ClassicCar

1. Bring your Club Roster so you can access Tourist Emergencey Help listings.



2. If you have a splasher, drop the pan and do a "deep maintenance" routine.



3. Check/repack wheel bearings



4. When greasing, don't forget throwout bearing



5. Bring coolant and material to repair a rad hose



:rolleyes:

Far easier and simpler to carry a spare belt!

Geoff.

Geoff C., N.Z. wrote:

Far easier and simpler to carry a spare belt!
Geoff.

Geoff, sometimes far easier said than done. Before fall hershey, I spent half a day, a couple calls to an experienced vetern of the exact problem and three trips to napa to acquire the correct belt for my spare generator. must have been your buddy Murphy (before getting a job with GM to design their alternators) who decided that there should be two different castings for the "same" generator. As a follower of your writing, I am sure you would agree, that to confidently carry a trunkfull of interchangeable parts, you must truely understand their interchangability.

AAA towing , cell phone, credit card.

I think this info is great.I think the point that Geoff C.made is a good point.The older your car is,the more parts you need if you are driving it,but when it comes to fixing it in 5 minutes or having it towed??.If you have it towed,you are still going to have to repair it.If you had your shop manual and a supply of a few hard to get essential parts,the chances of getting John Q tech to repair your vehicle is great.I think being prepared is everything.I think that we need to think in a bigger circle.Most will agree,if you are posting an opinion here,you have experienced a problem in the past while traveling,or maybe you had/have resolved all the issues that could have been troublesome before you left..If you look at the percentage of us with experience/knowledge,this number is probably low.This is something some of us take for granted,and some of us don't know.My point is trying to put together a guide that can be useful to members.If the target audience is directed to only those in the know,I think we are forgeting the members with little and/or less mechanical experience,to the back burner.This means that less of our Hudsons will be shown.

Too Funny T.B.

Good point Jimalberta.This is what I'm talking about.If you know what your limitation is,then you can make decisions based off what you might learn at this session.Adding info each year to this list,as parts become availible to make our vehicles more safe and dependible.There can be pros and cons.I was thinking about some of the other info you find in this forum.We can talk about the HEI ignition kits availible,and where to get them.We can talk about the different types of wheels that members have used,and how they have worked out for them.Simple lighting concerns,what to bring on a trip parts wise.One of my own personal experiences with lights-headlights to be exact,was I had a 49C8 sedan,on the way to AACA-Winchester[Docs meet]traveling late at night on US 50.It was raining real bad and 1 of the original headlights went out,I went to high beam,no problem for about 20 miles,then that went out.We stopped to try and find a place open and that had a 6 volt headlight,no where had this.We ended up in K-Mart,and bought a 12volt light thinking something was better than nothing,and found this was useless!!Maintence items often excluded or forgotten.There was some mention in this discussion that if we succeeded in making all the problems fixed or resolved before we left,there wouldn't be any "hard luck"awards.You can tell as a club,we are getting better and better with our cars.In the last few years,I don't believe there have been too many real,real bad stories of mishaps and problems while coming to the Nats.

Jimalberta wrote:

this thread kinda reminds me of why I wanted to upgrade my drive line to a more modern one.

Even a modern driveline requires maintainance especially for a long road trip maybe just not as much. The modern driveline is operating in what is still a 50 year old shell when you're talkin about a Hudson. There's still preventative maintainance to be done on a 2007 car before a long road trip even if it's mostly tire inflation and oil ...that's universal. A machine is a machine and there are no perpetual-motion machines. LOL A tech session like that could even benefit those with mods I think.

Geoff C., N.Z. wrote:

Far easier and simpler to carry a spare belt!

Geoff.

True, but what if you suffer a panty hose failure? Then what?

TOM B wrote:

I usually tow my NEW PT Cruiser behind my Hudson on long trips...It serves two functions: 1. Provides back up should I need it 2. Serves as a place to store the most distracting element of a long trip..The Little Woman...LOL

Now that's funny, right there. The visual imagery I get is priceless.

SamJ wrote:

I'd hate to have my heavily modified ride break down in Upper Rubber Boot, Wisconsin (for example)...finding somebody willing to work on it could be a problem. Any car requiring more than 2 shop manuals to repair is scary. :cool:

Sam,



As long as you have your roster, you'll find a Hudson guy within a couple hours, even in Upper Rubber Boot, Wisconsin. But don't try this in the winter, we're all out on the ice....fishin'!

Clutch guy wrote:

Nick S.spells out exactly what can happen.I know this put a big crunch on his fun at Hershey/Carlisle.I'm sure I will use this example.I'm also sure that Nick probably won't ever experience this same problem again,thanks for sharing this info.

getting there is part of the fun.
if you can't take a little snag in stride, this is definitely the wrong hobby.

Well,I think I have some real good info.I thought maybe I would have had more responses about various years and things that go with that.I will try and make a good tech session with some of the info.Looking forward to seeing everybody in Auburn at the 48th.HET meet.

You forgot the fuel pump!

Geoff.

jamcoats wrote:

I've been doing weddings in antique cars for 9 years now, and breakdowns can present a serious problem. If you break down on the way to a car show, big deal, arrive late and get the "Hard Luck" award. If you break down between a wedding and a reception, you're giving back $350-$600, you're dealing with a VERY IRATE bride, groom, parents of the bride or groom, or all of the above, and you just ruined someone's wedding day. THANKFULLY in 9 years of doing this, I have only arrived late once. I try to keep my Hudson in top shape, and I carry hand tools, points and condensor, cap and rotor, coil, length of #12 wire, butt connectors, zip ties, hose clamps, electrical tape, length of hose, battery & jumper cables OR jump box, jug of water, quart of oil, compact portable grease gun, hubcap wrench, bulbs, 20A AGC fuse (only fuse on the car), various bolts & nuts, wood screws, gasket maker, a length of 2" wide fiberglass exhaust wrap, fan belt, and a small funnel for putting gas in the 1/8" NPT plug on the vacuum tank - I think that's it. Most of this fits in a med. sized canvas tool bag in the trunk. This is all the stuff I'd want to change en route to a wedding. If I was driving to a National Meet or something, I would carry an axle shaft, generator, head gasket, maybe a distributor. I always have my AAA Gold card (300 miles free towing) and cell phone. I also have a pickup truck and access to two car trailers if I need to phone a friend to come get me.



Happy Motoring!

Hey Jam, I've been in the same line of work the last few years with a '54 Caddy Limo and a '74 Excalibre sedan and a '48 Windsor limo among other old cars and the owner of the company was kind of a slum-lord with the maintainance to say the least and I ended up fixing a lot of stuff myself cause he wasn't a car guy. Luckily for him he had more than one antique car and the Bride could be rescued if and when something did go wrong. Had another employee rush me a different car on 2 occasions. Heck of a way to run a circus. The owner even put on his contracts "we reserve the right to substitue cars" in case the one the bride chose broke down. I could've run the business better myself doing the exact opposite of everything this guy was doing. Was never a dull moment. LOL How do you press upon such people the need for routine maintainance?

junkcarfann wrote:

I respectfully disagree...there is a major difference between having an old car like a Hudson equipped with a modern Petronix system, and having a modern car that is totally computer-controlled and basically unfixable on the road.



You can always change out the updated distributor for an original point and condenser one on the road, (or with another updated distributor, they are not prohibitibly expensive), but you are stranded if your modern car's ignition system fails.



So, with the old car updated, you have the best of both worlds...You can have the benefits of the modern systems, and still fix it on the road if you carry the parts. But with the new cars, you are stuck when they fail.

This is great.This really gives a different perspective of an update.I think that it depends on which system you use.I have seen some of the GM type conversions,which I think take up to much room to say the least[advance curve to much,coil in cap,vacuum adv.issues---,but I guess you could just pull one distributor,put the original back in.If you planned for this,it would already have some type of resistor in place to correct the 12v system.I think you can buy the 6v solid state system,but most are 12v.The petronix system would be,pull one and install another,Distributor lead would need to be on the replacement dist..

FWIW,



When I take a long trip in my 'modernized' Hudson, I bring along spares of most anything I can fix along the way if necessary. For instance, on my car I've installed a modified Chrysler slant six electronic ignition, so I bring a spare distributor, ballast resistor and control module. I've got two fuel pumps (AMC mechanical and electric) on the car, so I don't bring an extra fuel pump. I also pack a spare coil, gasket set, fan belt, light bulbs, starter (although last time I installed my spare starter I discovered it only had one start left in it, so I still needed my HET roster that day!)



Even though some of this stuff is 'readily available' at common parts houses, it's not as readily available as it is when it's in my trunk next to the tool box. Speaking of tools, I also bring along a small box packed with everything I can think of, along with a torque wrench, timing light, floor jack and jackstands. I can pack all of this into a couple of places in the trunk and still have lots of room for other things.



The most important thing to bring along is a high level of confidence in your car in the first place. This can only be obtained by spending time, getting dirty and getting to know every system on the car intimately. The way I see it, if I'm packing along all of this extra stuff there's little chance I'll need it, but it puts your mind at ease knowing you should have it covered if you do have problems.