Well I've been Ivaned.

[phat46]

Sorry to hear about your troubles Joe. Hang in there and remember...one thing at a time.

[GPster]

Well I pushed the truck out of the garage today (told my wife it would give me more room to get the junk refrigerator out). Found enough plywood to set 2 jackstands on so I could drain the oilpan on the 235. Got 6 gallons of water and maybe a 1 1/2 qt. of oil. I was thinking that I would remove the oil filter out of the canister ( which is high and mounted on the side of the intake) and fill the crankcase with kerosene backwards through the gallories and the oil pump and then drain that out and put oil into it the same way. After this I need to remove the spark plugs and spin the engine and see if any cylinders took any water. The powerglide transmission does not appear overfull like the engine dipstick  did and the transmission dipstick is higher than the road draft crankcase vent and dipstick tube on the engine. I'l have to check it further before I spin the motor on the starter but I didn't crawl back far enough to check. Is a '53 one of those transmissions with GM's better ideas,"drop the pan by loosening all the bolts while it is still full of oil, we can save 35 cents a car if we don't use a drain plug". More tomorrow. GPster

[GPster]

Well the Motor Manual says there is a drain plug on the transmission but I didn't crawl under it today. Maybe tomorrow. I've got a plastic jug specifically for Kerosine and it had probably a gallon in it. Dumped that in the crankcase and probably about 2 gallons of oil that the neighbor and I have accumilated from oil changes ( I stopped pouring when I got to sludge). Today I got 2 1/2 more gallons of kerosine and added it to the mixture. Still a little shy of running out of the crankcase vent and dipstick tube but my container only holds 2 1/2 gallons so another trip tomorrow. Pulled the spark plugs and 2 showed signs of water. Used compressed air and blew all the cylinders out before I tried to turn the motor over. It turns over by hand fairly easy but I'm not doing too much of that untilI get the water out of the tranny. At a loss what to put in the tranny after I drain the water. Should I just put tranny fluid in it to the full mark?  I'm thinking because it wasn't in operation when it got submerged (it's not like it was drive off a high wall into a flooded gravel pit ) no water got into the torque converter.  I'll have to have something to go into the converter to replace whatever comes out and this might not be the place for kerosine or some kind of flush. Is there a difference between regular fluid and the Ford type fluid  for this off-beat way of cleaning things up? Also what would be the best thing to oil the cylinders of the engine down with? Detergent oil, non-detergent oil , kerosine or type A transmission fluid? Also on my last letter I came up with what I thought was a novel way of back-flushing the oil pump and gallories by adding the kerosine through the oil filter canister. Which way does the oil flow through the old style oil filters? There was water up there too. When I pulled the filter cartridge out ther was probably 1 1/2" of liquid left in the canister. I siphoned maybe 2/3s of it from the bottom of the canister and it siphoned until it turned to oil which I dobbed up with a rag ( I wonder if this would work with the tranny with a siphon tube down the dip-stick tube ?). I don't think I'll be driving it to Fort Wayne next weekend but the Cruise Night/Car Show at the bar up the street has been re-scheduled because of the flood. Give's me more time. I've seen the movie "The Flight of the Pheonix" may be this could be the "surfacing of the fenox". Tomorrow I'll get more kerosine when I go to church or is that tomorrow when I go to get more kerosine I'll stop at church (and pray for it). Things are looking up. The gas company got the water out of the line from the street so now we have hot water and the stove works. After I got the wiring straightened out in the basement the central a/c runs after being submerged. Still can't get the furnace working. It's a new, high efficiency, computor controlled, spark ignition Lennox. The instructions said don't turn off the gas with-out following this proceedure. These instructions where the lower front of the cabinet and probably under 7 foot of water when my gas meter decided to stop fighting with the Ohio River and drank enough water to fill 65 feet of line. Oh well, I'm not good with computor controlled cars either. Now for a change of pace I'll read how to change a down-sized GM chassis into a race car. And I thought the only thing you could do with them was put the under '47-'54 Chevrolet truck cabs. GPster