Slick 60's

That's cool. A Saskatchewan landmark!

The battery that was in it had a sticker on it to record when it was last serviced, with little punch holes to indicate the year. If I'm not mistaken the sticker only went up to 1984, so I suspect it had been sitting for some time.

very nice work! My Dad and I are sitting here surfing the slicks projects/builds and he and I like the progress you are making.

Hoofbeat Racer wrote:Let's try for Three Hills in the spring ok? At least spring of 2014...

I'm going to make it official. This is my goal. Three Hills 2014!

If any of you are looking for a parts truck i own a 1962 Mercury pickup truck
http://alberta.kijiji.ca/c-cars-vehicle ... Z495859686
PM me I am open to any offer

T ray rather than cluttering up other peoples build threads why not list it down in the " trucks for sale section ".


Rick

I already own a parts truck.

Since this is up near the top again I might as well do a mini update. I recently reacquired a box of pistons and rings for my 223 and a gasket set that a friend had been storing, so it's nice to almost have everything consolidated in one spot.

Also, if anyone has seen coverage of the floods in Alberta I'm happy to report that we we're on high ground and well away from any flood plain, so the Merc is nice and dry and our place didn't sustain any damage. A lot of people were displaced and there's a ton of damage so we've been lucky. It's almost surreal to see the difference between our area and those directly affected, as you wouldn't know anything was amiss up here.

Good to hear yall are on high ground and your getting the pieces together to get you Merc going . I started tearing into my Uni a couple weeks ago and hope to be driving it by the 3rd weekend in July .


Rick

The truck still waits...

However, there is some good news on the garage front! I just got a Liftmaster 8500 shaft-drive garage door opener installed.



I had been told that the previous owner had built the garage in such a way that an opener install was virtually impossible! It's a 9' door, 10' ceiling, with the tracks tucked up real tight. Not much room on the sides, so part of a stud and some insulation had to be removed, as well as one of the fluorescent light fixtures since the door was hitting it on the way up. :facepalm:

The previous method (using the 1x6 fence board the P.O. left behind) of getting the car out was as follows:

1-Enter garage through man door
2-Partially lift up the overhead door with the handy-dandy rope
3-Lift door up to about 6.5 feet by hand, prop with fence board
4-Start car, drive out, park in alley, shut off car and remove key
5-Close overhead door from inside and lock
6-Exit garage through man door and lock
7-Exit yard through back gate
8-Get back in car and drive off

So much better now! Once the major house projects are completed my plan is to continue the garage purge I started and get everything more organized. I'll have to find a solution for remounting the light fixture so it clears the door, then I plan to add some shelving, rearrange things a bit, and get all my tools in one spot. They're divided in small groups throughout the house since I've needed various things for doing the renos. And the wall repair necessitated picking up a bunch of new tools (mostly saws, lol) so I'll need to find them a new home!

The simple answer for the lights where the garage door is is to make a bracket to mount to the ceiling on either side of the tracks and drops down below the tracks with a piece of inch and a half box tubing running across under the door . You mount the lights to the box tubing and even if the door is open " which happens a lot around here in the summer " you still have plenty of light at night . I am getting ready to do this myself and can put up some pics when I get done to show how I did it . My doors isn't quite as close to the ceiling but its not much lower from the ceiling than yours .Theres about an inch between my opener track and the ceiling and about 2 inches between the opener track and the door when its open .


Rick

I was thinking of trying something like that actually, after seeing a similar solution on Garage Journal. It would decrease overhead clearance slightly but that's not an issue for me as the Slick is under 6' tall and only getting lower, and the Z is only a shade over 52" at the roofline. The limit on the opener is currently set at 7'6" and I could only lift it up to about 6'6" before anyway, lol.

I think the clearance between the ceiling and the top of the door when it's open is 3". The door clears the fixture on the right (by a hair), but not the one on the left, go figure! Explained why it was binding up anyway.

A friend of mine is an electrician and should be coming over this weekend to wire in a new outlet for the opener, which is currently plugged into an extension cord (the PO installed a total of 12 outlets but none in a convenient spot to plug in an opener; the east side actually has 3 outlets within about 4' of each other and all are blocked by my truck). So I'm going to pick his brain about remounting the lights. I'd like to see what you come up with when you're done though.

Oh, and to truly make things interesting there's no attic access...

Ok theres no attic access or theres no attic above the garage . Lack of access is an easy fix Lack of Attic due to being a basement garage is a different story all together .


Rick

No access to the existing attic.

So yeah, relatively easy fix, but I would have thought it would be easier to add BEFORE insulation and drywall, lol.

well it could be worse . The drywall isn't taped or mudded so pick the 2 ceiling joists you like mark out the other 2 lines and grab a drywall saw and get to cutting . I'll bet you have enough scrap lumber from the other project to make up the opening then 4 pieces of trim to drop the piece of drywall you just cut out back down onto . You could even go hogg wild ad add drop down stairs at this point .


Rick

I actually did the other project primarily with "scrap" lumber (PO left behind two 10' lengths of 2x6, a few sheets of sheathing, etc.) so only spent about $300 on materials.

But yes, shouldn't be an issue. Just an extra bit of work. And for the time being it's actually working okay. Just had to disconnect one fixture.

Great story Big M! Those same trucks from Girvin are what started my obsession with unibodies too! I grew up in Davidson, just miles away from Girvin, and first saw these trucks in high school. I almost bought one, but at the time they were too much money for me. Great pics and very cool to see your progress, neat to find out where those trucks ended up after all these years! I'm trying to get some pics together of my project to post. I just got a short box uni merc, but it needs a lot of tlc, gonna be a while before it gets completed too...

That's cool, welcome aboard!

I recall stopping in Davidson on the way down the first time I saw the two trucks together. My friend got a milkshake at the A&W and added some booze to it, lol. I'm quite sure it was in the fall of 2000 and we were headed down to Regina for a Riders-Lions game.

We pulled the truck through Davidson on the way to Yorkton too. Oddly enough I think we stopped at the same A&W for lunch after spending the entire morning getting the beast up on the tow dolly.

No physical progress to report, but I have done some more planning. Inspired by the Mctim64/BIGREDTODD LSR uni, I recently started contemplating a different way of getting the springs under the front axle. I set about to create a setup that is entirely bolt-on, and wouldn't require welding to the axle. The advantage of this would be that it could be entirely pre-fabbed, and could easily be removed if I decided to go with a different setup. I made up a quick 3D model in order to visualize what it might look like:



The beam isn't quite to scale as I haven't confirmed the dimensions yet, and the springs are a simplified representation. So it would require some tweaking but so far I think it has potential. The materials would consist of DOM tubing, keystock, and plate (which I could easily get plasma cut at work!). Once I get some more complete dimensions I'll be able to finalize some details and see if it's feasible.

Hey Jason, did you know that someone on KIJIJI has a wanted ad for a short BBW Merc uni and is using your signature pic in the ad?

Interesting, saw the ad before but didn't click through the other photos . Looks like that's where it was taken from too as it's tiny. I do use it all over so it's not overly surprising that someone could have sniped it from somewhere.

EDIT: I think I know who posted the ad, a very talented builder that I've actually met in person. Seemed like a genuine nice guy too. It would be VERY interesting to see the end result if he were to find a BBW shorty Merc.

Oddly enough another photo of my truck comes up on Google Images (first hit) via the "other" truck site that I haven't logged on to in probably 8 or 9 years. The last conversation I had on there was with some fellow by the name of Ringo Fonebone, lol.