Continuing saga of the Cherry-Bomb

Cherry-Bomb. (Photo by Linda Hughes.)

Art Dana’s fabulous Cherry-Bomb (pictured) sits semi-crippled in my garage.
Actually, it’s not crippled; it just doesn’t have any steering.
I.e. it’s not drivable.
Art Dana (“DAY-nuh”) is the retired bus-driver from Transit with fairly severe Parkinson’s disease. We have similar interests.
The Cherry-Bomb is Art’s fabulous 1949 Ford custom hot-rod.
Other pictures of this car are in this blog at “We’re not young any more.”
It’s a gorgeous car, but obviously from an earlier era.


Rear of Cherry-Bomb in my garage. (Photo by the so-called “old guy” with the dreaded and utterly reprehensible Nikon D100 camera.)

As you can see, the taillights are tiny — certainly not the glittering mega-jewels ya see now.
Bias-ply wide-whites, a visor, and no safety equipment at all.
No seatbelts, no airbags, and a solid steel dashboard (unpadded) awaiting your face.
And a steering-column that would impale you.
It’s hard to imagine doing 100 mph in this thing, but it was probably capable of that.
And it has all the custom-car gimcracks. Dummy spotlights, blue-dots on the taillights, brows on the headlights, flames, skirts, flipper hubcaps, nosed and decked, and louvers in the hood.
And fuzzy-dice on the inside rear-view mirror.


An honest-to-God Ford Flat-head V8. (Note Offy heads.)(Photo by the so-called “old guy” with the dreaded and
utterly reprehensible Nikon D100 camera with flash.)

Most important to me is that it’s a Flatty.
Ya don’t see many of them around any more. Flat-heads usually got replaced by the Small-Block Chevy V8.
It’s also been converted to floor-shift — a Hurst shift-lever.
Art says all the numbers match, which means the engine is original to the car.
But it has high-compression Offenhauser (“AWF-en-HOW-zrrr”) cast-aluminum cylinder-heads.
And what turn-signals it has are a J.C. Whitney add-on.
In 1949 turn-signals were new to the scene; an option.
The first car in our family that had turn-signals was our 1953 Chevrolet — the infamous “Blue Bomb;” the car I learned to drive in.
Self-canceling too. A J.C. Whitney add-on is not self-canceling.
Prior to turn-signals, ya just rolled your side-window down and stuck your arm out.
The same turn-signals ya use on a motorbike, if it has no turn-signals — most do now.
Which meant turns rarely got signaled.
Ya weren’t rolling down the window if it was snowing.
Turn-signals on the Cherry-Bomb are wired into the parking-lights.
Those too are tiny and weak — hardly the beacons ya now see.


The Cherry-Bomb. (Photo by Linda Hughes.)

The steering on Art’s car was extremely sloppy — almost 3/4-turns of play.
The Pitman-arm had been replaced — that’s the heavy steel forging between the steering-box and the wheel-linkage; arm-like, but only about 4-5 inches long.
Suspect was the steering-box itself; which can wear out.
Art tried to farm out rebuilding it, but kept crashing mightily in flames.
I have a pit in my garage, so Art suggested we remove the steering-box ourselves.
I suggested we needed another body, perhaps Joe Libinati (“Lib-uh-NOT-eee”), another retired bus-driver who got the Cherry-Bomb running by replacing a defective electric fuel-pump.
We were unable to remove the steering-box.
Art had an old shop-manual, but it had an exploded drawing of the steering so tiny and confusing it was undecipherable.
Steering-wheel removed. Then the U-bolt clamping the steering-column.
The standard column-shift shift linkage was still there, although the shift-lever had been hacksawed off. It was no longer connected to the tranny.
The steering-box was unmounted from the left frame-rail, although a bolt broke — one of three.
But we were unable to get the steering-box out, because the shaft from the steering-wheel wasn’t letting us angle it.
And that shaft was inside the steering-column, which we couldn’t back out of position.
We thought the shaft might be separate parts, but it’s not. The tiny exploded drawing was impossible to make sense of.
Figuring there was some trick we were unaware of, we gave up.
Art went back home, and no more Libinati. —He was taking a break from grand-parent babysitting anyway.
On the phone for Art.
He called his friend “Louey,” who said getting a steering-box out of a ‘49 Ford should be no trouble at all.
Louey has two ‘49 Fords himself. I guess he’s a retired equipment mechanic, and he suggested he would help Art.
Louey and Art arrived yesterday (Tuesday, July 7, 2009) in Art’s Toyota Camry. Art can drive but feels unsafe about it. Louey was doing the driving. The Parkinson’s is compromising Art’s depth-perception.
Louey is in his 70s, but still pretty agile. About the same as me.
He dove into the interior of Art’s car, tore up carpet, and started removing a small sheet-metal panel on the firewall.
That panel was what was blocking our removing the steering-column.
Of course, Louey also knew the shaft between the steering-box and the steering-wheel was continuous. We had no idea, and it looked like multiple pieces — especially in the exploded view.
Twenty minutes at most; column removed, and then the steering-box, five-foot-long steering shaft intact.
Everything in a plastic Weggers bag, and back into Art’s Camry.
Back to Art’s home; location of a work-bench.

Art called today (Wednesday, July 8, 2009), and said the steering-box was apart, and looked okay. It will get rebuilt, and then reinstalled.
He had to buy a rebuild kit (gaskets and shims) from some place in Lockport — but the shop can’t get it until Saturday (July 11, 2009).
He can’t get it until the following weekend, as he will be in Thousand Islands until the end of next week.
So for now, the Cherry-Bomb just sits. —Art feels bad it’s taking up part of my garage, but I told him I wasn’t that worried about it.
“So far I’ve showed off that car to who knows how many people. Some appreciate it, and some don’t. My neighbor across the street suggested it needed a six-cylinder.
NO WAY JOSÈ! Would ya put a slant-six in a Hemi-Charger?
That thing is a classic. That it’s a Flatty is what stands out.

• “Linda Hughes” is my wife of 41+ years.
• “Transit” equals Regional Transit Service, the transit-bus operator in Rochester, NY, where I drove transit-bus for 16&1/2 years (1977-1993). —Art was another bus-driver.
• Before radial-ply tires, tires were “bias-ply;” tread-casing at a 45° angle to the sidewall. “Radial-ply” tread-casings are at 90° to the sidewall, and handle much better than bias-ply tires. —Radial construction was costly to implement, but now all tires used are radials.
• A “wide-white” is the nickname for a white sidewall tire. “Wide-whites” were very popular in the ‘50s. (The full width of the sidewall being white.)
• RE: “Skirts, flipper hubcaps, nosed and decked.....” —Fender-skirts are the fitment over the rear wheel-wells that cover the space — very popular in the ‘50s. —“Flipper hubcaps” are hubcaps with a rotating flipper. Art’s car has flippers on the front wheels. —“Nosed and decked” refers to -a) removing the hood-ornament from the hood, and filling the mounting-holes; and -b) removing any and all trim items from the trunk lid, so that appearance is smooth. Hot-rodders often did this.
• RE: “‘Old guy’ with the dreaded and utterly reprehensible Nikon D100.......” —My macho, blowhard brother-from-Boston, who is 13 years younger than me, calls me “the old guy” as a put-down (I also am the oldest). I also am loudly excoriated by all my siblings for preferring a professional camera (like the Nikon D100) instead of a point-and-shoot. This is because I long ago sold photos to nationally published magazines.
• Our family’s 1953 Chevrolet Two-Ten two-door sedan was nicknamed the “Blue Bomb,” because it was a pig, and navy-blue.
• The Chevrolet “Small-Block” V8 was introduced at 265 cubic-inches displacement in the 1955 model-year. It continued production for years, first at 283 cubic inches, then 327, then 350. Other displacements were also manufactured. The Chevrolet “Big-Block” V8 was introduced in the 1965 model-year at 396 cubic-inches, and was unrelated to the Small-Block. It was made in various larger displacements: 402, 427 and 454 cubic inches. It’s still made as a truck-motor, but not installed in cars any more; although you can get it as a crate-motor, for self-installation.
• “J.C. Whitney” is a mail-order supplier of el-cheapo auto paraphernalia. They sold turn-signal conversion kits for non-signal antique cars.
• “Tranny” is transmission; in this case a three-speed manual with a clutch.
• “Weggers” is Wegmans, a large supermarket-chain based in Rochester we often buy groceries at.
• “Lockport” is an old Erie Canal town west of Rochester near Buffalo, the location of a series of canal locks to climb the Niagara Escarpment.
• “Hemi” (“HEM-eee””) is the infamous Chrysler V8 engine with hemispherical combustion chambers — a very significant engine. A “slant-six” is the slightly inclined six-cylinder Chrysler engine used in small cars from the late ‘60s through the ‘80s. It was very reliable but small and low-output.