Projects 1939 Ford Convertible Sedan Resurrection

Sam,

Your build is so far beyond my skills, which makes it WAY beyond my budget. This is going to be an amazing car.

b

 

Man, it's hard mentally to take that step backwards when your mind is so close to and ready for paint! Good on you and Don for taking the time and effort to make the right repair.

 

You’re making great progress Sam and Don.

 

darn nice job!

 

Most of the time I feel this car is beyond my skill level. Budget ? I gave up on the budget years ago! . Hopefully we will finish it before I run out of wealth and health.

Thanks Tim, This is a constant problem, especially in this final bodywork and painting stage. Nobody likes doing things twice but it seems that especially in this painting process we have to stop and compare my expectations with the reality of our skills. Doing things twice has strained our working relationship a few times but we are working through it.

Thanks John! I hope you had a good trip home ( despite your problem) from the cruise in.

Thank you patsurf!

Well it's been another busy month around here. Don's been fishing and camping a couple of times. I have been doing yard work and seasonal maintenance and putting on a car show while trying to make some progress on this painting project. We are trying to wrap it up before it gets too cold to paint without making my electric power meter over heat from spinning so fast, from trying to heat this shop while ****ing air out of it with the exhaust fan.

We finally got some paint on the front fenders.

Fortunately I remembered to pull these running boards out of storage before we tore
down the paint booth. They appear to have an anodized finish on the bottom side.
These are Bob Drake reproductions. They are very nicely made but do require some finishing.

There is some loose rubber on the flanges that needs to be cut off. Otherwise it will
probably catch dirt and water causing future problems.

I used 400 grit paper to prep the boards.

Masking these things was fun. NOT!

Don applied 2 coats of 2k ( gray) then some sealing primer,followed two coats of black
Raptor liner. While doing my 40 coupe years ago I just painted some Rustoleum over the
yellowish coating . Some of that paint has peeled off over the years, so I wanted to be sure
we prepped and coated this set properly.


We had been doing some color sanding on the front fenders so I covered them up
for today's project.





We started with 2000 and then 2500. I see some places that need some further
attention before we buff them. It is nice to see them shine ( with water on them) during
this process giving us a glimpse of the shine we are striving for.


While Don was camping last week I just could not resist putting some bling on this
grill.

This makes me smile!!!! It took me much longer to install these strips than I thought it would.
I guessed wrong and installed one whole side of them upside down! Those little clips that hold
these strips on are a pain to work with. It takes 4 of them for each of the 26 pieces. Darn things
would fall off of the far end while I was working at the opposite end,trying to line them up
with a hole in the grill My hand was sore from slamming them down with the soft side of a
closed fist. I finally got the process figured out after a few hours and the process went much
quicker on the last 25 or so. They do not recommend using a rubber hammer for this. It is too
easy to bend the pieces. Over all I rate this reproduction stainless grill trim a 5out of 5.


One last item for tonight. while don was away fishing I did some work on the ch***is.
One of them was swapping out the disc brakes. This is the same metric brake I am using
on my 40 coupe. The new one on the left should provide much better braking than the little
Mustang 2 unit it is replacing. My experience is that you don't need power brakes if you are
running these discs up front.

Yes they are a little wider, but I compensated for that with some ch***is mods.

That's it for now. I should be back soon with some pictures of shiny black body parts.
We hope to get the paint booth down and the ch***is and body into the working shop
before the snow fly's. We are looking forward to the ***embly phase. We expect the 4 door
body to give us some grief when we mount it to the frame and try to get those door gaps
back to where they were before we pulled the body off for paint work a year ago.

 

Wow great update Sam! Looks fantastic!

I'm glad you made the comment about the Rustoleum peeling on the bottom of the running boards on your coupe...that's what I used on mine. Might need to re-think that.

 

Thanks Tim! I don't think it was the paint. I think I did not prepare the surface correctly. Good old spay can Rustoleum has actually severed me well on other parts of the 40 coupe. I used some of it to patch a poorly painted
piece of the frame in the engine bay. It has held up well.

 

We started buffing out the fenders today! This picture just dose not show it's true shine,
or the big smile on the face of the 39guy taking the picture. Black is a lot of work!

 

Don buffed out the left rear today. The front fenders are buffed out and stored away in the car trailer
for now.

I have been on this inner fender for awhile. These were shot in single stage black. There
was just too much orange peel on these panels. The flat surface is easy to sand, the 37
louvers..........not so much. This is a lot of hand work and my arthritic hands are not liking
it at all. I am thinking the stock panels would have been a better choice....

 

That's a big job Sam...lots of hand work with all those louvers. I don't envy you on the task! It's looking great though.

 

You’re doing great. Keep up the good work and just remember, if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.

 

Well it has been another busy month. The last big item to paint was the hood and we have been on it for about a month. We painted the inside first. We had a lot of runs to fix.

Eventually we managed to get it pretty smooth.

The yellow tape covers all of the stainless trim attachment holes.

The top surface was painted next and allowed to season for about 3 weeks before
color sanding and buffing.

Note the thin masking plastic covering the walls of the paint booth. Don does
a great job with a buffer but he can really make a mess That foam pad was a really
fast cutter but it ended up causing a problem.

Just a before and after shot.

The hood was coming out great until the this happened. We think an over aggressive
foam buffing wheel ripped the paint loose here. So we had to sand the hood down
again and fix these flaws before re-clearing the whole hood again. We put 4 more coats
of clear on.

I did some sanding and then used an air brush to apply some black base coat to the
damaged areas before applying 4 more coats of clear. We will let this sit for awhile
before sanding and buffing it with a less abrasive buffing pad.

This was my new idea for supporting the hood for painting. It allowed better access to the
flanges/ edges of the hood where they meet the fenders. Worked well.

We shrunk the booth to half size a couple of weeks ago.

We supported this back wall and then dismantled a bunch of the booth around it

We then carefully slid the free standing wall over and inserted it into the remaining
booth.

The process went pretty smoothly and we now have a smaller booth which allows
us to move the project ch***is back into the shop.




You can see the black or gray area of the floor which shows the floor area gained by
doing this. We ended up with a 13.5 foot by 27 foot work area. This should be adequate
for ***embling the car.


This is the new routing for the exhaust hose.
That's all for tonight, thanks for watching.

 

I'm glad to see you making progress . That cut and buff on the the right half looks great. I found it's a lot of work just to re-arrange things so you can have a suitable space to work. I'm doing that here and doing snow removal also. We haven't seen this much, this fast in quite a while. Keep up the good work.

 

Great progress your tub is comming out great. JW

 

It's looking great Sam. I too have experienced and fear the dreaded buff through! It ****s! Fingers are crossed that it goes better for you guys on the second p***.

Good plan on shrinking the paint booth to gain more working space. I'm setting up a paint booth in my shop as we speak, in my mind I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get the big pieces (body and ch***is) in and out of the booth and past each other within the confines. It's going to be like one of those sliding square puzzles we had as kids.

Keep up the good work!

 

Snow removal can take up a ton of time!

 

The car is looking great. Those little issues are frustrating but it looks like you recovered quickly from it.

 

Came in to check your progress & happened to read post #1 again. Wow, great job & coming together as you planned. Great build!

 

Yes, it is, but it is also very, very rewarding when done correctly and it looks like are doing just that.

 

The problem with black after all the work to have good body to receive black - keeping it looking good in the future.

 

Going great guns Sam, loving the updates.

 

Thanks Joel! We still don't have measurable snow down here in my valley but they have opened the ski hill in the mountains nearby. I am not looking forward to moving snow around.

Thanks John Lee, Good to see you are watching.

We will doing our tetris moves in week or so. I hope the snow holds off another week or two since we have to load the body onto an open car trailer to move it from the clean bay to the work bay.

Thanks, Yes you have to have a high degree of resilience and penitents to build one of these cars.

Thanks for checking in Amish Mike!

Yes black is almost as pretty as chrome

Yep....

Going great guns.....some times I think....just shoot me....

Hope you all had a great Christmas!



The 4 coats of clear and a lot of careful sanding and buffing resulted in this shiny piece!
It took us a long time but the results are worth it. This body and paint work tested our
friendship many times. I am so very thankful for my friend Don's patience and hard work
which gave us this great result.

As soon as we moved the ch***is into the shop we pulled the engine and transmission out of it for
painting and detailing. This engine was built a long time ago. It is kind of a mystery. All I know is it is
a 350 with a small B&M super charger and a 750 Holley. It also has 1.6 roller rocker arms. I don't
know what the cam is or compression ratio. It was supposedly built by someone in the mid west that
built engines for NASCAR.

I have never used a supercharger before and I am not sure if I will like the noise it makes. I have only run
the engine twice in 20 plus years. But it ran well. If I, or especially the wife, don't like the noise I will
swap the engine out for a a 383 stroker.

Those blue washer things surrounding the allen bolts will be going away. You can see
in this picture how difficult it is to get access to the manifold for cleaning.

I have never seen this type of rocker arm before. They look pretty stout though.

We discovered the intake gasket had a very small leak while I was sneaking a peek
through the distributor hole in the manifold, so it had to come off. I tried for quite a while
to find a Fel Pro1205 intake gasket set like this one but apparently it is not made anymore.
So we will be trying something else from Fel Pro.




I installed a Pertronix kit in the old tach drive distributor.


I struggled with the cleaning this manifold while it was still on the engine. The areas
marked with arrows had not been polished previously and the sand cast finish was the
second complication. Just being hard to get at was the other problem..

I tried to find a new gasket for this blower to manifold connection but could not find
one with the exact dimensions. So I will be making one.

I bought a lot of abrasives for this project.. That table top Dremel type tool ( Black and Decker)
came in pretty handy. Some of them were worthless. The usual progression was 80 grit wheel,
or drum sander, 180 grit sandpaper, 400 grit sandpaper, 600 grit sandpaper, felt wheel with
buffing compound and finally hand polishing with aluminum polish.




Well it took several afternoons to get to this stage. I can see why the factory guys skipped
polishing those tight areas. You can see the mess of tools and sand paper ac***ulated
on just the last day. It is not Bandit Billy bright but much better than it was.

Thanks for watching and Happy New Year!

 

I think those are Cam Dynamics rocker arms.

 

That engine looks like some pretty nice pieces bolted together. With the intake off, it might be a good time to bolt on a degree wheel and put a dial gauge to one of the lifters to determine what cam is in there.

My brother has run that blower set-up on an sbc in his Willys for close to 15 years now. It doesn't build a ton of boost (4-5 psi), and doesn't make a bunch of noise so it's easy to live with. It pushes his Willys down the quarter in 12.0's...so it's a fun very streetable combo.

 

Thanks for the info SS 327. Looks like they are still in business.

Well Tim, I didn't check the cam with the degree wheel. I just hope the engine provides me with miles of smiles. 12's sound good to me also.

So I know some on the HAMB are not much into billet bling, but I like shiny stuff. Don spent considerable time sanding and polishing this bracket that we modified about a year ago. It was converted from an AC compressor bracket to an alternator bracket. It came out pretty nice.


This area of the bracket had been solid aluminum and was machined the hard way with
a Sawsall and files.

I used Rem Flex gaskets on the headers. They are thick and easy to break while
handling them during the install, but they seal great with only 20lbs. of torque.
I have had them on my 39 convertibles 383 for more than 10 years.

So here is a plug for another item I have been using for years on my other cars. I had difficulty
keeping my header gaskets sealed on my other 39 before finding this Stage 8 system ( none since).
It isn't cheap, but it is not too difficult to install. Those tear shaped pieces are positioned up against
the header tube and stop the header bolt from rotating ( loosening ). Before installing this system
on my 383 it seemed that I had to tighten the the header bolts several times a summer.


They also have a system fro the header collector flange.
I plan to pull a replica Mullins Red Cap trailer with this car so I decided to beef up this
rear crossmember before we put the body on the frame.

Turns out the rear crossmmeber is just the right size to use a piece of 3x2 rectangular
tube I had on hand.

It needed just a little persuading to fit into the hole.

The plan is to use this plate to bolt the hitch in later. The oval holes are for access to the
rear body mount bolts and bumper bracket bolts. I used a similar system on my 40 coupe.

I used some of this edge protector on the ends as I intend to run some wires through
this crossmember.

I welded this piece in . I t should be stout enough for the little trailer. Looks like i failed
to get a picture after it was painted.

That's it for today! Thanks for watching!

 

You do know that WEEDETR makes and sells a bolt in trailer hitch ***embly.

 

No but I will check it out.

 

Kudos to Don on his polishing effort.I second the RemFlex gaskets; I have them on my '40 for at least 6 years and have removed and re-installed the headers several times with no leaks afterwards.
Nice fab work as usual, Sam; Are you planning on using the trailer thhius summer?

 

Hi Joel, Thanks for the compliment, I don't know if I will be able to use the trailer behind this project car this summer. I don't expect to get an interior installed in it until next winter. I do hope to be driving it this summer though. I have pulled the Mullins behind my other 39 before. I have to be careful to remember it's back there.They are lite and easy to pull but I have never mastered the art of backing one up. I think you should have a CDL with 25 years experience and be qualified to pull triples to back one up.

 

We mounted the body last week




We used a cherry picker on the rear end and a fixed point pick in the ceiling with a chainfall.

We had the ch***is on rolling dollies and after removing the body cart out of the way
rolled the ch***is under the body. This process went very well with just the two of us
doing the job.

We are working our way around the car shimming the body as needed to get all four
doors to work.

When we removed the body from the frame last year I taped all of the shim packs to the frame.
I had hoped by some slim chance that the body might line up easier when it was put back on
the frame. Those hopes were quickly dashed. After a week of trial and error and many new
shim combinations we have the back doors looking pretty good. Hopefully the front doors will
cooperate this week and allow us to get past this phase of the project with out loss of hair, our
appointments with a mental health councilor..