Can't believe you caved to build a (Trico) air-conditioned open car! Are you a REAL Texan or NOT? (Well played)
LOVE the T 'wheel! Looks like the body is coming together nicely. You are a master at finding resources! I can't keep up!
Haha I have been dailying a 71 Dart with no AC for about a year and if I don’t put this Trico in the T it will definitely end up in the Dart!
Probably not gonna get too much else done today - we are working on a trailer for Robin. But I pulled the old radiator off & mocked it up with a 64 Ford radiator. @MojoRacing I need to trim the brackets so it will sit up in the shell properly. It will take some thinking to make the radiator hoses work… but I think it’s doable.
I have three options right now… one, the ‘30 shell in the picture, shortening it was my plan… we have a junk repro stainless one to practice with. I also have a 28/29 shell and as of today picked up a cool looking winter front grill with slats, but it is probably too big. Haven’t tried holding it up there yet. Thank you Frank for the offer however!!
Slants are on topic, right?? Yeah, I had a little exhaust leak to take care of in my daily... We are gonna be finishing up Robin's trailer this weekend so there won't be much progress to report on the T. But we'll hit the ground running soon - I plan to have it moving under its own power again ASAP.
Yep... we also got a 29 Essex. At the time we didn't think the grille shell went with the body but it turned out it did so it definitely won't be going on the T.
I'm ashamed to say I haven't touched it since before my last few posts or even been out to Robin's shop in the past 3 weeks. Hopefully soon we'll get cracking on it again. I will be headed out there this weekend but we will be trying to finish up the trailer, so I doubt we will touch the car. I was hoping to have it done or at least driving with the T body on it before the end of summer, but too many complications arose.
Not working on it today but a little musing… By putting the rad in front of the crossmember I can avoid having to chop the rad/shell. But not sure the proportions are gonna work. I tend to think the rad should be directly above the front axle. Still have to find fan clearance either way.
I have one with a place for a temperature sensor but haven’t installed it yet. Actually I think I forgot about it in a bucket of evaporust… for the past year or so… so it should be good to go!!
Did something today! Robin's trailer is nearly finished - we put the deck on it and buttoned up the wiring, so only a little paint work is left. With time to spare today we turned our attention to the hot rod T languishing in the back of the shop. Not having time to tackle any of the bodywork we decided to try again to remove the steering wheel. Unfortunately it wasn't gonna come off nondestructively. It really twisted my guts up to do it but there was only one way to get it off... we had already broken a puller and tried every trick we could find to get the wheel off gently. It was just too rusty, and the hard rubber cladding, brittle from years spent in the elements, was getting worse and worse from prying and pulling, no matter how careful and gentle we tried to be. So the cutoff wheel came out, and I cut the steering wheel off. Here's the T wheel preliminarily fitted. We will trim up the adapter and get it sitting just right before we weld it on to the A column. I also made new body mount tabs that I like better, but I didn't take pictures of them. We'll get them burned in next time and you'll see them then.
Finding some traction... We decided the 18ga sheet metal we've been using for patches is too thick - it's hard to weld to the T skin without blowing through. Our earlier attempt at patching the driver side turtle deck quarter left some ugly weld blobs and a pretty rough patch, and instead of trying to fix what was there we decided to start over. I cut the old patch out, back to the Ford metal, and we paid a visit to Robin's scrap pile. This '52 Chevy gave up its chassis and a LOT of sheet metal for Robin's sedan delivery project, leaving a few orphaned pieces like this. Luckily the sheet metal is the same thickness as the T's - so it can be an organ donor for my car too! It feels wrong cutting up even parts of an old car like this, but it's the way she goes. I was able to harvest this strip of steel, which will be used to make new patches for the bottoms of the turtle deck quarters. I shaped part of the driver's side today but didn't get it finished enough to burn in. The turtle deck is whole enough to properly bolt to the car! This was pretty exciting. Obviously quite a bit of tuning and panel beating remains, but it's enough to take measurements for the remaining patch work we need to do. But now when someone tells me to put a Chevy in it, I can tell them I already did.
Didn't do any body work today. I decided I want to try MIG brazing, so we ordered some silicon bronze wire, but it isn't here yet! So we did other stuff. I was too gung ho to remember to take pictures when we started this, but when we tried to install the gas tank we noticed the e-brake handle and the gas tank didn't get along. So I cut two inches out of the e-brake handle and stitched it back up. You can't even tell, except the pitting is all gone where I worked! That's better! Then I finally installed the new body mount tabs I mentioned a few weeks ago. Much more elegant. I'll have to fine tune the thickness of the rubber pads, but I like this a lot better than what I had. Closing out another day... all this little stuff adds up. I wish I could work on it more often but we are close now, so close. Also, I know it's not strictly traditional but I ordered a quick release steering wheel hub from Speedway. Will make it much easier to get in and out of the car and also much harder to steal it if the steering wheel is locked in the trunk.
Frank that is an Eastwood cheapy bead roller that I motorized and customized. I got some of the inspiration from a guy on Youtube that made one and presented it to Gene Winfield. I bought some items through McMaster Carr and just used his video as a reference. It works great! I used it to make the drivers floorboard on my Sedan Delivery, I'm pretty sure you've seen that.
Busy day today! Let's dive in... First order of business was my very non-traditional quick release steering wheel. After weighing all the options I decided this was the way to go for easy in and out, even if I get fat in the future. I didn't get a lot of pictures of this process but it was fun and easy. The quick release hub consists of the big hex sleeve & the hub part which is screwed or welded to the wheel. Since the A steering shaft is tapered at the top, we had to make it cylindrical to allow the quick release sleeve to set down deep. I had the idea to use a hole saw for this... it worked great. After welding the sleeve to the shaft, we drilled & pinned it just to be sure. Bam! That's that. After that we decided to get serious about the bodywork. The silicon bronze wire came in and I was itching to try it out, so we swapped wires, robbed the argon bottle from the TIG machine and hooked it up to the MIG machine. I was having too much fun with this stuff to take pictures but it is wild to be able to run beads on metal that regular MIG blows through instantly. I fit up & burned in the passenger bucket side patch from Howell's. I didn't notice while I was brazing, but one of my clamps moved and allowed the panel to sag a bit. We'll have to hammer & dolly the depression out but it will clean up pretty good. The passenger side turtle deck quarter is almost totally solid at the bottom (just a few inches of the outer skin are missing), but the inner foot was missing. We were gonna have to cut it back an inch or so up the outside, put a 90 degree bend in a strip of Chevy skin, and tack-tack-tack it in on thick metal. But with the silicon bronze wire, I can work on much thinner material. A while back we hammer-formed some channel pieces which were in the original bondo body that we now know were actually the remains of the trunk floor. Since these channels follow the shape of the turtle deck quarters perfectly, we decided to braze these to the quarter skins. This gives us the meat we need at the bottom of the quarters to attach them to the subframe, and saves some tricky patching by allowing me to simply braze up cracked/thin metal that would otherwise have to be cut out and remade. I wish I had taken more pictures! But we made some real good progress today, and now we have a firm plan for next time. Next weekend: will we get the turtle deck finished up at last?
The process is really brazing, not welding - it runs extremely cool, so there's very little fusion of the base metal. This is great when working on super thin sheet metal because there's barely any warpage and it won't blow through unless you're really trying. You can actually run a bead on metal that, with MIG, would blow through instantly, even if you were just tacking it, and it still produces a very strong join. You can imagine how much this helps when working with already thin metal that's been in a creek for 80 years, like the panels I'm working with, with pits & unpredictable thin spots. But this wire still offers a high tensile strength - 50,000 psi, compared to 80,000 psi with normal MIG wire. I also found that it does not throw visible sparks when you grind it... so when you're grinding the bead down, you know when you've found the base metal when you start seeing sparks. Let's see... because it doesn't melt the base metal, the work cools down a lot faster which is nice for body work where you're often using your fingers to check for fit and smoothness. And it responds to hammer & dolly much better, because the brazed joint is much softer than a MIG bead.
Dang, I wish I was closer to you. Since I changed direction again, I've got a brand new, though surface rusty, turtle deck floor pan just sitting that I'm now never going to use.
The Jalopy Journal
