” fund.