Restoration Blog: November 2020 - Jay Leno's Garage

well another episode of jaylon's garage pandemic edition this is one of our restoration blogs where we show you well what we've been up to the last few months although not a whole lot considering everything's going on this is my panard bt24 this is a french car two cylinders about uh 850 cc's these are pretty cool little cars we're just doing it back to its original color as you see it looks pretty nice still got to do the interior has a lot of interesting features we will do a whole uh segment on this car when it's done i just wanted to show you what project we're working on you know as you know uh the guys get to work on their own stuff here as well and pear you know our painter he's painted almost everything here including this this is his car right over here this is i'm going to show it to you in a second a 56 ford he's just done a fabulous job come on let's take a look you all know pear blix our painter uh he does all the cars here as i just mentioned this is his 56 ford he's restoring it here at the shop as well in his spare time i think he's doing it in my time but apparently he says it's the spare time but it's uh it's all right it doesn't matter but uh very cool as you can see he's put this glass roof on it's going to be it's going to be nice when it's done i want to spoil it but i'll just give you a taste just the color combination the gray and the maroon it's not a factory color obviously it's sort of a resto mod it'll have a modern engine but we haven't figured out what the engine is yet but well just giving it a taste come on let's move on to the next project well this is a car nobody's seen before at least here at the shop uh as you know i'm a huge fan of rough superior motorcycles the ss100 a lot of people know that george ruff didn't make cars he only made about 85 of them but this is one of them this is a brush superior car we're just getting it ready and we'll have more on this later but nice looking thing had a lot of the rough touches to it it's basically just a hudson that's been re-bodied but that's okay uh we'll have more in this a little bit later just give you a taste here's the one over here i want to show you this is our table lago grand sport come on show you this one here's a really rare unusual car in 1953 table lago grand sport they only built i think something like 19 of these this was a lost car you know peter larson wrote a terrific book on these the definitive history of these grand sports and this car was missing it's the only car they're missing this is serial number 1102 i came about acquiring this because a car collector who was 98 years old uh told me about it i went to his garage he bought it in 1965 in france he flew it back to america he got a one-day trip from the department of motor vehicles to drive it from the airport to his garage in orange county he drove it to the garage in orange county he parked it in 1965. it never moved again he had a lot of cars i don't know why he didn't drive it but he just didn't so it's probably the only one in original condition left i know it's the only one i think it still has the original bumpers on it because these were used as well just as you use any car a couple were found abandoned on the streets of paris you know things like that 4.5 liter six cylinder engine as they say in the auction butch slight recommissioning when he parked it he parked it with a full tank of gas if you've never seen 24 gallons of gas what it looks like after 60 years almost of sitting or 50 years of sitting well we had to pull the gas back when we pulled the gas i put my hand on it's a little bit of pressure my hand went right through it here's some pictures of the gas tank and you know jimmy our metal guy he does such beautiful work he copied the original tank perfectly taking all the fittings off of it well here here's his original tank here's the original tank here's the one he made it's amazing all the gas completely evaporated but took all the metal with it so they're just literally handfuls of metal dust in the tank the tank was just filled with gasoline that had eaten the metal and the two had somehow congealed i don't know but it was pretty bizarre pretty bizarre the brake lines were all frozen the brakes were frozen the interior still looks beautiful i'll show you that in just a second and i'll show you the engine as well jimmy did a great job of fixing these doors these these are all wooden frames so what happened was you'd open the door would immediately drop and you have to lift it up to shut it now look at that just shuts beautifully we'll do an in-depth test on this one soon but i'm going to show you some pictures here's what the door looked like when jimmy took it off to give you an idea he replaced a lot of the wood just did a wonderful job on both sides this car is rare because it has a manual gearbox you know anthony lago who teamed up with taobao he owned the patent to the wilson pre-selector gearbox and he made sure that all towel logos came with a pre-selected gearbox and i'm sure this probably did but this car was raced apparently it has webber carburetors on it and it's got a four speed i think it's a poltermusol i think that's how you say it gearbox that's a french gearbox that chrysler also used when we put up on the rack and looked underneath it looked like it was done at the factory i don't think this was an aftermarket hot rod job but i don't know peter larson is still researching the car he's trying to find some history on it for me you know we found out it was used as a test car for some of the magazines but the interior is beautiful i'll show you that in just a minute let me open up the hood and i'll show you what that looks like underneath all right i've got my cell phone out here here is the engine people think it's a twin cam it's not it's got push rods they're the big webbers down there as you can see george did a wonderful job george chief mechanic here you know this engine had almost no compression three or four of the cylinders that had nothing we soaked the rings with a combination of atf automatic transmission fluid and acetone let it sit for a week or two fired it up the rings came back and now she's got 115 pounds in every cylinder so that's pretty good let me show you the interior as well i'm going to reach down here and open the door again notice those door handles much like my cunningham as you can see that the interior 100 original has that rich aromatic smell uh this is a big car the seats are just beautiful i mean there's one little cut in the leather right there that's about it but this is all the original leather this car is really too nice to restore so we're just going to keep it exactly as it is there's the manual gearbox down there as you can see the gauges we're still waiting for our that's the fuel gauge over there we sent that out to get fixed and recalibrated but jimmy did a beautiful job redoing rehanging these doors let's uh shut this hood and show what else we got this is a project we've been working on a long time this car has probably been the longest restoration that we've ever had here must be 12 years 13 years something like that easy only because other things came along and got in the way it's an early 20s revere could be a 20 or 21. uh it has the famous rochester duesenberg walking beam engine this is just a fabulous motor valves are on the side and they call a walking beam because you if you took the cover off you'd see the valves open this way it's really cool just making up an exhaust system for it now this is a really fast car if you ever watch wayne carini's my classic car he he had one of these for alan was amazed how quick it was because this is this is what the duesenberg brothers did they built racing engines and to make money they put them in cars and that's what the revere is let me get the cell phone and i'll walk you around a little bit okay there's that famous can you read it rochester duesenberg engine there look at the castings on this thing look at that exhaust system where he comes over the top big carburetor let me show you we're now doing some wiring uh brakes on the rear only which is a little dangerous this thing is really fast uh we painted the body and restored the interior before we started working on the engine and we had to make so many pieces for the motor that it's very time consuming but we're getting down to the wire now so this is going to be running pretty soon pretty soon a three-speed gearbox as you can see it's a four seater uh kind of a cool looking thing got the top come on let's move on to uh the firebird here we are on our 1968 firebird sprint i love this thing because it's a six cylinder just a brief history those are not familiar with it john delorean was a huge fan of the jaguar xk he always wanted to build an american version of the jaguar xke the closest thing he had since his head of pontiac was a firebird so he developed a firebird sprint with a six cylinder overhead cam engine the first overcam uh overhead engine i think i think from a major american manufacturer uh i mean it costs will sinclair and most people had them in the 20s but i mean in in the modern sort of era of the 60s it's basically a chevy six an overhead cam and it had the uh a rubber belt drive which was seen as revolutionary at the time big quadrajet on there uh the guy i got this from i think we talked about this before he ordered it with all the performance options and the trouble with this thing was when you got the six and you ordered with the quadrajet and the custom exhaust system and all the high performance items it only put about 215 225 horse and it costs more than a v8 so of course in the horsepower obsessed upset 60s people went why would you buy a six when you could have a v8 but i liked it because it's extremely light it handles well and this is a real sprint and it has the hood tack and it has all the performance options uh the guy opted for power steering with the six which is seems odd to me because it seems so light anyway the real sort of bugaboo on these engines were these the rocker arms okay they wore and they wore excessively so oil pressure was kept low so it didn't put too much pressure on the cam and they just wore out this is an original one we rebuilt this motor we had these made and these are just beautiful out of tool steel we had them harden and then we use something called dlc diamond light coating this has been run on the engine for quite a while and you it's not a wear mark anywhere this way we can bring the oil pressure up a bit and this engine should last a long long time i mean you can see the wear on the original piece but uh it's pretty cool i mean these are just just beautiful look at these we have these all custom made so i'm real excited to get this thing going and fire it up uh all right let's uh let's move on and see what else we got it's been rather quiet around here because of this pandemic so i pulled some of the bikes out i haven't ridden in a while and just redid them flushed the tanks and recoated the tanks and did a few other things this is my 66 bsa lightning i'm sorry this is what motorcycles looked like to me when i was a kid this was the fastest bike you could get it was just a terror on the street now you get your doors blown off by honda 400's but back in the day it was really really cool let me get the uh my cell phone and we'll get some close-up shots and take you around these bikes fish you know i i'm sorry this is just a classically good looking motorcycle to me you can see the kawasaki right next to it which is a great bike too but i just like this open look same thing this one here this is my 64 triumph bonneville this is one of my favorite bonnevilles you know every now and then you get a british bike that's just about perfect and this one just shifts right drives nice extremely lightweight just a fantastic motorcycle this one over here i hadn't ridden in a while the rubber had all gone soft and was completely deteriorating this is a vincent hrd series a i believe it's 1938 this is number 50 of 75 built just put new grips on it flush the tanks and i take it around the block every now and then these have become extremely valuable i mean just crazy money but they're just just wonderful bikes to ride i got it 30 years ago when it was still a bargain although it seemed outrageous then at the time but the price of these has gone up got 10 10 12 fold certainly i don't say that because i i never sell it i like it as a motorcycle not as an investment but it's nice to know things go up in value too i love the fact that it has sea if you've got a clock as well as a rather than attack you have a clock on it and just a beautiful motorcycle another bike that's kind of interesting i work with mobile one about god 13 14 years ago to build this with sns this is just this is one of the very first sns crate engines and with mobile one doing the lubricant and they kind of sponsored the build and it's just a lot of fun to ride fast fast bike and we'll do a whole segment on this one as well i just thought you'd like to get a kick out of it and get a kick out of seeing it you know you can't just restore cars and forget about them they require a lot of maintenance this is my 66 ultimate toronado this one hot rod of the year i think in 2006 and hot rod magazine we're really proud of that one just a brief synopsis of it we'll do another piece on this we converted it to rear wheel drive it's got 1076 horsepower let me show you the motor oh i love this car this motor is just fantastic uh as you see it has twin turbos each turbo has its own cooling system uh see there's a radiator there there's a tank back there for this side there's a tank for that side and this is the main radiator for the car we had to make our own puffball valve because there was nothing commercially available uh this thing is really fast it's got traction control it's got anti-lock brakes i think we'll do another piece on this one pretty soon because we really haven't done anything on this in about 10 or 12 years it's a lot of fun to drive and it's so impressive when you when you open this hood so just want to give you a great brief glimpse of this thing as you can see the body is totally stock we made or made our own wheels let me show you those right there they look like the stock wheel but these are 17s instead of 14s so anyway oh and we 3d printed that part as well the air cleaner up there the cover come on i'll show you uh what's happening with the electric and finally our 1914 detroit electric this is one hopefully we're going to have it running by christmas i know we said that before other things get in the way but it's looking pretty good jim has been doing a fabulous job on this thing you know he checks rechecks and checks everything again and what we wanted to do in the interior although they didn't have radios in 1914 we took a radio from the late 20s early 30s and adapted it and well yeah let me get the let me get the cell phone out again i'm going to show you the interior here it looks really cool okay let me show you what's happening there's an old zenith radio jim did all the woodworking here it's just beautiful look at that so we'll have big comfy chairs from 1914 to sit on this is how you steer it right here that's your steering wheel and that's your throttle that other one uh as you can see we got our inverters and everything else in here this has got air conditioning and bluetooth but some nice details look at that see where it says edison electric on there what does this say a detroit electric i'm sorry can you see it right there it says detroit electric right on that's one of the original plates that's our radio and the beautiful woodworking and the speaker will be down here so oh and that's our batteries over here these are out of a nissan leaf there'll be a set in the front and the scent in the back so that's the battery used to sort of run the auxiliary stuff the 12 volt that's for your air conditioner and we're getting really close so there you go [Music] uh

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 429,725

Rating: 4.9628334 out of 5

Keywords: Jay, Lenos, Garage, Restoration Blog, November 2020, Panhard, Brough Superior, Rochester Duesenberg, Talbot, Competition, Oldsmobile Toronado, Detroit Electric, Pontiac Firebird, restomod, gearhead, wrench, car nerd, motonerd, Jay Leno, Jay Leno's Garage, car reviews, classic cars, vintage cars, sports cars, super cars, cars, jay leno garage, jay lenos garage, car collection, cnbc, car restorations, restorations, automobiles, automobile restorations, jay leno restorations, car videos

Id: 3wFL-b_bJO0

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 16 2020