Folks,

I am remiss in not praising D. Dutra's skill and service...I recently got a set of his exhaust manifolds (his front and my modifed rear) and put em on last week. First set I ever had and they are greaat! I fitted them up with no gasket to see if they pulled up so a .010 gage wouldn't slide between them and the block, and of course had one on the old modified set that was too loose. Solved that by putting a Bridgeport milling machine to the assembled set, and still took removing .045 to get a perfect flat before assembling again. In putting them on and off a few times I got to enjoy all the bad word muttering we all do when encpuntering the nuts under the carb...then I had a flash of inspiration...because the problem for me with starting the nuts is the socket external diameter regardless of drive size I studied on how to avoid a socket at all. Then it came to me..I got a 8 inch long piece of 5/16 rod, got out a die and made 3 threads on the end of it. I then put a nut on the rod end (so that the nut was be half onto the rod), then slid the rod and nut up to the stud and turned them gently to start the nut on the stud. Then I just put a rattail file tang against the nut to hold it from turning, unscrewed the rod and spun the nut on with either a finger or the file tang. Once the nut is down to the manifold ear a socket easily get to it to tighten it. I got all the nuts on in less than 10 mins, not one dropped nut, no bad words, and was able to ensure the triangle washers didn't touch anything. I shoulda thought of it years ago. I reckon a long bolt would do just as well as a threaded rod, but I wanted to be sure the nut didn't spin. Nice when things work.
rock
'64d100

And where is the fun in that?

What other "tricks" have people come up with for solving challenges on our era cars?

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Cheers!
Al T