Frankie's Restoration Log

FRANKIE LINKS including vendor sites for parts and tools as well as sites for Cadillac organizations

RESTORATION LOG includes log entries of repairs and restoration between the time of purchase at Barrett-Jackson and the present.

1. Gearing Up

After the auction, we found that Frankie had a low battery. The boss got Barrett-Jackson to install a new battery before he took possession. We got home the next day without incident, but the car appears to have electrical idiosyncrasies to deal with. Ummm, I seem to have slipped into a different hottie-tottie terminology for the luxury car than I use for Henry and BillyBob. I'll have to watch that.

April 11^th 2007  Ordered online and received two "Battery Tender Plus 6v at 1.25a" chargers, one each for Frankie and Henry. In the meantime, Derek has located a local mechanic to help with both Frankie and Henry. The mechanic, Jerry, has inspected both cars and is now doing his research. First impressions of him are good.

April 28^th 2007  A few weeks ago, I received a couple of Caddy repair book reprints from Bisko Auto Books. Included is "Body/Chassis Parts Book 1938-1946 Cadillac" and "Shop Manual, Chassis Only 1939-1941 Cadillac, LaSalle".

November 20^th 2007  Haven't been making much progress on the Caddy's electrical malfunctions. The boss is trying to locate a mechanic to work on both Frankie and Henry but hasn't much luck yet. The first guy he found, Jerry, doesn't seem very interested. He found another guy thru a local collector with a big stable of classics, but this guy is in the process of packing up and leaving the area. We joined the Cadillac/LaSalle Club (they have a mechanics list) but we're still waiting on them to process the paperwork.

The last couple of times he tried to start Frankie, Derek reported that it was starting to feel more and more like a bad starter. I located one on ebay and won the auction. It appears there were two different starters used with the Caddy 346 engine and they are not interchanageable. The first few starters I found on ebay were for the 41-48 engine. The one we need is for the 39-40 engine and it also was used on the LaSalle (model #1107912). It arrived today. It is pretty rusty but the armature spins freely and the solenoid mechanism works freely too. It may be of some use to the machanic when we find one.

January 21^st 2008  Derek arranged to have Frankie worked on by Tony, the owner-operator of the Valero station in downtown Boca Raton. Tony's service operations consist mostly of exotics and classics. In a few weeks time, Tony and his guys had the caddy purrin'. With Frankie back on the road, Derek wanted to enter it in the Reflections in Glass XXV Show held in west Boca Raton at Mission Bay Plaza on January 19, 2008. I went with him and entered my old truck BillyBob. Here's the story of how that went. Frankie won first place in his class.

< Back to IntroMore to come. Stay tuned. >

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Issued Monday August 28, 2007

Updated Thursday March 28, 2018

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