Cadillac frame off restoration - the video

[Bruce Nunnally]

1949 Cadillac Fleetwood Series 60 owned by Member Jon Yinger

Cadillac & LaSalle Club of Southern California.......Visit us on the web at http://www.clcsocal.com. 1949 Cadillac Fleetwood Series 60 restored and named (Lily) by owner Jon Yinger. .

[joeb]

Southern car for sure. Based on sun damage to tops of fenders. The new "search and restore" show is cool. Get a team of a dozen techs to put 2000 man hours of effort into a car in 3 weeks is nice.

[Cadillac Jim]

20,000 man-hours comes to $2M plus parts, but this car just may be well worth it. The car that they started with was barely restorable, with the steering wheel and probably a lot of other parts cannibalized for salvage, the upholstery in ruins, etc. The reliability upgrades are fantastic. I still recall having to put brushes in a 6 Volt generator every year or two, separate vibrator voltage regulator life of a few years at best, 15,000 mile shock absorber life, etc. I hope that they found a way to put a PCV system on it to keep blow-by from accumulating in the oil to give the engine a modern car life expectancy.

I especially like the fact that they kept the hydraulic power windows and seats. There is absolutely nothing wrong with hydraulic instead of electric power windows and seats except size, cost and weight, none of which are important in restoring a 1949 Cadillac. And, the silence, smoothness, simplicity and reliability of hydraulic power windows and seats sure beat what is needed for electric power windows and seats. Of course, six-way with four-way lumbar power seats presents a daunting hydraulic design problem and is best done with electric power solutions.

The wiring of the day used natural rubber insulation enclosed in a fabric tube. By the 1960's the rubber would become nonviable as insulation except in the best of climate-controlled situations so the entire wiring harness had to be replaced. The removal/installation is simplified by the frame-off restoration process but fabricating this is not just ordering a Painless Wiring universal replacement and cutting pigtails. One would need to start with the terminals on the ignition and turn signals, headlight and taillight sockets, dome light and courtesy light sockets, etc. etc. etc. and build everything up from scratch. One big help is that use of 12 Volts reduces the required size of the copper wire by 75% (see GeekPost below), and modern insulation is a fraction of the thickness of the original I hope that they have an old manual with a complete wiring schematic to work from. I believable that the Chilton manuals published in that time frame did include complete wiring diagrams for most cars.

[Cadillac Jim]

GeekPost: Going from 6 Volts to 12 Volts means that for a constant power in a battery-wiring-accessory circuit, with the power at the accessory the same, the current is cut by half. Since power loss in the wiring is the square of the current times the wiring resistance, that would mean that power loss in the wiring is 75% less in a 12 Volt system than a 6 Volt system for the same size wire. So, for the same efficiency, which allows the same wiring loss, the wire can have four times the resistance and thus 75% less copper.

I once read that the weight of some of the more accessory-laden 6 Volt cars in 1954 ran 15% of the weight of the car. I believe that I read this in an old Car & Driver in the 1970's so this could have even been for some 12 Volt cars. This is a big reason that car manufacturers have been looking at 42 Volt systems as a new standard for ten years or more. The reason that it hasn't happened is that 42 Volts DC has safety and arcing issues. You can weld with 42 Volts DC coming through big enough wires (jumper cables!!!) from a 42-volt lead-acid battery. I'm not sure whether the battery is based on a nominal 2 Volts per cell (12 Volts from the battery) or a nominal 2.33 Volts per cell (14 Volts from the battery, which is a good number for what you see once the car starts). So, this could be an 18-cell battery (or, three 12 Volt batteries in series) or a 21-cell battery (which requires an extra 6 Volt battery with three 12 Volt batteries, or seven 6 Volt batteries). I've always assumed that they mean an 18-cell battery. Either way, a dead cell is about three times as likely to result in AAA calls than for a car with a 12 Volt system.

One thing that I wanted to propose to GM in 2001 or 2002 was an all new concept that uses a 12 Volt battery and alternator with a three-phase 400 Hz inverter. All car wiring would be the same four conductor cable with a couple of fiber optic data lines for a redundant network bus. The ease of putting a GFI interrupt solves the safety and arcing problem. It's easy to interrupt an AC arc by stopping the inverter but very difficult to interrupt a DC arc. And, the data bus carried along lets every light turn itself on and off according to what the car's master computer says to do, much like most of your car does now through relays. This system would do it through IGFETs. The thing about 400 Hz is that motors and accessories have been using 400 Hz three-phase for aircraft for at least 70 years now because the copper and iron sizes and weights for a given power are less than, say, a 60 Hz AC motor, something that is very important for cars these days, so the technologies needed are already there. Also, with 42 Hz three-phase with neutral, very efficient 12-phase rectifiers can produce very smooth 50 VDC that doesn't require capacitors or filtering for anything other than radios and such. Lower voltages can be efficiently produced from 50 VDC by switching buck regulators that are available on cheap chips (they still need an inductor and a couple of capacitors, one of them large) if you want to have low voltages for LED lighting. For HID lighting like we are seeing as the future of headlights, the starters and ballast design for 400 Hz three-phase is a breath of fresh air next to any low-voltage DC design.

Feel free to move this post to a new Topic.

[davedog]

^^^ Really enjoyed reading both these posts Jim. Very interesting stuff

[Cadillac Jim]

I think that by the time you count the cost of the systems for a 12 VDC system with the 42 Volt three-phase system that incorporates the car's network with fiber optic, the cost/weight/efficiency is competitive with a car that has HID headlights, a CAN network (necessary for OBD II, which is required for cars sold in the USA these days), and high-tech stuff like LED stoplights and such. High efficiency bucking regulators that produce very clean DC from 50 Volts rough DC, including current multiplication that produces very high currents at low voltages, exist now. You have one in your desktop or laptop computer right now that solves a harder problem.

I would hope someone takes such a leap in a concept car or some such. With hybrids, plug-ins, and motor-generator-motor cars like the Chevy Volt, something like this is going to happen somewhere. Better the USA than Japan or Germany or wherever.

[joeb]

$2M? No way. Car looked ok to begin with. Will this thing ever be driven? Yes I saw the video. Must have been driving from the shop to the museum?

[Cadillac Jim]

The video says 14 months and hours. I thought that I saw 20,000 hours somewhere when the post first went up but I can't find it now. At $100/hr that's $2M. Each man level of effort is about 2400 hours so 20,000 hours is 8.4 men, average, which is high. 2,000 hours is 0.84 men, which is low. Whatever it is, there was a whole lot of work put into that car. I would expect that Brea Rods and Customs sponsored this car to some extent because they are prominently featured in the video and probably in signs when the car is shown.

[joeb]

i can believe dumping 100-250k into a car cuz you luv it. but going from 200k to 2M is a big leap. its just a car after all. i checked our local craigslist for some 1955 cars. found 2-3 1955 olds 88 in various shape. 2 were pretty nice, solid restored cars in the 14k range. a 55 olds 88 and a 49 caddy are pretty darn similar in size, heft, motor specs and so on. 15k to run down the road in a clean rig compared to 2M for a super special caddy? of course there was a 55 eldo conv on cl too. they wanted 59k or 79k? it seemed really nice. but i was looking quick for a low priced example in the 15-20k range and there were many

[Cadillac Jim]

Yeah, I'm convinced that the 20,000 hours was in a post and has been edited out. I don't see it on the YouTube page for the video, in the video, or on the car's web page on http://www.clcsocal.com. I can believe 3,000 to 5,000 hours, some of it sponsored by Brea Rods and Customs. It looks like it was intended as a daily driver, not a museum piece, and $2M is a bit much to have in a daily driver.

I once met a guy in 2001 or so in the dealership waiting for service. This guy had a mid-1990's Deville. He told me a tale of how he restored and showed a classic 1950's or 1960's Cadillac convertible until he sold it for $500K and retired on the proceeds. Then, his service consultant came out and tried to sell him a $5500 job because his case half was leaking and he stormed out. Never saw him again. I wasn't on Caddyinfo yet or I would have helped him find a better solution. I eventually left that dealer myself. I perceived, rightly or wrongly, a bad culture in the techs that befuddled management. The CTS-V isn't going there for service.