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.