'59 Plymouth Forum

On a beautiful sunny day in June we were on our way to a car show when I heard a couple of really loud bangs under the hood I pulled over and so did Matthew who was following in the convertible and our friends with their 55 Oldsmobile. When we opened the hood we saw cooling fluid coming at the intake manifold. We called AAA and waited for a while and when he arrived he couldn't really find anything wrong with the engine but it was running a little rough. He told us to drive it home and he would follow us for the first 20 miles. The car ran but not as strong as I was used to but we made it home. We already had plans for a rebuild this winter as it was smoking and using a lot of oil and we decided to move our plans forward a few months.

Matthew started looking for the needed parts and in September he started taking a lot of parts of the engine.

We found a lot of dirt in the engine but otherwise it was OK. We found that the timing chain and pistons were still originals and not much has been done to the engine in the past 57 years! Two valves were not really OK and the number one piston was the reason for the oil usage. But everything came out well and the block is ready to go to the machine shop next week.

We had a lot of loose parts in the garage that needed a clean up and some fresh paint. A couple of months ago Matthew had a workshop for powder coating and told me that I should powder coat the parts. Yesterday we looked for all the "black" parts and this afternoon we went to a place were you can sand blast and powder coat yourself. Fun to do and in the end a lot cheaper than paint. We spend about 4 hours and $100 for sand blasting and powder coating all parts in the last picture.

After 20 minutes in the oven we had to let the parts cool for a while before we put on the black powder. We used matt black for the front support and gloss black for the other parts.

Amazing, Ron! I just now looked for DIY powder coating places in Philly, I haven't found one. What a neat trick! It's great that you have a shop like that near you.

Dan

Faulkner wrote:Amazing, Ron! I just now looked for DIY powder coating places in Philly, I haven't found one. What a neat trick! It's great that you have a shop like that near you.

Dan

As far as I know it is the only place in The Netherlands with the DIY system, fortunately it is only about 5 miles away for us
Send over your parts and we can do it for you, it is fun to do it and it goes really fast!

Yup! Powder coating is fun and the results are fantastic!!!

I'll be going back next week! Still have some parts that need to be coated in red and some in black

Ron and I keep trying to catch up with each other via Skype, but six hours of time difference keeps getting in the way. Either I'm busy, or he is. Today was no exception - when I tried to reach him, he was out in the garage with Matthew, working on Chrissie. Not exactly sure what they are up to, but he messaged these pix and reports great progress.

Inner fenders are rusted so we are using the ones from the old Fury.
I removed the front fender and inner fender on the passenger side, we cleaned up the frame and painted it black. That's what happened

Did you ever find what caused the loud bangs in the engine?

We can only guess what caused the loud bangs as we did not find something really wrong with the engine. It is Obvious that it needed the rebuild as a lot of parts were in there since new. My best guess is that it happened because the original timing chain slipped but I was cruising with a steady speed and normally the would happen when accelerating. But the engine came home from the machine shop this week and now we can start rebuilding it.

In November we went to Florida to escape the cold weather here. Dick Koch has been receiving some packages for us that we had to take home with us. Had a great day with Dick and Yvonne and came back to our Florida villa with a lot of boxes

Got all the new parts in the garage now except for the cam shaft. The NOS one is in on it's way to the Netherlands!

Today I will start to get the old paint off the block

Great pix and flix, Ron! I love the scenes of boring and honing.

I notice that you powder coated your valve covers red, just like the air cleaner. Is that because you like the look, or is silver on Faulkner's covers wrong?

So much for being factory or politically correct. I think I'm going to turn my swivel seat levers in the other direction.
Dick.

The original brochure shows red valve covers.

I have received pics from Raymond with his all original 59 Sport Fury and it has red valve covers. I think it all depends on where the car was build.
So far what I have seen on survivors the block was silver, valve covers silver or red and the air cleaner red.
I like the look of the red valve covers more as the engine has more color

I'm gonna paint my red!