Projects Shade tree Model A speedster kind of thing

You're getting more done working in the woods and using trees as tools than I'm getting with a shop and an open credit line to Harbor Freight!

 

Well, I’m no stranger to HF. Haha

 

I learned this method from my father. He was a wooden boatbuilder, and he developed the ability to build them by eye, without any plans. He built some truly beautiful boats that way. It was kind of like watching (and helping) a sculptor, in a way, just seeing the boat take shape, literally, except instead of removing material he was adding. I guess that's still sculpture, though. I'm using the same philosophy here (and used it on the original body, too). It requires me to keep things adjustable. That firewall, for example. It started oversized, has been trimmed, and will be again. My plan to frame around the edges will allow me to finalize the shape and make corrections right up to the end, even adding some back if I get over-zealous with my trimming. It also takes a lot of patience. I made those conduit side pieces first, because everything is based off of the width, both practically and aesthetically. Then, I added those battens and bent the dash frame. Left it there and went down to our ramshackle coast house with some of my children and grandchildren for a few days, then came back with fresh eyes. Small adjustments have been made, and I'll leave it be again while I work on the brakes or something else, then surely adjust some more. The trick is not to do anything permanent unless you are completely happy with where you are. For example, that dash frame had a nice parabolic curve, but I changed it this morning to have a little peak in the middle and a straighter run on each side down to the terminal curve. Just looks better to me, and it lifts the rear of the line of the hood in profile so that it doesn't appear to be slanting down. I had measured carefully, and it was parallel to the frame rails, but optics are a funny thing and it looked to me like the radiator end was higher, even though I knew it wasn't . I probably didn't raise it even a full inch at the dash end, but it made a difference. Anyway, here are some pictures of where I am now. There are probably too many of them, but I like to have the documentation for future reference.















I sat in this thing for about 15 minutes this morning, just daydreaming and planning and puzzling. The pedals need some pretty drastic modifications, and it needs another section of floor up there, but it all seems feasible. I'm pretty excited about how I hope it will turn out. Knock on wood.

 

Much as I dislike publishing pictures of myself, I'm going to include some that my son took of me sitting in the car. I tried to take some myself, but discovered it is impossible to get into this car and fully seated in the 10 seconds my phone gives me. I do have some pretty funny evidence of the attempts. I'll keep those to myself. Ha.







Dang. This is going to be a small car. I wish I had the wheels on it, but soon enough (hopefully).

 

Your shift lever knob is a hoot....

 

show at least one of the 'personals'-come on be a sport!

 

Well, hell. No harm, I guess. This was as close to success as I got. I was laughing at myself pretty hard in this one.



It's not so much that the car is going to be impossible to deal with, but that all of this stuff is taped and clamped on there, and I had to be careful not to kick or grab the wrong thing. I would not have been laughing at myself if I had knocked it all loose.

 

Loving your build and your ingenuity! Are you near Valdosta? My brother lived near Tallahassee for over 30 yrs. Charles taught sculpture at FSU. Your outdoor "shop" reminds me of him working on large sculptures, mostly of steel and cast iron.

Al Hook

 

Al,
I'm in Thomasville. If you know where Valdosta is, I bet you know or can find T'ville. Your brother sounds pretty cool.

 

I am also not too excited about having my picture taken. FWIW, I think the first photo is a cool portrait of a man and his passion.

 

Back to the brakes. My NOS cables arrived yesterday, so I have started the project of grafting 1937 cable actuated mechanical brakes to the 1928 Model A rod actuated system. First off, I needed to turn it into the later Model A system. Here's a picture that shows the rather complicated 1928 apparatus that goes across the chassis to the right, and the later one-piece crossbar to the left.



Front of the car would be to the right. That gap in the middle of the '28 stuff is where it connects to ball sockets on the arms of the housing for the torque tube bell. That piece to the right of the gap ends in ball sockets and has another big one in the middle. It accepts the force from the pedal. Although it looks overly complicated, it's actually pretty ingenious and, at least in theory, allows the braking to be balanced between the two sides. I don't know enough to tell you why Ford decided to go with the one-piece arrangement, but I'll bet any performance advantages of the old system just weren't dramatic enough to justify the complication and expense? Either way, I had to cut the ball sockets off of my housing because they blocked the speedometer drive. I replaced the whole mess with the later model shaft. It was a bolt-in.

Now to the cables. Here are a couple of the old ones:



The new ones are genuine NOS ford parts, my preference over reproduction by far. They have been stored well all of these years. Grease was still gummy in there (but I did renew it, anyway).



Removing and replacing was pretty straightforward, so I won't take up bandwidth for that. Here's a front and rear installed:





My old front cables had these cute little pedestals that connect the cables to the frame. They anchor the ends of the cable sheaths so that the braking force actually gets to the brake shoes. You can see them in the picture of the old cables. Unfortunately, the rear cables must have had another arrangement, or the brackets were hard to get to because whoever pulled this stuff just cut those cables and pulled them through, leaving the brackets with the frame. I looked on the Bay of E and all over the internet for a couple more of them, but couldn't find any.

I decided to just try making some for the rear. I had no intention of trying to copy the Ford ones, just needed to secure the ends of those cables so they won't pull forward when the brakes are applied. I looked around the junk pile for inspiration and found this old single port VW intake manifold. I cut the ends off of the heat riser and turned/drilled some tubes out of bar stock. I squeezed the heat riser ends in the vise until they matched the OD of the tubes, then filed some curved notches. The tubes are a friction fit over the brake cables for most of their length, then they shoulder down to a hole the inner cable will pass through, but the sheath won't.












Took all of that out to the O/A setup and brazed it.




Old and new, just for comparison. I measured and made sure the center of the cable would be the same distance from the frame at the new brackets as it will be at the brake crossbar. I don't want any unnecessary friction or wear.



Right now I don't have any way to clamp the rear cables into my homemade brackets, but I don't think that will be a problem. For one thing, the cables will have a much deeper bury in the new brackets. I also think that the bend I will have to introduce into the sheaths will be pushing forward constantly. I think the clamps are necessary at the front because the wheels there have to turn, and there could conceivably be a combination of steering and suspension action that might briefly pull. I can always retro-fit some kind of clamping deal on those rear ones, if I discover an issue. One more item on the watchlist.

I still have to attach those cables to the Model A crossbar, and of course the front cables are too short by about 6", while the rear cables are too long by about a foot or so. I think I already have solutions figured out, but that's a post for another day.

 

The front brake cables are 6" too short. I decided to make short sections of brake shaft to make up the difference. The cables terminate in swaged-on 5/16" x 24 threaded rods, with 2" of threads for adjustment. 7" extensions will give me about 1" of thread bury, and 1" of adjustment. I need these to be good steel, so I decided to sacrifice an 18" socket extension.

First, cut roughly to length:



That's tough, hardened and tempered steel, and I will be doing a good bit of machining here, so I needed to anneal it. To do that to carbon steel, you heat it past bright red and cool it as slowly as possible.





I let these cool to touch buried in the ashes on the sides of the forge. You can get a lot more carried away with this stuff if you are making knives or such, but this will do enough to allow me to machine it.

Speaking of machining, I left 2 1/4" full diameter at one end, and about 1/2" at the other end and turned the middle down to the diameter of a Model A brake rod. I don't want these to be so heavy that they pull a kink in the cable when they are not being used.



Ended up here:



Then I stupidly ground flats in the short ends. Just a complete brain fart. I had intended to forge them flat, which would have made them wider and left me plenty of meat around the holes for the pins, but I got carried away with the machining and stopped thinking. I was able to salvage them by taking them out to the forge and hammering them from the end, making that section shorter and wider. It left them uglier than I wanted, but I don't care. Then I drilled them and sanded some of the ugly away.



They look pretty thin on one edge each in the picture, but that's just because of the little chamfer I put on them lining up just right. They are at least as beefy as a Model A brake rod end, so I think they will do. They are way beefier than the worn out rods I was running on the old car for a year or so before I replaced them all. Haha.



That's a pretty unworn stock Model A end. I should have taken a side by side, or at least tried to hold them the same distance from the camera, but you get the idea.

I considered hardening and tempering these. One of my hobbies is knife making, (the real reason I have that old forge and anvil) so I am familiar with such stuff. I decided against it. Stock Model A brake rods seem to me to have been left annealed. They deform pretty easily, by which I mean if you bend them they stay bent instead of breaking like hardened steel would, or springing back like tempered would. Some people think unhardened steel is weak, but that's not necessarily true. I think in this situation, where you would definitely prefer deformation to failure, annealed is best. I am perfectly willing to be convinced my reasoning is wrong, though.

Be that as it may, I still have to drill holes in the long full diameter ends and thread them. Those will then screw onto the cable ends, and the short ends with holes will attach to the brake actuating cross rod with pins. This picture will at least give you an idea of what I'm dealing with, though.



Next up is the rear brake cables, which have the exact opposite problem. They need to connect to the top ams of the cross rod, but they are far too long, so I have to deal with that. Stay tuned.