Restoration Blog: May 2021 - Jay Leno's Garage

welcome to episode of jay leno's garage restoration blog we'll show you well because of pandemic we've slowed down quite a bit we got some stuff done and i just thought i would fire this up for old time's sake people seem to like to see these steam engines run i've lit the boiler already out back what i'm doing now is priming it with a little oil just i'm forcing oil into the line here that should be enough uh we've built up some pressure let's see what i got you open this tap to get any water out of the cylinders because water does not compress you can blow this whole thing it'd be a shame because this this engine is exactly as it was in 1866 lincoln was present when this engine was built it's all original all the original bolts original lagging let's see if i've got anything here i'm gonna try and move this this wheel is three tons have i got anything here we go okay here we go well so much of the steam engines being noisy you see how quiet it is all you're hearing is really the wheel going around and once it gets hot this bit of noise will quiet down as well okay i can shut this now this is your governor i've told this story before but for people new uh that's the way expression balls out comes from those balls the typical force forces them out that controls the cam which slows down so the engine doesn't over rev and eat itself up this thing was 125 horsepower in 1860 this is what the luddites were afraid of they go in and they smashed these engines up because they took work away from craftsman this produced 125 horsepower which was unbelievable back in the day and this was just seen as a job stealer you know how many men could do the work of this would it take to do the work of this engine 10 i don't know but that was a problem it's a precision piece of machinery it's all one casting this thing weighs about 12 14 ton i don't know something like that this was shipped across the country by horse and wagon the only thing that comes apart is this wheel the wheel is in two pieces that's it so it's it's a pretty amazing piece of equipment thomas edison used one just like this a right engine to light up trenton new jersey in 1876 for the uh for the world's fair exhibition it was the first time an outside area had been lit and people just went crazy it literally made nighttime daytime but the amazing is how quiet it is [Music] this engine over here this is 1832. i believe this is the oldest steam engine in america still running on steam i could be wrong i'm not sure that's what they call a walking beam these are your uh that's your governor right there your ball's out governor this is your hand throttle here there was no osha so you walk over oh hey what's this didn't they get another worker because they were cheap but this is what people did before netflix they come out and oh just watch the steam engine for a couple of hours pretty much it anyway i just thought you'd get a kick out of seeing both of these operate there's so much detail in these and they're beautifully made and they run forever see it ran until 1928 from 1866 to 1928 and then it sat for 50 something years maybe 60 years and then i got it and all i did was put it together build a fire and go try that with the modern engine it took seven tons of cement to get this level but once it's level it'll run forever so the engine doesn't eat itself up all right this car looks familiar it's because you may have seen it eight or ten years ago when we first restored it 1962 maserati 3500 gti great car we got it all done and then i was driving it and in the first 500 miles the transmission was nothing but trouble popping out of second gear grinding to get in reverse you had to stop turn the car off back it up it was nothing but a pain i just got discouraged and we parked it then the pandemic came along and i said i love this thing so we need to do something about it so what we did was we put a tremec tkx boxer this is a fabulous gearbox a five-speed gearbox way stronger way tougher can take a lot more power than the uh than the zf that was in here uh i'd be curious to hear some of your comments you know have i ruined a car but well i can go back at any point and put a zf box in and i still have it and if i ever sold the car that would go with it bernard made a bell housing there was nothing available so well here here's a raw chunk of aluminum here he is making the bell housing and it bolted right up obviously we had to change the drive shaft these teachers are great because where you put the shifter is adjustable so it'll fit just about everywhere but now it shifts oh it really makes it enjoyable now a lot of people say hey maybe you ruined this car but you know we put air conditioning in it which it didn't have uh we did a few other things to it it's still a maserati uh with twin cam with the two plugs per cylinder it just dries better and handles better still as the stock brakes you can turn it back to what it was at any point but now it really shifts and really drives wonderfully we also put a uh a new head gasket in it that had a leak you know i'm sure you've all been there to get these problems where you start working on something that gets so discouraging you just park it and that's we did with with this one but i got two gear boxes from tremec to put in this one and the fo this one in the maserati and the other one and the firebird and it really if you're looking for a gearbox this is not an ad it really is about the best you can get it's just bulletproof it bolts right up it's easily adaptable and the nice thing is we can take the transmission out without touching the engine either from down below or above there was a crossbar here but it's not structural so we took we just eliminated it and this works perfectly well uh it looks like it's hanging but it's not it's bolted up at the engine it's in here very securely uh new drive shaft uh what else we got that's about it i mean if you want to see the full restoration of this car you can see a younger looking me eight or ten years ago uh talking about it and driving it and i did drive it for a while enjoyed it it's just the gearbox became such a pain i just parked it and younger prettier projects came along and we worked on them and then i went back to old faithful after this now it shifts and drives nice now i can really put a lot of miles on it as you can see the passenger seat is not in and we still got to put the uh the cover over the transmission but it goes back perfectly fine and at least now it's a running driving car you can really use and i can go back to stock whenever i want nice thing about doing something like this is nobody can tell you open the hood it's still all maserati you'd have to actually get under the car and go hey wait a minute you know and to realize that it's not stock but why go to back to stock when i got a better stronger transmission so come on let's move on to the next project well here's a bike i've had for well over 30 years this is a vincent black shadow the thing that makes this rare is it is the very first vincent black shadow it's the third one built the first one sold what happened was i was riding my other black shadow and my first year of doing the tonight show uh i was out on the mall hall on the highway and a guy in the bsa just slammed me just t-boned me knocked me down dented the tank and i said on tv i need a gas tank for vinson black shine everybody's got one let me know so this old guy calls me and uh he said i i got a time but i got a whole bike gotta buy the whole bike i said what do you got he goes 47 vin's in black shadow he said they really didn't build any in 47 he said no no mine's a first one i was the first one the guy it was the third one built i i always wanted one i was in europe i was a gi and i went to the factory and picked it up i went well okay can you give me the engine numbers on the bike okay so the gaming engine number frame number i called the vincent club and i said uh could you run these numbers for me the guy comes back oh yeah that's a bike was destroyed it's been lost i said that's what i thought what was the story he said oh this young gi bought it from america and they said the guy's name and i went uh that's the guy that called me and what happened was in 47 he got it home in 48 this has a bronze idler gear and that broke so he just put in his garage and it sat there for 60 years well not quite 50 years and that's when i bought it from him and here it is see you can tell these early ones these have the coffee can speedometer see the story of the black shadow what this is it was phil philip vincent liked the rapid which is the one that had aluminum colored fender silver fenders cylinders rather aluminum cylinders and phil irving the brilliant engineer he's designed the black shadow in secret because phillerin said no the repeat is fine it's fast enough we're selling all we can that's good enough well okay so irving built this one in secret they use i'm told a speedometer from a jaguar they put in what they call this coffee can type holder here and the rest is history they built six like this this is the third one built and the very first one sold when my guy got it so all we did was sort of clean it up a little bit make sure she's running nicely notice it doesn't have the hydraulic forks it has the bramptons on it very early bike wonderful to ride a lot of people prefer these forks to the guy draw likes if you don't know what i'm talking about but it's a vincent term it was the only bike that had them so anyway i thought you'd get a kick out of seeing that to me it's still probably next to the brush superior one of the most beautiful motorcycles ever made come on i'll show you the dodge polaris this is a car that's always fascinated me this is a 1964 dodge bolero 426 max wedge we all know the 426 hemi a lot of people don't realize before the ford's 26 hemi there was the 426 max wedge which was a 383 that was bored out a few other things we've done to it to make it 426 it usually had two carburetors on it on the on the stage three the high performance one i believe this one has a single carburetor half an hour manifold the original four speed transmission this is all original paint except for the roof somebody along the way had painted the roof silver we went back to the original red we matched it pretty good when you see this on the restoration blog in a couple of weeks we'll be all buffed out somebody also added these reflectors in here i took off the mag wheels it was all jacked up but i just put we put wilwood disc brakes you know willwood again they make breaks for almost any american car and when you have something like this that has this much horsepower close to 400 and it's really fast having that single mass assembled with brake jumps even though the max wedge the brake drums were an inch wider because they knew it was powerful so they wanted it to stop so you could get metallic lining and actually stopped pretty good but not as good as a brand new set of disc brakes and once again you can go back if you want but i like to drive my stuff the interior i believe is all original this is all original paint original chrome nothing's been re-chromed no power steering no power brake this is what they used to call a man's car it's just kind of funny you know what it's a man's machine they would say that stuff but you know everybody credits the gto is the first supercar the first muscle car uh and even though there's a little bigger body than the gt it's not that much bigger and with this 426 and the four-speed these were really powerful cars chrysler was at the top of their game back in the early 60s mid 60s come on let's show you the engine in this thing this is the 426 max wedge offenhauser manifold edelbrock carburetor these are the factory headers these are really kind of cool there's a new wilwood master cylinder dual circuit of course we moved the will word up a little bit the original is much lower here so it ran the risk of boiling the fluid which was very a very real thing back in the day so with this wilwood master and having it up higher runs much cooler of course we put a yellow top optimum in here it's got the ability to crank this thing all day long so that's nice but it does start right up because msd ignition not a lot in here that's stock but enough these are just tasteful upgrades you would have done back in the day uh the disc brake is really a thing that makes a difference because you got something like this and you got a slam on the brakes you know yeah it's a little tricky i think i'm like the third owner of this car we started to rub it out a little bit here using some of our own jay leno's garage products and the paint is coming back nicely the only part we painted was the roof come on let's move on to the revere that was the other project down the road here this is the revere with the rochester duesenberg this was a racing engine back in the day called the walking beam slowly getting us together as you can see we've just made fabricated a whole custom exhaust system we got that in and this is real close to being ready to fire i know i say that every time but other projects come along a lot of the switch gear was pot metal and disintegrated so we had to scan it and make new ones out of brass so that takes a little while but you look in here and you'll see the exhaust system and transmission it's very close to being done and we finally finished that that fire truck engine remember the rod came through the side come on i'll show you the repair now here's something you might remember and season i think two maybe three of the show we had the christy fire engine we got from burbank the 1913. and we got it running for him and we shot it and we're going up the hill and boom the end just blew apart a rod like this this is the this is the rod came through the side of the block and blew a hole in it well we sent it out to lock and stitch they fixed the block it looks brand new we had carrillo make us some custom rods you know coilover rods the racing rods for this thing had special pistons made you know burbank was nice enough to lend us to us so i said i'll fix the engine for you well sixty thousand dollars later it's it's done but it's it's beautiful and it's going to run just fabulous we're going to put it back in in the next couple of weeks we got it all together you cannot see where the where the here can i turn this let me see you cannot see where it came through the block i'm going to show it to you i'll show you the whole it was right here i believe yeah right through there look at that you can't even tell it's amazing you know you have an engine block with a hole in it you think oh this engine it's a matching number engine i had a bugatti where that came through the side of the block lock and stitch fitch fixed that one too so you can keep your original engine and be honest and tell people what happened it was repaired it has the original numbers on it this is a 20 liter four-cylinder engine each piston is five liters each piston is basically like a 289 engine out of a mustang just enormous things and it's a they're beautiful motors it's what they call a t-head you see you have valves on both sides of the uh of the of the pistons in the center you've got your intake here and your exhaust that's your intake here and your exhaust on this side and that's how that works so we should be able to fire that up for you the next time we do this so come on i'll show you our final project well this car is finally finished you probably saw this in previous restoration blogs you'll see us driving it and do a whole in-depth thing in a couple of weeks on this one this will be coming up very soon final thing was the interior i think not stock i did the interior and leather i just like leather it's just so much more comfortable and and french cars are just wonderful driving cars so having that comfortable leather seat but this car has a lot of unique features look at the brake drums are external so they stay cool can you see how the wheel goes around them there it's kind of neat but we'll get into all of that when we do the whole shoot on this car so anyway i hope you like some of this restoration blog and uh thanks for all your comments we appreciate it and uh the pandemic is slowing down i got the crew back for this shoot so that's good uh we're still under some restrictions but it's getting better and i hope you guys are staying safe too so thanks everybody see you next week [Music] uh

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 472,520

Keywords: Jay, Lenos, Garage, Rochester Duesenberg, Panhard BT24, steam engines, Maserati 3500 GT I, restoration, restore, car guy, car enthusiast, gearhead, car porn, motonerd, Brough Superior, Jay Leno, Jay Leno's Garage, car reviews, classic cars, vintage cars, sports cars, cars, jay leno garage, jay lenos garage, car collection, cnbc, Restoration Blog, May 2021, Restoration Blog May 2021, steam engine, steam engine train, steam engine model, Maserati, Dodge Polara, Panhard, car nerd

Id: aTwtpoK3Wgc

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Hodaka]

Those steam engines are fantastic. Kudos to Jay for keeping them alive.

RE: Maserati 3500 Tremec transmission. I'm old enough to remember when 3500's were not at all desirable. Because the coupe had an aluminum body, folks kept them as they still "looked OK." I wouldn't worry about originality with a 3500 as their injection systems were notoriously unreliable. Most folks removed the systems and fitted carbs.