Projects 1936 Ford Tudor Sedan - Build Log

I hope for this thread to be the project log for my 1936 Ford Tudor Sedan build, to be a sort of handy place to post pictures, ask questions, and bounce ideas off of people when I find it necessary.

My plans for this car are fairly straight forward. Bring the body back to straight, likely chop it 2"-3", build a chassis, build a cage, drop in one of my spare circle track motors, paint it the color of my choice, and try not to die while driving the wheels off it.

I'm after a car that goes fast in a straight line and in the turns. To that end, I will be installing an IFS of my own design, and the whole chassis build will lean heavily toward the asphalt stock car end of the spectrum (though I won't be building in an offset obviously). It ought to be an adventure.

Enough talk of what will be, time to talk about what is (or was).

I bought this car from a dude in TX, a HAMB’er by the name of Bill Morgan, (and a damned fine fellow he is). He cut me a good deal and was very easy to get along with.

Toward the first part of October ’08, Ben D ran down there and fetched it for me. He’s also a damned fine fellow. His work was well worth the money, he took good care of the car en route, and he is also quite easy to get along with.

So, with two good deals with two excellent HAMB’ers under my belt, I had a very sturdy ’36 Tudor Sedan in my possession.

That brought me to here:















It’s a very solid car, with very little rot to speak of. The best part was that the car came with a current title. I’ve already gotten the new title taken care of, so that’s one major hurdle already overcome. Color me tickled shitless about that one, believe me.

The only real bad rot is in the floors. You can pretty much read through them. Doesn’t matter though, they’d have to come out one way or another anyway, since I plan to channel the body over the frame.





More in the next post . . . . . .

 

First order of business is obviously tear down. Let me say this right off the bat: Old cars are dirty business. lol Like that’s news to you all.

I guess my karmic payback for this body having so little rust is that it comes with all this fine red dust piled everywhere inside. Every day in the shop ends with me tinted a dark shade of reddish orange.

Things progressed pretty well through the front fenders. I only had to cut half a dozen of the seemingly endless number of fasteners that held the front fenders on. It all came apart fairly easily for its age. Honestly, I was expecting a bigger fight out of it.

Right Front:













Found some more rot, though it’s still not too bad, as I understand it, this is a pretty common spot to be rotten on the 35-36’s.



More in a few . . . . .

 

Two days later, I was back at it for the other front fender.

Left Front:









Found a little more rot, but again, not too bad all things considered.



More to come . . . . .

 

It took me two more days to get back to it. This time I headed for the left rear fender.

Left Rear:









The tail pan on this one is probably gonna need to be replaced. It’s awful moshed up, and I found that new patch panels are pretty easy to come by.



Right Rear:







Happy to say that I didn’t find a single other spot of rot on the rear part of the body. Both quarter arches are solid and the lower quarters are good and solid as well.

That makes me happy. Life is all hugs and puppies right now. Lol

This brings me up to current as of 10/25/08.

Next on the docket is letting the body and frame part ways.

 

looks like a good start . did i read that right , you are gonna channel it? are you going full fendered?

 

Yes, and no.

Yes I said I was going to channel it, and yes it's keeping its fenders, but I'm not going to be channeling it over the stock frame.

As it sets, the bottom of the running boards is already lower than the underside of the frame, but I'm going to be building a tube chassis that has a section that is taller than the stock frame (by about 4" IIRC), so it will need to pop up into the interior area to keep the clearance the same.

Ride height is looking like about 5" in the front and 7" in the rear, but that may change when I get the body hung and get a good look at it.

I plan to build the chassis, then hang the body and get the stance right, then do the chop, and finally do the cage. Much effort and cash must be expended between now and then, I suspect.

I've got a plan though, and that's a start.

Gotta get it all apart before I do much else though. . . . . .

 

Help my feeble brain. What kind of car is this going to be?

 

Kind?

I'm not sure what you'd classify it as, honestly.

I'd call it a hot rod. Fast, pretty, spartan.

Outside it will be a chopped, lowered, full fendered '36, with a hotrod stance (nose down, pretty low, but nowhere close to dragging). Nothing wild.

That will ride on a fabricated tube chassis with a 8 or 10 point cage. Motor will be a 410 sbc out of one of my circle track cars (might see about E85, 'cause all my race motors are alcohol burners). Right now I'm thinking about using a Richmond five speed OD trans (so I don't break it). Suspension geometry will be very similar to an asphalt late model stock car with no offset. Double A-Frame IFS in front, two link with a pull bar and brake floaters on a Winters quick change in the back. Wide five hubs and wheels all around (racing hubs, not the stock ones).

It probably won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it'll make me giddier than a school girl with a secret.

 

OK, I get it now. Have fun.

 

Congrats on your project ! Looks like a great start, a bit banged up, but not too bad. Love the body style, even though I'm not with you on the way you're gonna build it...but who cares...its your car !
Are you planning to sell the stock chassie, here on the HAMB ?
/ primerkid

 

Yeah, probably.

I'll save and sell any of the stock stuff that I don't end up using. Hopefully someone will get some use out of it that way.

The frame is good and solid on this car, but it's tweaked a little on the RR corner (as you can see by the crumpled tail pan on that corner). It wouldn't be too hard to straighten back out, I don't think, provided you had a frame machine or a hellatious bit of I-Beam to strap it down to when you pull it. The damage is pretty much contained to an 8" square area right around the RR corner of the frame.

I think that maybe I wasn't clear about my intentions before, but I intend for this to be a street legal driver that handles like a race car. I'm not building it just to race (though I bet autocross would be a hoot in it ).

 

I sure could use the front axle and spring setup. Today, I just drug a 36 ford coupe x race car out of a holler. The thing used to be fairly intact, but someone had taken the front axle out. I am thinking about a nostalgia car but the body is really fried. I'll probably spend a few hours beating on it anyway to see what I can make it look like cause I just love to waste my time. Years spent on their side doesn't do a car any good. I'm going to post a new topic with pics and see if anyone thinks it's worth saving.

 

You are off to a good start, keep it simple and it will get done. Be sure to brace the body prior to removing it from the frame or it may "spring".

 

Well, Ben D has first dibs on the chassis, but if he passes, I'll post it up here.

It would be nice to sell it as a unit and just let someone come and get the whole thing at once.

I figured as much. I planned to brace of the interior very well before I pulled it from the frame, leaving enough room under the bracing to build my new floor, obviously.

The plan currently is to release it from the frame, brace the holy hell out of it, and then pick it off the chassis and set it on a rolly roundy cart where it can live while I do the rust repair and body work.

I don't think I'll do the chop until I've set it on the new chassis though. Much easier to see how it sets when it's actually setting on its new home. That way the stance and flow are WYSIWYG, instead of having to take my best guess and run with it.

I figure it will be a lot easier to not fuck up the chop if I can set the parts, tack them in place, and then stand back and ponder the situation for a while before things become more permanent. If they suck, or I don't like the way it looks for whatever reason, I can go back and adjust. Either way though, I will actually KNOW what it's going to look like at finished height and stance. If nothing else, it makes me feel better.

It's a daunting task really, taking the knife to such a well preserved bit of tin.

I'm gonna do it though, those side windows are just too damned tall to leave them alone. It would irritate me for the rest of my life if I left them stock.

 

I like the idea of using a stockcar based chassis...Are you going to use a HOWE style front clip ? I'm guessing 4 corner coilovers?

 

Similar to the Howe and Port City gen 1 stubs: strut style uppers (centered, no offset, strut rod to the front) and strut style lowers (forward offset, strut rod to the rear)

Lefthander fabricated stub drop pin spindles: 10 Deg kingpin angle, 8 3/4" spindle height, 3" drop with wide five pins, front steer, rear mount brakes.

Coilovers all around. Right now I've got Afco 13 series shocks and Hyperco springs set aside for it (7" in the front, 9" in the rear), but if space gets too tight up front, I may have to drop down to Pro small body shocks in a 6" stroke. Have to see about that as the build progresses.

Two link with a spring loaded pullbar in the rear. Full length panhard bar in front of the housing. I'll also be running wide five hubs in the rear, and brake floaters to keep wheel hop under control.

I've got the roll center set at ~2 1/2" in the front, and ~8 1/2" in the rear.

I'll probably have to run sway bars (both front and rear) too, but I won't know what I need there until I get the car built and see what it weighs.

 

Your making me drool!!!!! Thats a bitchin set up!!!! A 36 ford on a super late model chassis !!!!

 

That's the same reaction I had when it first occurred to me. lol

It will rule hard, provided I don't fuck up the execution.

 

That looks like a pretty decent start for your project. Way better than our '35 coupe that lived in a creekbed!

 

ryan would like to buy right rear wheel for my race car,let me know,thanks

 

I've just got the one set of wheels, and I've promised Ben D first crack at the chassis. If he passes, I'll start to part it out.

Hang on for a little while so I can see what Ben wants to do.

 

OK, life and business (as well as a moderately sized bit of laziness) intervened for a while and shoved this car to the back burner.

There it languished for months, until finally, through a combination of being out of work (and thusly having nothing really constructive to do), and listening to my old man bitch about having a bay in our shop tied up (never mind that his toys are tying up the other bay ), it was decided that a push needed to be made on this front.

After much peering and pondering, I realised that the floor pan had pretty much disintegrated, and that since I didn't have the original doors anyway, I was worrying about alignment for nothing. The new doors will have to be gapped and aligned when they are hung, and since the hinge mounts are all cracked and in dire need of repair, I said to hell with it. We'll just pull the body without a bunch of bracing, and jack it back into shape when I hang the doors.

So, that's what we did. I found most of the fasteners frozen and inaccessible, so I put the smallest tip I had in my Victor torch and burned them off. An old timer taught me a neat trick that pretty much just pierces the center of the bolt head, allowing a small circular motion to sever it from the shank. Easy peasy, and for the most part, leaving the components involved none the worse for the wear (aside from the bolt of course).

Once it was all loose, we slung the body in two places and picked it from above using our fork truck with a lifting boom.

In all, it took me, my old man, and a nice fellow I work with (an older engineer who I am apprenticing under so I can eventually take the PE exam myself) about five hours to burn/loosen all the fasteners and disengage the body from the frame.

I was busy with the torch and the impact while we were working, so no in-progress pictures, but here are a few of the aftermath.

Frame:















As you can see from the last two pics, the floor is more gone than there.

See all that gray? That's not paint, that's the floor . . . . . showing through the floor.

Yeah, not good.

Definitely going to need rockers and some work at the bottom of both front and rear door posts, on both sides.

Not pretty at all.

Oh well, as my old man would say, "If it were easy, they'd have the Girl Scouts out here doin' it!"

 

Thanks for posting this. I'm picking up a 36 Touring Sedan in a few days and will have to do the floor as well. The body is pretty nice and it's a roller- came out of a barn in Eastern Idaho. I won't be working on it right away but plan to drop in a Merc flatty with a T5 and lower the stock layout suspension. I want to make it a good runner before I get to the big body mods. Going the custom route.

Keep posting as this is great to see how it turns out.

 

I love the look of a good custom, but around here, anything less than 5" off the ground don't live very long. Poor road maintenance just doesn't quite describe it.

If this car had been a coupe instead of a sedan, I probably would not have been able to resist though. I do likes me the look of a '36 3W Coupe taildragger. That deck lid just seems to go on forever.

From the research I have done, it appears that floors, and cowl corners are the spots pretty much guaranteed to be rotted out on a '36.

The front fenders have a small gap between the fender and the cowl which catches and holds crud, which then catches and holds water. Add 60 years to the tab, and you get a big cancerous hole.

I'm not real sure why exactly it is that the floors are always so bad off though. If you look real close in the last two pics, you can see where someone laid a piece of sheetmetal down on the floor just in front of the rear seat kickup, likely to cover up rusted out holes. That means those two spots rusted out before the car had stopped being driven. Something makes those two low spots right before the kickup a prime local for rust to form. Could be as simple as those are the two low spots, so if the seals leak, water collects there and is held in place by the carpet. Could be something else entirely, I dunno.

It doesn't matter to me though, 'cause the frame portion of my chassis will be nearly 9" tall from top to bottom, so I'd have had to cut it out for clearance anyway. At least now I don't have to feel bad about butchering prime material.

I've been trying to save as much of the stock stuff (that I won't be using myself) as I can. That way I can sell it off to offset costs, and maybe help some guys get a hold of hard to find parts.

What I need worse than anything is either a new set of fenders (both front and rear) or, barring that, the fabrication fairy to trundle by and miracle the ones I have straight again. Lots of body work in my future there.

 

Woe! You know, some guy in Sweden or Finland turned one of those '36 two door sedans into a '36 three window. Came out real bitchen.

 

Yea this guy
http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=222004&highlight=36+coupe+sweden

That thing came out drop dead gorgeous.

 

Strange how the floor is so rotten and the running boards look good.

 

Yeah, I thought that was a little odd too, but they are very solid. Covered in rotten rubber, and full of tiny little holes where the rubber was anchored in place, but solid.

For the most part, the entire car is solid, except for the floor. A little moshed perhaps, but solid.

Now I'm gonna go read that Swedish fellow's thread.

EDIT: Holy Hell! That Norwegian fellow is a master of sheetmetal work. As much as I'd like to say I was tempted to go that route, I simple don't have the sheetmetal fab skills to pull off such a feat yet. It's one thing to beat out a panel or fab up a patch, but to create large body panels out of whole cloth like that guy did is on a whole 'nother level.

I'll be happy if I can get the chop pulled off without steppin' on my whiner.

 

If you are going to cut out the firewall, I would be interested in buying it!

 

I doubt I will remove much of the original firewall, but if it turns out that I do, I'll send you a PM.