Sorry to have disappeared for a bit, working on the car and had a major deadline at work that had to be met, 12-14 hour days for 4 weeks tends to burn you out.

so over the past few weeks the '39 has had a few issues raise their ugly head.

Alternator caught fire, that was fun.. I was still having an issue after I fixed the fan issue and a couple other wiring problems, so I took it in to my buddies shop for a load test on the alternator, and during the test the alternator started to smoke and then burn.. so $400 later I have a new alternator (and had the old one rebuilt as a spare). the interior of the alternator was very rusted which is probably what lead to the failure.. It appeared to me as if water had made its what into the unit, like someone hosed off the motor, I can't see how it could be that rusty from just sitting, it really looked like it had sat in water.

Then last weekend I lost the brakes, AC, and the transmission would not shift, happened after I hit a large bump on the highway. I could hear a sucking sound and figured that either I tore a vacuum line or the brake booster failed, since it is under the car it could have been smacked by something.

got under the car and discovered the previous owner had run the vacuum line for the booster and the transmission through the frame and had it looped up and over the drive shaft at the rear of the transmission, he had a stubby little 3" long hose on the transmission vacuum modulator, with a "T" off to the brake booster, but nothing securing the line and no hose clamps holding anything together, apparently the bump caused the line to bounce enough that the driveshaft grabbed it and tore it out.

I removed all the crap, shaped a hard line from the manifold and ran it down the back of the motor and over the top of the transmission, and secured it to the transmission properly, and ran a new line for the brake booster.


while I was under there I noticed something else. The brackets that the previous owner welded on for the front torsion bars were cracked at the welds, and tearing the frame apart:

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So I had to take it to back to my buddies shop and put it on a rack, cut everything out, reinforce and re-weld it all.

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