Those brakes will be a very nice upgrade for sure.

Update time.

Spent some time cleaning things up in prep for reassembly. Pulled the tie rod assemblies out so I could clean up the sleeves and install the new tie rod ends I bought. Turns out my plan for less expensive tie rod ends hit a snag. The threaded ends are fine, the location of the zerk fittings would have worked. However, the diameter of the tapered studs was too small and my window for returning them passed, two days ago, lol. Teach me to slack off. So I have new tie rod ends coming. Decided to pull the pitman arm off so I could crape off decades of grease and clean it up, only to decide that I may as well replace the pitman shaft seal. Would have been nice if I remembered that before I finished my tie rod order, oh well NAPA can get it for me for about the same cost

Cut one coil off the Aerostar springs I installed earlier this year. Got them back in where they belong. Bought a Pneumatic cut off tool, but it appears either my compressor can't keep up or the tool is under powered, so I converted an old miter saw into a chop saw and got it done.

Found that my oil pan screws were all loose, I suggest this might be a maintenance item added to the oil change check list. Heck this might even slow up the oil leak I have.

Tomorrow, I hope, I start final assembly on the disc brake swap. I should have all the stuff I need on hand, except the tie rods. Might reinstall the old ones just dso I can move the car about.

Sunday update

Another other issue I ran into during final install. The specified hose has a pair of squarish tabs where it passed thru the frame mounted tab. I assume that in the original application those tabs are an alignment feature, in my case it was in the way. So I hand filed off the smaller of the two tabs, it fits fine now. Though the instruction to mention the need to remove a mounting bracket on the hose, easy enough, it makes no mention of those tabs. Again that would have been nice to know. I have the pass side done, driver's side hadn't been started. Spent that time yesterday degunking both sides and cleaning up the tie rod sleeves, pitman arm and other semi related areas. Seriously thinking about dropping the pan to clean and reseal it since I have the tie rod assemblies out of the way and I have a large mess under there. But to be honest this might turn out to be one of the snowball things and I don't want to get that ball rolling. Because I fear the timing cover and rear main seals "ought to be replaced while I am there".

A couple of other minor nitpicky details that fall under the customer service aspect of this disc brake swap. it would have been nice to have the torque specs for the bracket to spindle bolts listed, rather than "Torque to recommended settings for 5/8-18 bolts."
Turns out the grade 5 zinc plated bolts supplied need 144 ft/lbs. It would also have been nice to have the caliper mounting bolt torque specs listed as well as the brake hose banjo bolts torque spec, 28 and 32 ft/lbs respectively. I may have mentioned in another update that I had to clearance the bracket to caliper area as the opening was insufficient to clear the caliper. No mention was made of this in the kit instructions and it took me a while to find it but there is a GM TSB that details that clearance requirement, .005 to .012", this kit uses GM metric calipers and 10.87" Mopar rotors.

There are a couple of things about the kit I would have done differently and the instructions would have been much more detailed and clear if I had written them.

So if anyone has a 40-54 Mopar, is thinking about the Rusty Hope kit and you have questions, fire away.

I just like the Rusty Hope name. Sounds like something that should come in a can, that you can spray on rusty old cars.

I do have a Rust-eze sticker on the bumper, bought it that way and kept it.

Perfect!

Been awhile since the last update. I only get my son one weekend a month and Covid hit me the last weekend I was supposed to have him, hence the delay.

So this update will show the process of converting to an electric fan setup. Backstory, the original radiator sprung a leak and the price for an aluminum replacement was way less than getting the old one properly restored. So I figured if I wasn't going to spring for the proper restoration of the old radiator I may as well get the much, much less expensive radiator. I wanted a two row core, but that was out of stock and I ended up getting the three row one instead. First up, a pic of the old radiator and the leak is seen.

I really prefer to have a puller fan but the clearance between the water pump shaft and the radiator precludes any single fan. I could have tried to fit up a pair of smaller fans, but I didn't like the CFM ratings of what would work with the room I had. I tried to find a reference for CFM requirements vs HP produced, good luck there. I did find several that gave a CFM recommendation based on cylinder count, useless. Pretty sure a 300 HP 4 banger is going to need more airflow than my 97 hp flathead 6, but that's not how the cylinder count recommendation works out.

After some research and thinking I ended up with a Derale 18217 fan. Designed to work as a pusher or a puller, 1800 cfm on low speed, 2400 on high speed. I did some airflow measurements with the stock fan that I will post up later once I have the numbers for the electric fan.

Some might wonder why I wanted to go with an electric fan. Well Engine Masters did a Dyno Shootout and the type of fan I have took 30+ HP to spin that style of fan at 5000 rpm. My stock flathead put out 97 HP when it was new. That's a big chunk though the EM fan had 6 blades, mine has 4, they ran a shroud, no shroud on my setup and If I ever hit 5000 rpm on my flathead I won't be worried about fan HP loss but rather why my rod put a hole in my block, lol.

Here's a shot of the stock fan setup, my Trusty Assistant is pulling the radiator.

In this shot my Trusty Assistant has pulled the radiator and fan and is reattaching the water pump pulley. I did have him spin the water pump pulley once reattached to ensure there were no issues with the bolts hitting anything. As I explained to him, the bolts will sit a bit deeper without the fan in place and it's a heck of a lot easier to address that now rather than later when everything is in place.

Here we see the poster board being fitted up to test the template. We laid the new radiator atop the poster board to mark out the mounting holes as well as the width, height and shape of the body of the template. We are going to sandwich the mounting plate between the radiator and the radiator yoke, which is why you see mounting studs rather than bolts for the mount.. I do not trust the skinny little nylon mounting things they give you with the fan. They will break and I don't need that.

Here is the template all marked out. We had to shift the fan to the driver's side some to clear the heater fan motor. I really wanted the fan shifted to the passenger side so as to give more access room for the petcock but that was not to be. I can still get to the petcock but it will be somewhat awkward. I might end up using some tubing/pipe to move it somewhere more convenient.

At this point my pulse rate dropped to the upper 40's and I was pooped out so we called it a day, Covid after effects, got to love it. We did get the template transferred to metal and most of it cut out. I decided that I needed a dimple die to take care of some of the excess sheet metal which I didn't have, so this made a decent stopping point anyway. Still have to cut out the big hole for the fan to blow through. The circle shown is the outer diameter, it's about an inch smaller for the inner diameter of the housing. Which will give me a nice clear area to mount the foam rubber weather stripping to seal the fan to the radiator.

One last thing we did do, the timing marks on the stock lower pulley, no balancer on this engine, are extremely faint. So I cleaned them up and Marked TDC (small mark) and 5 BTDC (large mark) so I can see them when I am timing the engine. I need to spray it with clear to keep it readable.

Pace yourself...wife had the vid in Fall 2020 and the fatigue still is felt. Great progress.

Glad you got over covid and are making progress, but don't overdo.

Got the cooling fan swap done, sort of.

I am tired of buying third world junk and paying first world prices for it. I had to buy three toggle switches before I got one to work without a failure of some sort. First one mechanically locked up after one use. Second one, the cheap pot metal threaded part stripped upon installation. Going to go to Aircraft Spruce and buy a good one I guess, would have been much cheaper in the long run. Then the temperature sending switch, not sensor, typical GM type aftermarket switch, never worked. Engine got up to 210 then I just grounded out the switch lead and the fan came on. Toggled on the high speed and it worked fine too. If I hadn't of gotten my haircut the other day I would be bald right now, lol. Anyway, the details.

Yesterday I did all the electrical work. Not much to say other than it was a long tedious day of routing wires, cutting to length, crimping, soldering, heat shrinking and wire looming.

Used two relays to control the low and high speed functions of the Derale fan I am running. The instructions for the fan kind of casually mention that the low speed portion needs to be running before you fire up the high speed side. So here's how it's wired, for now.

Low speed relay has switched 12v provided by the wiring harness I put in a while back, this is hooked to one side of the relay COIL. The ground side of the relay COIL is hooked to the aforementioned (failed out of the box) GM temperature switch. If it worked this switch would have grounded the relay coil when the temperature of the coolant hit 185ish. Seems there is some slop in the the actual turn on temp. In my testing I ended up just jumpering the switch wire and the fan came on, I figured if the temperature switch hadn't come on by 210 it was either never coming on or was useless for what I wanted. Once this relay is energized it takes power from the battery side of the remote starter solenoid, thru a fusible link and 10 ga. wire, and sends it to the fan low speed connection. It also sends 12v to one side of the high speed relay COIL connection. This was the easy way to ensure that the high speed side only came on once the low speed side was running. Since the high speed relay will not have power to it's coil till the low speed side was energized it was a fail safe setup.

High speed relay COIL gets it's ground from a toggle switch on the dash, for now. I plan to put a temperature switch on this relay to automate it's activation. But I will probably keep the toggle as an emergency override as well. Output side is similar to the low speed relay, fusible link, 10 ga. wire to relay, outputs to fan high speed connection. It works as expected. Will not turn on if the low speed relay is off, toggle switch cycles it on and off manually.

Near future plans, I have two new Speedmaster switches coming, from Jegs. One is set to turn on at 185, off at 175, this will control the low speed fan. The other is designed to turn on at 200 and off at 185. this will control the high speed fan. In order to install them I have a water outlet spacer with two ports coming as well. Fortunately, the flathead uses the same water outlet setup as the pre 79 Mopars do, so that was easy, lol. Otherwise I would be doing it myself. The low speed temperature switch will work just like I have it wired right now, on the high speed side I will wire the higher rated temperature switch in parallel to the toggle switch so that either can turn on the high speed side.

The relays were mounted so as to not drill new holes in the core support.

I mounted the fan to the mount we fabbed up. I don't care for the skinny plastic mounting things that are included with the fan. Hence the mount. If you look in the picture you'll see where I used 1/4-20 bolts to mount the fan.

I needed to use some nylon spacers to mount the fan as it bowed up the sheet metal without them. Used some window foam to seal the fan to the sheet metal. Decided not to use the dimple die to make more holes in the mount as I felt that would end up just allowing the air to flow out those holes rather than thru the radiator. If it turns out I have highway speed cooling issues I will revisit this. Here's the mount ready for the fan.

Installed the fan to the mount, had to use coupling nuts as the hole was too small for a 7/16 socket to fit on a regular 1/4-20 nut It works.

Here we can see how I secured the long 1/4-20 bolt I used to hold the fan. Bolt head is on the radiator side of the mount (I checked to make sure it clears), a nut secures the bolt to the mount, the nylon spacer is visible and if you have young eyes you might just be able to see the window foam sealing the fan. There is barely a gap to seal.

Here we have the fan assembly installed, after multiple R&R's to sort out all the details. The three visible mounting studs are actually 1/4-20 bolts screwed in from the front of the core support. The factory just used 4 bolts screwed in from the backside of the core support to hold the radiator in, Not an issue, except the bottom bolt holes in the radiator flange are not slotted to allow you to slip the radiator over them upon installation. Would have been almost impossible to mount the fan and radiator if I kept that arraignment. the unseen one uses the factory setup because the front brake junction block is in the way if I try the stud method. I may relocate that when I redo the brake lines.

In any case, the fan mount will be sandwiched between the core support and the radiator.

Front side picture of the fan. Had to shift it over to clear the heater blower motor. In the bottom right section of the fan you can see the terminal block I used to connect the fan wiring to my relay setup. Era appropriate setup, lol.

Everything clears with room to spare, though getting to the drain valve is tight, no fitting to attach a hose to drain it either, yes a mess awaits me when I get the new switches.