Sandy's 63 Jetfire 4 spd manual

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The manual choke was a factory installed item on the 4 speed manual shift cars.

The car was built in the third week of January 1963 at the South Gate California plant and sold by Davis Motors in Sonora California on July 17, 1963 to Salvadore and Madelaine Mier of Tuolumne California. The Cole’s rescued the car from the drive in shed on their property where Madelaine had parked it in 1986. Their youngest daughter Judy, who is likely in her early 70’s, still lives there. She said she drove the car as a teenager but never got her drivers license.

We intend to get this baby back on the road hopefully by the summer. We strive to have all our classic cars in excellent driving condition so we can drive them anywhere. I just drove my 1961 Olds Fiesta wagon the 1500 miles back from Florida to our home in Canada this past April and intend to drive it back down to Nashville for the OCA Nationals in July. I have no intention of selling it: I plan to ‘drive the wheels off of it’ !
I just got the turbo back from Jim Noel and Mark from D&D Aluminum V8 is rebuilding my engine as we speak. By the time the car is on the road I will have so much money in it I don’t imagine any one would offer me enough to make we want to let it go.

So to continue with my story:
As I said, after finding out about this car I started talking to Harrison about the car and their plans for it. After a day or two I offered to buy the car ‘as is’ now. I got him to send me some high resolution photos and the more I saw, I knew it needed to be mine. By the end of May I had ‘wore them down’ and we had come to a tentative agreement but that deal fell through as we could not come get the car until mid July as Steve had to have some surgery first and Mark truly did not want to sell it – so he backed out. However I was promised that I would be the first too know when it became available.
Finally in early August I got the message I was waiting for. Co-incidentally, Steve had sold his Harley at the first of the week and a couple hours before I heard from Harrison, Steve had also sold a 1972 Olds 442 that he had bought in June (it was a mess when he bought it, spent July working on it and really cleaned it up and made it into a nice saleable car). The Karma Gods (or is it the CARma Gods) were smiling on me that day! So we dropped everything, scraped together a bag of cash, hooked up the trailer and went on a 2,500 mile Road Trip to California!

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Our trip to California was great. We arrived late Saturday night and due to the fact that we were paying for the car with a certified check we could not finalize the deal until the bank opened Monday. We had a chance to see the car but not on a hoist as their shop was full of vehicles that needed to be rolled outside so that was put off until Monday morning: however we were impressed with what we saw. Mark also took us to visit with the daughter of the original owner, Judy who still lived in the family home and we had a chance to chat a bit about what she remembered about the car. She had never got her drivers license but had driven it on her ‘beginners permit’ way back when. Monday morning, when finally got to see the car we were amazed on how nice it was underneath even though it was far from clean underneath and covered in spider webs – we could see that it was a very rust free car and so it was mine! Our trip home was great however we had a tire blow out on our trailer on hwy 80 in western Wyoming, thank goodness we had a spare. We had planned to stop in Cheyenne that night so I googled tire shops, called ahead and made sure they had our size so we would have a back up should we have another blow out. They opened at 8 am so we were waiting for the doors to open and since the tire shop was beside Lowes I purchased some of their best spider spray as Mark had warned me about black widows. The underside of the car got a good spray down before we continued on. The rest of our trip was uneventful. Every where we stopped people wanted to know what it was. Oldsmobile’s are rare enough and of the dozens of people we chatted with at gas stations and hotels we only encountered one person who had heard of the Jetfire: but you all know ‘all about that’!

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The blow out took the tail of the fender and rolled it up into the wheel well. Btw the car even came with a ‘California snow tire’ Judy told me they never had salt on the roads in the mountains back then, just in the city but they did get the occasional snowfall and when it did no one went out when it snowed.

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My car came with an original GF-91 TRF Filter on it and since we can not buy these any more I have been working towards recreating the TRF filter identical the factory equipped unit (none the less, Eric managed to score an NOS GF-91 one recently) So I decided since we can purchase the correct ‘style’ filter on e-bay, I needed to come up with a fool proof way to ‘print them’. The old model AC GF-61 is identical to the GF-91 only without the TRF wording. The GF-61-P is also useable however the tube size is 1/16” larger at 3/8” but can squeeze into the 5/16 rubber coupler tubes. Originally, they would have been ‘pad printed’ – basically a roller style rubber stamp that the filter rolled over. I worked with my graphic designer daughter Erin and she designed me a stencil so I can recreate these. Here is the result of our many hours of trial and error! I will be making these stencils available in the classifieds.

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[oaklyss]

Sandy, that is beautiful work. My car also had the original GF-91 still on it. I have a few GF-61s that I had tried to make a stencil for, but no luck. I had 2 NOS GF-91s a few years ago when I was between Jetfires, but sold them. I would love to have a stencil. What paint did you find for that color?

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Thanks Oaklyss, anything that makes these Turbo cars different needs to be recreated. I just used a bright red and if you hold the filters 2 feet apart it looks correct but I think Testors Competition Orange ‘may be’ the absolute correct.
I am also working on the red button for the TRF tank cap too. Anyway I submitted an ‘ad’ for the stencil in Parts for Sale section but it has not yet posted so I will ‘repost’ here!

Recreate your own Factory style Turbo Rocket Fluid filter. You need to watch E-bay or other NOS parts sellers and purchase new-old stock AC model GF-61 filters; same as the GF-91 with 5/16 fuel lines ~ only without the TRF wording. Also useable are the GF-61-P filter however their tube size is 1/16” larger at 3/8” – since they couple with rubber tubes you can make them work. (see photo for the size difference of tubes) I am selling a pair of stencils with complete instructions including shipping for $25.00 USD. PayPal or mail a check – Sandy Gray sandygray2018@gmail.com If you want a different quantity, just ask!
Hope this video link works: https://1drv.ms/v/s!Ar1CGnoOThJagog0BMprVg_G1gUmhA?e=Q0Qd09

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[oaklyss]

Sandy, I just bought the stencils from you through PayPal. Your daughter is a genius. Tell her thank you.
I believe Chevy Orange engine paint would be a good match also.

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[dr-jet]

Awesome Sandy!!!

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Hey ’63’ owners. So I taken off my side emblems to clean everything up there was so much gunk around there. Anyhow lots of scrubbing, cleaning, polishing. Now that the goop and wax is all out of there, and upon closer look there appears to have been Red on the outside of that turbine. Does any of yours actually have red in them? What was left actually look like it was kind of translucent red on the Chrome. I have restored many exterior emblems on vehicles over the years and the colors are usually opaque/solid and this red truly seemed to be translucent/’candy’. I posted this inquiry on the face book jetfire page and immediately got an confirmation from another 63 owner that yes, his car had the same remnants of red and it too looked translucent red . Then an owner of some NOS turbine emblems spoke up saying there was NO red in his turbine fingers.

Can you all please check your turbine logos and let me know what yours are like?

Also, ANOTHER QUESTION: I’m assuming the trunks letters push into those pop in speed nut sort of things, and there’s no way for me to remove these safely so I’m just going to have to try to clean the paint around them?

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[oaklyss]

I never saw red paint there. Mine look to be silver.

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