On April 10, 2017, Clarence convinced me that we really should look into the oil pan and see what happened when I had started the engine back on January 6th. I reluctantly agreed, knowing full well that what we were going to see was something between ugly and really really ugly. Um…… it was ugly.

And it got uglier when we pulled off the oil pan.

The #3 rod bearing was gone. It had been ground up into crumbs and small chunks. Sally & Clarence left for home the next day and I was left with the knowledge that I had properly guessed a rod issue. But that didn’t make me any happier. I removed the rod cap on #3 and pulled the rod and piston down and out past the crank shaft journal.

This is what a rod bearing and rod bearing in a cap are supposed to look like:

That was the “before” photo. This is the “after” photo:

Oh dear – what to do next?

On April 4, 2017, Sally & Clarence Davis arrived for a visit. Clarence & Sally had the Michigan stored at their barn in Hobart, Indiana for a year after we purchased the car in 2011 and they helped us move the car from our garage to our work shop in 2013. Sally (Janet’s sister) is also a great grandchild of Michael Fleck, the original owner of our car. Clarence has been a great help in working on the car and has extensive experience with the care & maintenance of very big power plant machinery. He & I commenced work on April 5th, going over the entire differential and drive shaft.

We got the adjustment of the ring & pinion gear to the smoothest operation so far, tightened up the torque tube adjustments of the depth of the pinion, closed up the differential and added the very viscous gear oil.

Maybe that will be the last we need to deal with the differential for a while.

In Mid-March I worked for a steady 4 days to correct issues with the thrust bearing adjustment mechanism on the torque tube. It involved hours of attempting to get better access through the little adjustment door. I had to rig a torque tube support to the rafters so that I could get the best angles for work. The photo does NOT show the straight up and down orientation that was required.

The thrust bearing was trapped in the torque tube. There was no way to get it out through the ends of the tube and it was clearly meant to install or remove through the adjustment door. But it could not be removed because of restrictions in the torque tube casting. I spent DAYS carefully grinding, filing to open the area up without damaging the threads in the tube or on the bearing race. It was very fine work with magnifying lens goggles & Dremel tools with tool steel burrs. Finally the casting was opened up enough to fully unscrew the bearing race and remove it.

An unforeseen problem presented itself next. The bearing would fit nicely back through the little door,but would NOT thread back into its correct position. I fought with the little #%$#&* for a solid 8 hours (over 2 days when you would NOT want to have visited me.) It had been in there. It had threaded out nice and smoothly. But it would NOT thread back in without starting to cross thread. I tried every trick I knew about getting this thing back in. NO DICE. So I slept on it. Not literately, but I did walk away and didn’t deal with it for a day or two. In thinking about the problem it occurred to me that the torque tube was a combination of steel tubing with some cast iron and bronze inserts. The thrust bearing race was bi-metal. The outside edge was steel (where the notches were cut and the threads were located and the inside (the actual bearing race) was some bronze alloy. Bi-metal pieces tend to be a bit “flexy” or “bendy”. And this flexy or bendyness is increased with changes in temperature. Could this bi-metal bearing have expanded or sprung bigger when I removed it from the torque tube? Hmmmmm. Why not cool this thing and see if it shrinks?

Off to the local Albertson’s supermarket where they sell dry-ice. I packed the bearing in the stuff and got it really cold, inserted it into the little doorway and gave it a spin. BINGO! No muss, no fuss — It went in LIKE THE LITTLE $%*&^*(&^ WAS SUPPOSED TO GO IN. Problem solved – lesson learned. Everything’s cool.

My Dad headed back to Fresno and I took a some time off from working on the Michigan… letting the issues before me sink in a little. The differential was becoming a real frustration. “Correcting” the mistakes in the rear end was not improving the operation of the gears. Eric & Kristie arrived for a visit on January 24, 2017 and Eric was ready to attack the problems my Dad & I were encountering. When in doubt, call in the engineers from M.I.T. And so we did.

We took the carrier out of the mounting and went through it to work out the adjusting mechanism.

The entire drive shaft had a lot of components, some of which were not original. At least one Hyatt type caged roller bearing had been replaced with a modern sealed bearing and spacer. I annotated the arrangement as I found it:

Eric & I checked forward & reverse play / looseness in the drive shaft pinion gear and tried to get it to adjust where there wasn’t too much fore & aft slop while adjusting the ring gear left and right to get a nice mesh without binding or clatter.

We were less than completely successful. Improvements? Yes. Wonderful? No.

Some of the adjusting mechanisms didn’t want to cooperate very well. Most especially the rear thrust bearing adjuster that was accessed though a little door on the torque tube.

By the time Eric & Kristie had to leave, we had still not sorted out the actual proper (or best) adjustment of the gears, but we could see what needed to be done.

We started the car 4 times on January 6, 2017. Each time the engine ran very fast and I was unable to adjust the carburetor to slow the RPMs down to anything approaching an idle. On start number 3, I started to hear a faint rapping noise. On start number 4, it was a very noticeable knock… I shut the engine down immediately and and knew that we had something bad going on. It was simply a question of “how bad.”

So, for the time being I chose to ignore what had happened with the engine and my Dad & I concentrated on the differential which we knew had some issues. In retrospect, it was probably a good thing we didn’t have a “happy” engine, because if we might have tried to DRIVE the car. That would have been – not good. It seems that
when we opened up the back of the differential the ring gear was on the RIGHT side and not the left side. I noted this discrepancy back on my July 8, 2016 Post.

In any case, the ring gear was installed on the wrong side. We eventually determined that someone (Phillip Dickey? or kids at a Portage High School shop class?) flipped the entire torque tube / drive shaft / ring & pinion assembly — upside down. Was this a prank or were they trying to get a different wear pattern on the gears? I think we may never know. The result was that the thrust bearing adjustment door was on the bottom of the torque tube instead of the top and the ring gear was on the right side. So why would this matter……… well, in doing a little research, I now understand that the gearing in differentials is dependent upon whether the engine turns clockwise or counter clockwise. This, in turn, (sorry – for the pun) will dictate which side of the pinion gear the ring gear is placed so the car has 3 speeds forward and one in reverse. OR…. if you flip the ring gear to the other side, 3 speeds in reverse and one speed forward. YIKES! That could have been a very unpleasant discovery. My Dad & I confirmed this problem by jacking up the rear wheels and manually cranking the engine over while running through the gears. Sure enough 1st, 2nd & 3rd gear ALL IN REVERSE. “Reverse” gear rotated the wheels forward.

My Dad & I worked on the differential (man it is heavy) and managed to get the carrier & ring gear flipped around to the left side, but we had yet to discover that the torque tube was installed upside down. This meant that when we flipped the carrier over to the other side of its mounts, we were actually installing it on the wrong side. Oh dear.
The gears didn’t want to adjust and it was obviously not happy. It would require more work to get it to something approximating “properly adjusted”.