1954 Nash Rambler light re-commissioning

Gonna put this in the Antiquated because it's not really custom enough to call it a custom and it's no hot rod, but it is all period correct. I have tons of pictures to add to this to get caught up to where it is today.

Despite me having way too many projects already, I decided I wanted an oddball early 50's car. Lots of the more unpopular models sell for pennies today and I think I was watching too many Youtube resurrection videos so I started looking around. I had my eyes on a Kaiser but this Nash Rambler popped up in an online auction nearby so I went to have a look.

These are a bunch of the seller's pics from the auction, I saved them.

 

I looked it over and talked to the owner. Apparently it was bought new by a Christian radio DJ who refused to pay the destination charges at the dealership. He figured out it was cheaper to buy a bus ticket to Kenosha, so he told his dealer to let him know when it was ready and he rode the bus to the factory and picked it up from there.

Then around 2003 or so he sold it to a teenage girl who drove it around in high school. Her dad liked this to be her car because it stuck out so much, he figured she couldn't get away with much mischief in this car. This particular Nash was NOT equipped with the fold-flat front seat that turns into a bed, I figure that may have changed his at***ude.

37K miles, one repaint. The dad said it hadn't been running in about 10 years, I'm figuring more like 20, although the battery that was in it was only a few years old and still good. It turned over easy so I figured the drivetrain was likely still good, and the underside of the floors were amazingly clean, especially for a Wisconsin car. I could see some bad bondo work on the bottoms of the front fenders and the ends of the rockers, plus one big blister on the tail pan, but I figured I could fix that and keep the paint blends all below the molding line.

My high bid was just below $2K, with the ***le and license fees and the auction house's cut I bought the car all-in for $2300.

Got it home, and had it running within an hour or so. The blast of mouse-nest from the exhaust was pretty entertaining.

 

No brakes yet, but I had it running and the clutch was good, so the car could at least pull itself around the shop now. So I decided to buff out the old paint and chrome. It was really cleaning up nicely, and I figured I had a winner on my hands. I knew about the down-low fixes and the spot on the tail panel, but nothing else jumped out at me yet.

 

Next I brought it into the workshop to work on tires, brakes, and the gas tank. Luckily, the brake master cylinder is the same as some old Jeeps so new ones are available and pretty cheap, as are wheel cylinders. The brakes have a super odd adjuster setup, but once I got them freed up I think they'll work fine. It's basically a little offset peg on a rotating disk, you turn the disk until the peg is pushing on the back side of the shoe to hold it up against the drum. No new shoes available, although I did find NORS linings for the rear and riveted them onto my old shoes. Fronts are half worn and I'd like to replace them too at some point but for now they're at least something.

I'm posting these brake pics in case some internet searcher in the future needs to know what the brake hardware on an early Rambler looks like. Not very interesting, unless you have nothing and need a reference.



Notice that the rear wheel cylinders must have been leaking and someone tried to stop the leak with silicone! Talk about thrifty, I think the new wheel cylinders I bought were like 8 bucks each. Their fix didn't work either, at least it didn't appear that way considering how soaked everything was.



I mixed together a bunch of my leftover paints to match up a green color (close enough, didn't have to buy anything at least) and I repainted the wheels with the old tires on, then replaced the tires. They were from around year 2000, barely worn but way too old for me.

 

Next, I jacked it up and pulled the gas tank out. It's not rotted out, and although it looked gross inside, I figured it would clean up easy, seeing as it was supposedly running in the last 10 years. I did the soak in vinegar with a chain and/or bolts inside, agitating every once in a while, and every time I dumped it out, I got a ton of **** out. But it just would not come clean. I ended up building s****ing tools I could feed in through the fuel sender hole to bust all the crust off of the bottom, I spent WAY too much time trying to clean this tank out myself, should have just sent it out right away. Live and learn.

 

Great find. If you have to pull the head. There is a head bolt hidden under the carburetor.

 

Interesting side note, the fuel tank sender for a 36-55 Ford truck is the exact same bolt pattern as the one used in the '54 Rambler tank, and the ohms of resistance between the two is not exactly the same, but it's close enough to give a reading that I can work with. So if any internet searchers out there come looking for a 1954 Rambler fuel tank sender, the Ford truck ones fit, and they're pretty cheap, too. Gotta rebend the arm to match but that's about it.

 

I also mocked up the fender skirts, I want to run them on all 4 corners. I had some old universal ones for the rear that once the top was cut off, fit up pretty nicely. For the fronts I'm using a cut-off set of 52-54 Ford aftermarket skirts. They need a little reshaping in the front but otherwise they fit pretty well, too.



I was inspired by this pic I found on the internet. I have yet to see one of these Nashes actually run on the road with 4 skirts though. I did check, and my front wheels and suspension clear fine.



That's about as far as I got last year. But I did get curious and picked the big Bondo blister off of the left rocker panel, and as you can see, high quality bodywork under this paint job. Nice thick layer of foil tape over the giant hole before the half inch of mud went on. The mud was so thick in those spots that the bodywork kinda flared out like a body kit, and interfered with the fender skirts I plan to run.

 

That's how it sat for the winter, and this summer I've been able to pick back up where I left off. I decided I was going to do all of the welding on the car before I put the gas tank back in, so I started at that rocker panel scab.

I started using masking tape to make patterns and I really like it, I'm going to do this from now on, another thing I picked up watching Youtube videos. Works better than the cardboard cereal box style templates I was making, the tape holds more dimension. I happened to find a near perfect shape match on a '54 Ford rear door skin I saved to chop up for just such projects, and I welded it in.

First repair, turned out decent. I don't need anything to be perfectly metalfinished here, just looking to get everything within reasonable bodywork range, and solid. Luckily, the rear lip of the wheel opening was still good, making my patch panel much more simple.

 

Next up was the left front fender. The body filler scab on this one was pretty obvious so I made a 1 minute video of me tearing it off, just for fun.



Hopefully that link works.

Once that was uncovered and cut out, there was a little end cap I had to make for the front part of the rocker, shown here welded up



And then the patch panel, made out of that same '54 Ford rear door skin. That piece really came in handy.



Again, not perfect, but at least nice and solid and able to do real bodywork on. Up to this point, I was able to keep all of my work below the body line, and I was hoping to keep it that way. But it wasn't meant to be.

 

Right front fender was next. I was hoping for a repeat of the left side, and I was trying to be careful not to wreck the paint above the trim line.



Someone had brazed a rod to hold the fender flap to the inner fender, but they did it on top of the fender, then brazed on a huge chunk of galvanized tin over that. I could tell the damage went above the line on this side, so I kept stripping it.



No turning back now. I made the repair in two sections, top and bottom. I'm not talented enough to make this all in one piece. The edge of the fender against the door seemed intact enough to leave it there, any further than that and I'd have to take the fender off, which I really didn't want to do. Another masking tape pattern and another piece of that '54 Ford door.

 

That's good to know. I'm hoping not to have to go into this engine, it seems to run pretty good. But I like to have details like that in this thread. I've found a wealth of knowledge posted in build threads on old forums that have helped me, and maybe info in this thread will help someone working on one of these Ramblers at some time in the future.

 

Again, a little repair to an inner panel
had to be made and was easily accessible at this point, so I fixed that first.



Then the upper section



Then a lower section made out of that door skin again, plus a repair to the little brace that holds it in place, instead of the brazed-on rod.





Again, I was lucky that the wheel opening lip was good enough to reuse, as was the edge at the door jamb. The door gap is pretty ugly, but I can work with that. None of that gap was modified in the repair, I was just welding onto what was already there in place.

 

Now the right rocker. This one is made from a '60 Olds door top, it had to be longer than the other side because it was pinholed for a ways forward of the hole, due to a mouse nest I had to dig out. This one had another piece of galvanized brazed on over the top, instead of the foil tape like the other side. Turned out good though. Wherever my patch panels have original paint, I didn't even bother to grind it all off, I figure it'll make a good basis for bodywork and primer later.

 

Now we come to the tail pan. Even from the beginning, I knew there was an issue here, you can see it in the pictures from the listing.



I had picked a scab off to match up paint to for the wheels. It looked like some poorly adhered bondo and some surface rust, but I was hoping that's all it was.



So I started digging.

I foolishly did a lot of this with a grinder, thinking the damage wouldn't extend nearly this far. I ended up covering everything in my shop in Bondo dust.

 

It's way, way worse than I had anticipated. Even the body seams were just carved into the filler! Now I had to investigate the other side. It also showed some filler cracking and a small blister.





At least I wised up by then and started chipping it off instead of getting dust everywhere. But my hopes to keep all the paint blends on the back confined to the tail pan were laying on the ground in shattered chunks.

 

This side extended way up into the trunk gutter, which again had some foil tape covering big rot holes, will filler on top.

 

I can't make this **** out of old door skins.

Luckily, I found this Rambler American in a local junkyard last year, and I took pictures of it to share with @In_The_Pink as I've been following along with his Mish-mash Nash build. At the time I didn't think I needed anything that this car could offer, and In_The_Pink even commented that there's not much left of this one. But looking at the pictures I had saved, I could tell this would be a good donor to get the tail light area pieces I need. This one is a '58, and they're quite a bit different in a lot of areas than the '54 but luckily they used the same tail light area and tail pan.



The car is ultra-stripped, and it looks like someone was trying to graft it into a late model front wheel drive platform and gave up. But it's also a super solid car, at least in the rear clip where I needed it to be, so I was overjoyed to harvest some of the last bits it'll likely ever give up. I was just glad the yard hadn't crushed it yet.



The yard had me cut them myself and charged $100 per side. Not dirt cheap I guess, but the car was almost un-fixable without these pieces, so I was more than happy to pay that.

 

I started cutting. Here you can see what the old "repair" looked like on the back side. You can also see the chunk of undercoating that stayed on the car after I cut the steel off around it. This car has ultra-thick undercoating on it, and the floors are so nice, but this area was just destroyed.

 

Another interesting note, the tail light and its corresponding mounting plate on the '54 Nash Rambler is the same one as the 58-60 American, but flipped upside down. A way to make it look different than the old models I guess? I had to use the donor car piece as mine was ****, but it made it tougher because I couldn't use it as a reference for how things fit.



Once I had the tail light pan in place, I could fit up the big pieces. The upper section came off separately, the factory didn't spot weld them together at that seam. It's not just the tail pan and quarter panel here, the trunk floor and inner rear quarter panel all come together in this spot, along with the now flipped tail light pan.


This took a while. But it fitted up nice, and was a heck of an improvement over the previous repair. It's not really shown here but I was also able to use a bit of the inner rear fender which was poor on the green car.

I used the Fitzee method here to try to get the tightest seams. It worked pretty well although I think it would have worked better if there wasn't so much dimension in this panel.





A few more shots of the piece I was replacing. There's supposed to be a brace that comes down and connects to the bumper brackets here, it had completely rusted off.

I bet the guy who did this was actually proud of this work, it's not even the worst bodge job I've ever seen. And, if it hadn't been done, this car likely wouldn't have been adopted by the teenage girl that drove it 20 years ago, and it would likely have been s****ped. So there's that.

 

And then the driver's side, same **** basically.

 

Now to deal with the trunk gutter. Notice how on the p***enger side, the trunk hinge mount is open on both ends, but the driver's side had rusted away from its upper moorings completely, so someone boxed in the back side. This was the ONLY repair I found on the body that was actually welded, and the fab work on the panel wasn't even too bad, it was real steel at least. But that brace had to come out to fix the gutter, so that repair had to go.



TIP If you ever have to remove a welded-on panel like this and then put it right back where it was before, shoot a few self-tappers through it and remove them before cutting the weld away. This gave me 3 perfectly indexed holes so when I went to put it back into place, all I had to do was put the 3 screws back in and it was perfectly positioned for welding. Worked a treat.


Here's the new donor piece welded into place, with the old rotted piece next to it. Note the boxing plate from the trunk hinge bracket is gone now too. This piece took a really long time and a lot of careful t******* and fitting to get it in place, but it turned out great, and I rewelded the upper part of the trunk hinge bracket the way the factory had done it. The panel between the trunk and rear window (tulip panel?) was different between this car and the donor which made the gutter slightly different on the forward end, but for the most part it was a direct fit. Another piece that would have been really hard to make. The top edge of the inner fender from the donor was grafted to the '54 here as well.

 

The other side looked like it just needed a thin strip welded in above the gutter. But once I started cutting at it, I ended up using a decent sized section of the donor car gutter here as well. Typical rusty car stuff, everything looks good until you start picking at it. I've come too far to start half-***ing it at this point though. This hole had been filled with mud as well. I only dug it out after seeing what the driver's side looked like. Still much better than the driver's side at least.

 

And as long as now I have to paint the quarters anyway, I decided to investigate the last visible blisters on the car. They're right behind the back doors, just below the door handle area. Here you can kind of see what they looked like, I only took pics of the driver's side as a "before".



The p***enger side ended up being a very small area to fix. The only pic I remembered to take was this finished one.



But the driver's side opened up a pretty big hole, inside the jamb and out.



Both spots were holding dirt, really bad on this side. Easy enough panel to make though.

 

And that gets this build pretty well up to date. I cleaned up the shop today and couldn't help but take a picture of my patterns and my discard pile before it all went in the trash/s****. This isn't even all of it, just the big pieces. Way more than I thought I'd have to replace, but it all turned out pretty good.



The only thing left to weld is I think I'm going to replace the tail pipe, it looked pretty rusty from the mouse nest when I was under there. Then I think I'll feel ready to put the gas tank back in and finish up the brakes. I did paint the underside of the floors already, they were in great shape. A couple little welding repairs I did on the bottom side of the car but nothing picture-worthy, and they all turned out very clean. I'm really surprised by how much of the body was rotted, considering how nice the floors and subrails are.

 

I realize it's possible there are other areas of ****ty bodywork done to this car that just aren't obvious, and the fit of the p***enger headlight bezel makes me think that area may have been worked. But, I've decided that if there is anything else buried under this paint, if it hasn't made itself known yet, it'll probably be fine, and ignorance is bliss. This car is not valuable, and I don't want to have to repaint the whole thing, I didn't even want to go this far. But once I saw that tail light area, I couldn't leave it like that.

I'm very happy with my body repairs. But enough is enough. What I thought would take a few days ended up taking a few weeks. And my paint blends are already going to have to be a lot more extensive than I'd planned for. It's time to call it good and get back on track.

 

Neat looking car, with a cool dashboard. I hope it doesn't give you any more unpleasant surprises.

 

Very cool car , looks like it has found a good home . Thank you for sharing your repair process

 

Did some seam sealing and undercoating and whatnot last week, and welded a new tailpipe on to replace the rotted original, but nothing picture-worthy. This week I haven't had any time to touch it except I found the '55 Rambler grille I was looking for, and polished it up. Took a half and half picture and a finished one, it's quite nice.

I really like the look of the '55 grille better, it's more like the big Nash and less like the Metropolitan. Plus it should bolt right in, I'll save the original with the car but run the '55 setup. Still looking for a better front bumper but what I have will do for now until I find one.

 

Good to see you digging into this...sorry about all that dreaded pink Bondo.

Good to hear Gibson's still had the body shell on hand-- the sections you got are a huge time saver compared to repairing yours.