Hello, I am in the process of replacing my hydraulic top cylinders, hoses and rebuilding the pump. I have not seen a particular procedure to do this in the Fischer Body manual, and looking online I’ve gotten a few various opinions but no solid procedure. Does anyone have a true procedure to install these lines and tightening the fittings properly? I called OPGI who I bought the parts from to ask but they were no help. What I found so far is not to use Teflon tape because there are O-rings to seal the fittings, and one person said to tighten them 1/4 past hand tight and another person said 1/2 turn past hand tight. Any help would be much appreciated because I do not want these to leak and on the other hand to ruin them because I have a tendency to overtighten things.

Thanks ahead of time.
Doug

 

I just did mine and all I can say is you tighten them and use a little common sense. If you think you might overtighten them then leave them a little "loose" and run the top up and down a few times and see if the lines leak. You should do that anyway. The fittings on the line are soft brass so use a flare wrench where you can.

I'm cheap so I put new lines on some 55 year old "spare" hydraulic cylinders I had from a 68 parts car I disassembled in the early 2000's. So far so good

If it does leak it's not that big a deal to pull the rear seat out, remove the side panels and tighten them some more. It's the pump that's a PIA to get to. At 61 it's not as easy to crawl in the trunk anymore to assemble everything. The lines on my 68 didn't pass "through" anything so I actually loosely assembled everything on the bench and them put them in the car, pump and all. The hardest part was seating those stupid grommets on the pump base. (you need a blunt ended screwdriver type shaft that fits inside the hole in the grommet)

FWIW I had to cycle the pump cylinders up and down quite a bit to get all the air out. I had thought I did a pretty good job while it was on the bench.

This thing came in handy for topping off the pump reservoir:

 

I just replace my top motor, hoses and ram cylinders. It's a real PIA to purge the air bubbles in the car, so I assembled and bench bled the system before hand; keeping the pump motor higher than the rams made it much easier to purge the air bubbles. My hose kit had pump fittings that differed from the originals and wouldn't make a leak-proof seal at the pump housing. My original fittings had a small shoulder at the end without threads which the new lines did not have. This prevented the new hoses from screwing all the way into the pump hosing. My solution was to grind away the threads at the end of the fitting essentially creating the shoulder so they could fully screw into the pump housing for a tight seal. I did not overtighten the hoses at the ram cylinders during the bench bleeding process, and tightened all the connections after everything was installed in the car. Here's a pic of the shoulder detail on the pump fittings.

Rodney


The original pump-side fitting is on the left, the new hoses did not have the un-threaded shoulder which prevented a tight seal into the pump housing.

 

Thanks for the good information. I did put my system together on the bench yesterday and ran the pump with jumper cables from a car battery to bleed out the air. I actually kept my pump mounted in a vice with the cylinders down by the floor which did help the air bubbles move from the cylinders up into the pump to bleed them out. My fitting are flared like the picture from cdrod on the right. After tightening the fittings it turns out that the procedure for mine that worked well was tightening them about a 1/4 turn past hand tight. They were pretty tight at that point and seal up very well. No leaks. It took about three or four cycles to get all the air out, and between cycles I tapped the lines to get all the bubbles to move up to the pump.

Now to discuss some of the problems I ran into. First of all one of the cylinders was froze up right out of the box. Of course I didn’t find that out until having the lines put together and started bleeding them. I had to remove the cylinder from the lines, put it in a vice and apply a lot of force to break it free. It was stuck tight enough that I almost gave up. After that it seem to operate OK. I put everything back together a second time. I started to bleed the system again only to have the pump start to kick out halfway through the cycles. Since I was on the bench there was no circuit breaker in line so the kick outs were from the internal overload of the motor. I had not taken the motor apart when I rebuilt the pump, so now I again disconnected the pump and I disassembled the pump and the motor. The motor was pretty filthy from carbon from the brushes, so I used contact cleaner to clean everything off, applied oil the motor shaft using 3-in-one motor oil, and put everything back together again. The motor seem to run better after this, but I still had a couple of kick outs toward the end of the bleed and the motor was getting pretty hot to the touch. It was better than before though. Hopefully once I put this all back in the car it will run long enough to operate the top without kicking out. I will find that out today.

Regards,
Doug

 

Doug:
Looks good. My ram cylinders seemed to hold air in them even after many up-down cycles. My solution was to lay the rams on flat on the floor with the fittings facing up and would leave them overnight in the up position and then overnight again in the down position. This got most of the air bubbles out. Double check tightness after everything is installed; I found a few of the fittings on the ram cylinders started to leak and required a 1/4-turn more.

Rodney

 

Well after everything was put together I tries cycling the top. It went down ok, but the motor kicked out like 5 time putting it back up. I ran it through the cycle twice and same thing. I also checked the switch ohms on both sides (up and down), and voltage back to the motor connector and that is all good so it appears I have a bad motor and I will need to buy a new pump / motor set to get this thing to work properly.

Doug

 

I bit the bullet and ordered a new pump from Convertible Service today so when this project is done the whole system other than the wiring, switch and breaker will be new. The way my luck has gone I will probably have problems with that yet too.

One other question about 4 years back when I started having some pump problems I pulled these dense foam blocks out from down below the hydraulic cylinders while I was troubleshooting the pump and cylinders. At that time I just bled the pump and didn’t replace anything, but now I don’t remember how these blocks were placed under the cylinder linkage. I remember they were just wedged in place somewhere, but I can’t figure out how anymore. I haven’t been able to find any information on them in the Fischer Body book either. Does anyone know where these go or what they were for?

Doug

 

They sit on top of the wheel well as the top frame rest on them. I will see if I can provide the Olds Tech Bulletin that shows this.

 

This thread started with questions about fitting tightness, which moved on to pump issues etc, and now the mysterious foam blocks. I am going to move that question about the foam blocks over to the general topic forum as a separate question.

Thanks for the information to date.

Doug

*********
UPDATE: The question is getting answered in this thread so I won’t be moving it to general.

 

Tim,

Ok thanks. You must have been answering my question while I was typing my last post about moving the block question to a different thread. It would be great if you could find a bulletin of that. I know they came from right under the frame somewhere in that area because I was able to reach them from the top without taking the backseats out several years back, but I just couldn’t remember how they went back in.

Regards,
Doug

 

Tim,

So I imagine they must sit somewhere right around where I’ve got this yellow arrow pointed between my wheel well and the top frame? Or do they sit back just a little bit from that spot yet?.

Doug

 

Doug,
I can’t scan these, so a photo of the bulletin is attached.
Hope this helps!

 

Thanks Tim, that’s exactly what I was looking for.

Also, thank you everyone else for the information on this thread, I will follow up later after I get my new pump installed to let everybody know how this all works out.

Regards,
Doug

 

It's amazing the information you can get off of this site! I was surprised to find these foam blocks on my own '69 when restoring the top many years ago. It was obvious (at least to me) why they were there but I never heard of this rework procedure or information as to where to 'properly' locate them. I just made some new duplicates from the closest dense foam I could find and put them where the originals were.
Fascinating and thanks for the interesting find!

 

Yes, there is some very good information on this site. And also some very good folks that are willing to share information that can’t be found anywhere else. This is just a follow up to my project of replacing a leaking top hydraulic cylinder, installing new lines and replacing a bad hydraulic pump. I received the new pump the other day and installed it. I now have a good working top hydraulic system that raises and lowers smoothly, is much quicker and with no kick outs. I also mounted the polyethylene folding top support blocks per Tim‘s procedure.

While working on this project, I discovered another problem that I created myself several years ago. I had installed new stereo speakers and found that the speaker mounting adapter plate was interfering with the top folding down all the way. The frame in the folding top that’s right above the back window was hitting the top of this speaker adapter plate. It was keeping the top frames that rest above the rear seat armrests from lowering down fully by about 2 inches from where they should have been resting. (See a post that I put in several years ago about this problem). At that time I chalked it up to my hydraulic system having worn out cylinders because I didn’t notice it for a while after install the speakers and didn’t realize the two were related. I ended up removing the speaker adapter plates and re-mounting the speakers right to the body steel which gave me about 1 inch extra clearance. This corrected the problem. I posted a few photos of the finished project and the support blocks in place.

Thanks again for all the information and help.

Doug








Installing and bleeding pump

Finished pump installation

Folding top support block

 

I have speakers mounted there too and I found that there were only a few speaker manufacturers that make a speaker shallow enough to clear the top cylinders.

 

And actually the speakers I’m talking about are the ones that are mounted in the trunk right next to the pump shown in the photograph attached, not in the back seat arm rests. The top folds down into the boot right above the speakers that you see in the picture and was hitting those speakers.

Doug