'66 Newport 2 Door hardtop

[carguy300]

Headliner does look good. Are door panels redone? I love the red, my 1st car was a 65 newport 4 dr, red interior and it was perfect but the rest of car was a rust bucket, but in high school, who cares ,it ran good!

 

[darth_linux]

One thing I noticed when driving this car home from the previous owners house, over a 300 mile interstate highway, was that the amount of road noise and wind noise made it unpleasantly loud to travel over long distances. Part of that can be attributed to the fact that my drivers door did not have a single piece of weatherstripping in place (I installed new weatherstripping yesterday). But I guess part of it’s just a lack of insulation under the carpet. So, for $30 at Home Depot I picked up the 6 x 9 roll of half-inch carpet backer and I installed it today. It’s super easy to work with, very light weight, easy to cut, and I literally laid it in place and cut it out to shape in a half an hour. I feel confident using this material as I’ve replaced all of the water barriers in the windows, cleaned out the cowl vents while checking for drainage, and checked the front and rear windscreens for leaks.

You can also see the new trunk divider I made for $20 with materials from Hobby Lobby.

 

[darth_linux]

Headliner does look good. Are door panels redone? I love the red, my 1st car was a 65 newport 4 dr, red interior and it was perfect but the rest of car was a rust bucket, but in high school, who cares ,it ran good!

Door panels are original. They’ve been scrubbed and repaired the best I can, but they look better in photos than real life. Scuffs, tears, waves, etc. but for 58 years old, comes with the territory.

 

[carguy300]

Very clever and affordable! It will make a big difference in road noise! Ill be glad when I get mine gutted so I can see floor condition. It was a california car so should be pretty good shape. Rust around rear window is from vinyl top. I am going to redo my interior to black, its green now, black and gold go better together!

 

[darth_linux]

Very clever and affordable! It will make a big difference in road noise! Ill be glad when I get mine gutted so I can see floor condition. It was a california car so should be pretty good shape. Rust around rear window is from vinyl top. I am going to redo my interior to black, its green now, black and gold go better together!

Should be very little rust from CA unless there was debris clogging up the drain holes or something…

 

[darth_linux]

It seems like every little item this car needs is $50 each. After what I paid for this beauty, I’m not ready to be nickel and dimed to death, so rather than fire the money cannon, I’m getting resourceful and being satisfied with “it looks much better than it did.” Take these sill extensions and arm rest bases. $200 all together for new repops. I spent $7 on chrome tape and no one will notice unless they look real close.

 

[carguy300]

That makes real good sense to me, it looks good and its your car! Cant wait to see it all back together!

 

[darth_linux]

Ended up drilling new holes for sill plate extensions to attach to since the little “wings” that were supposed to be there had rusted and fallen off. Carpet got trimmed a little better and reinstalled. All that’s left are the seats.

 

[carguy300]

Lookin good!

 

[darth_linux]

Once I get the seats back in, my next project is to install this HiRev7500 kit from Richard E. Looking forward to it!

 

[carguy300]

Thats what I put on my first 68 300, 440. Pretty easy change out, didnt have to do any adjusting, set timing and drove it.

 

[darth_linux]

Thats what I put on my first 68 300, 440. Pretty easy change out, didnt have to do any adjusting, set timing and drove it.

Nice, that's what I am hoping for. After installing I'll do the whole analysis of how much vacuum advance I'm getting, how much mechanical, and then figure out the initial. It seems like right now it likes about 14 BTDC but I don't know if my current (very old) distributor is even working up to par as far as the advances go. It doesn't ping, so I'm guessing it's within spec, but beyond that who knows.

 

[stubs300]

Once I get the seats back in, my next project is to install this HiRev7500 kit from Richard E. Looking forward to it!

Do you mean Ehrenberg, aka "E-Booger"? Just follow his directions and you'll have no problem hookin that up. Good Luck

 

[darth_linux]

Working on cleaning the seats … found some repairs. Some of the red is a little bit lighter than the original, and then there is some turquoise!

 

[darth_linux]

I got the interior reinstalled today. The only thing missing at the moment are the two door lock knobs (which I have, I just need to install), and the little nylon bumper that goes under the folding front seat on the passenger side.

As I cleaned away decades of grunge and scum off the seats, I noticed that lots of repairs have been done over the years, some of them performed better than others. My take away though is that someone cared enough about this car to fix things that were worn out rather than just use duct tape, or whatever.

Something I didn’t notice before because it was so dirty is that the armrest has the same embossed pattern at the center of it as the backseat. Very cool detail that I didn’t even see before I cleaned the interior!

 

[darth_linux]

Here’s a couple more pictures.

 

[darth_linux]

I bought a steering coupler heat shield from another FCBO member since mine was missing. Soaked it overnight in Evaporust, wire brushed it and gave it a coat of satin black.

 

[darth_linux]

Time to replace the 1970s Dodge Truck carburetor with a more correct 1966 vintage Stromberg WWC. I got this carb from a FCBO member and he said it’s been sitting in a box for a least 20 years. Today was tear down. We’re gonna soak it in pinesol for a few days while we wait for the kit to arrive. Here’s the photos from tear down.

 

[darth_linux]

Got the carburetor all cleaned up and rebuilt. I did the “budget soak” - 5 days in a bucket of 50/50 PineSol and water. Not super good at degreasing, but all the gunk came off with a toothbrush and some Dawn.

Got a kit from Warner for $40 at O’Reilly. The bowl vent valve rubber in the kit was too small so I had to recondition the original. A 4 day soak in brake fluid seemed to work pretty well. The choke pull-off functioned ok, it just needed a new hose.

The power by-pass valve was marked .031. Not sure how that compares to other WWC carbs, but I believe it’s original to this carb.

This is @sixpactogo’s old carb. Most of the gold anodizing was gone, so I gave the outside a spritz of clear satin enamel.

 

[darth_linux]

Started installing the HiRev7500 electronic ignition kit. Everything went pretty smoothly but unfortunately the car will not start. I don’t seem to be getting any signal from the box to the negative side of the coil. Time to do some troubleshooting.