Hi, I'm converting a 54 Chev 4door to a two door. I hope someone here may be able to help with the length measurement of 54 hardtop doors, so I can extend mine. Any help would be appreciated. Ian
I'm converting my '54 4dr into a 2dr HT but with a retractable hardtop. I have some AutoCAD drawings that will be finished soon if you're interested. There are a lot of differences in the body styles to take into account, not just the doors. Are you trying to recreate a 2dr post or HT? I know that the hardtop roofline was a good few inches lower in profile, about a foot or so shorter in length, with a corresponding foot or so longer trunk lid. The position of the rear seat is also a foot or so further forward in the hardtops, with a narrower rear bench and less legroom than either the 4dr or 2dr sedans. I can give you extact dimensional differences if you want. I'm having to butcher my 4dr completely to recreate the original 2dr HT as best I can, and it's not really worth it. The only reason I am doing it is because here in South Africa, 4dr sedans were pretty much the only body style made, so I couldn't start with anything else. It's a lot of work, but here goes. Obviously (and the example I am giving is for a HT, a 2dr post would be simpler in some regards) the pillar needs to be cut down at the beltline and moved back to allow for the extended front doors. I have found the best way to do this is to cut out the inner and outer rockers completely and start there from scratch. A section of 1x3 steel box tubing makes an excellent inner rocker, way stronger than the original. This gets welded in place of the original rocker, front to back and it's a good idea to clamp a vertical post to this at the position you want the bottom section of your original pillar move back to. Now you have what looks like an upside down T made out of box tubing sitting between your rear door jamb and the cowl. Now comes the doors. There are a couple ways this can be done, neither is very easy. The front doors appear as though they have a pretty uniform section to them front to back, but this is about as decieving as thinking you can cut a 10" section out of the crown of the roof and have it line up perfectly afterwards. Method 1 is to section your front doors top to bottom, inner and skin, about 2 or 3" in from the rear edge. Then you need to section the back doors a corresponding distance from thier front edge so that when you mate the cut off front part of the driver side rear door to the front part of your passenger side front door, it will end up the correct length, and vice versa. Then, you mate the cut off rear part of the driver side front door to the back section of the passenger side rear door. It sounds confusing but if you carefully read what I have said, and picture each step it should make sense and you will end up with two extended front doors and two really short rear doors that will become filler panels for a welded up solid rear q/panel section. Problem with this method is that you end up having to reshape the rear jamb part of your new longer front doors because they used to be hinged there, and now they have to latch there... it's a pain but so is this whole procedure. Method 2 starts the same way as method 1, you section the front doors top to bottom about 2 - 3" in from the rear edge, now you need to basically separate these two parts by the distance you want to extend them, and cut out a corresponding filler section from the forwardmost part of the rear doors and welds it up, also them weld up the shorter rear doors. I prefer method 1 because there is only one weld in the new front doors rather than 2, but either way you will prbably get some degree of warping in the door skin. This can be taken out with careful shrinking and hammer and dolly work, or you can just reskin the extended inner door structure with a new 2dr HT door skin. Oh, Method 3, buy a pair of HT doors. Done. Now, remount your new front doors, you need to get them aligned as well as possible, using the horizontal of the new tubular inner rocker as a reference, it's tough, but has to be somewhat accurate or your gaps are going to be terrible. Ok, now you have to play with the cut off bottom section of your pillar and the vertical post clamped to the inner rocker until the pillar is clamped to the vertical, and the vertical is clamped to the inner rocker in such a way that your door is going to close and latch properly to the pillar, also move things around until the resulting door gap is uniform. Now you can weld your cut off pillar section to the vertical, and the vertical post to the inner rocker. Now we're getting somewhere! The bones of your frankenstien 2dr HT are in place. Now you will have to notch the front of the inner rear doors top to bottom to fit around that vertical post. This is fairly straightforward, once your super short rear door sections fit, weld 'em up! You will probably have some gaps and will need to cut some strips of sheetmetal to fill them. Now is a good time to install new outer rockers, and with some further cutting and fitting, you should be able to convince repro 2dr HT outer rockers to live in the space below your extended doors. This also takes a lot of ingenuity, I can't get repro rockers in South Africa, so I have to make my own from scratch. If you've followed me this far, I think you can get it all aligned up right and even somewhat smooth. The roof has to come off completely, about 10" or so section comes out of the centre (well, where the crown of the roof is most horizontal), and a LOT of panel beating goes into perfecting the roof profile again when the two sections are joined back together, stretching, shrinking... you name it. Mine's getting the obligatory chop as well, not just to bring it down to the factory HT profile, but 5" out in front and 9" or so out in back, which also gives a much better flowing curve at the driprail all the way down to the q/panel instead of the abrubt vertical at the back that the 4drs have. Oh, and if it's a Bel Air, forget about cutting the curved rear glass, lay it down and recess the bottom of the glass, or make a lexan rear window, the windshield is hard to cut but it can be done. Theoretically at this point you should have a rough but convincing chopped '54 Chevy HT. With the roof reattached (and the windshield angle was the same for the sedans and HT) you should have a foot or so gap between the base of the back of your roof and the trunk, this is because your roof is now shorter. It would be easy just to fabricate a panel to fill this gap, but then you would still have the shorter sedan trunk lid. This is where I leave off, because my retractable hardtop retracts into the extended trunk in three sections and requires the whole horizontal surface behind the rear glass to be on big solid welded up trunk lid that hinges backwards just above the rear bumper, but if you really wanted no-one to know this wasn't a factory HT (without snooping around a lot anyway) you would want to either lengthen your trunk lid or buy a HT trunk lid and fabricate a new filler panel around it. Oh, I forgot, you will want to cut out and move the seat back and rear parcel shelf forward too, this can be done when you are busy shortening / chpping the roof. That's it as far as the heavy fabrication and metalwork is concerned, but even a metalworking god will not pull this off without having to use some polyester or lead filler to smooth things out. I haven't touched glass issues either, but with some modification to that post hidden inside the extended q/panels you should be able to get factory HT glass and mechanism to work, same goes for the front doors, as long as you have lengthened them exatly to the length of the factory HT. Once it's filled, smoothed and primed, you will have yourself a chopped HT (or even a convertible with clever fabrication of a top well) from a humble 4dr sedan, and if you're going to all this trouble, you might as well channel the thing too. Just a note, in my case since the retractable roof lacks the structural integrity that it originally did, the body will flex a lot just like a convertible. I am adding a X member to the frame to sort this out, and I would suggest the same to anyone building a convertible out of any other body style. Rich
rlackey, all I can say is WOW!! What a great and in depth post. Thanks very much for the information. I'd love to see these Cad drawings. PM me You are certainly going alot further than I am. I'm starting with a 4door only because thats what was lying around at the time and I wanted to test myself and skills. The plan is to twodoor it, chopped 3 1/2 inches in the front and 4 inches at the rear. Hardtopped, but in the kustom sense, ie removing the pillar and attaching the window frames to the roof. My sills were almost non existent, so Ive recreated them, using what was left and alot of measurements of a friends 54 as patterns. The chassis has a Jag subframe with a rear step notch to clear 4 link holden diff. Engine is a supercharged GMC 270 six cylinder to turbo350 trans. Fully bagged with 1/2 inch lines and hi volume comp. The way I plan to do the doors is using two sets of front doors and a single cut. Rear half of one set, front half of the other = 1 weld. well, we're in the middle of a civil defense emergency today, Flooding everywhere, slips, towns cut off and all travel cancelled except for essentail services. Looks like a perfect time for me to stay home and get these doors started. T
First off, I truly admire everyone's ambition and skill. But I still don't understand the dislike of 4 doors so much that it's worth all that work. It's unfortunate that the, "yeah but it's a 4 door" attitude is so prevalent among us. Seems to me a pretty badass 4 door could be built with less effort than it takes to do a 2 door conversion. Maybe shave the back door handles is as far as I'd go. Of course, this is coming from a 4 door owner Different strokes for different folks, as they say.
I agree, I don't dislike 4 doors, in fact I think the '53-'54 Chevy 4drs look pretty damn good when done right, but for this particular project I wanted a hardtop, but couldn't get one without going to the expense of importing one from the U.S. which was out of my budget. I have more time than money to spend on the car, and I wanted to test and learn metalworking skills, so this was kind of killing a few birds with one stone. FatnLo, your car sounds awesome, got any pics? Rich
rlackey, I'll post some pics as I progress. The cars still a pile of parts at the moment. Ive been stuck into the body shell for the past couple of weeks whilst the doors, guards etc have been away getting dip stripped. I fitted up a rear door and marked for the cut today. Braced the body and removed the pillar and organised to get my front doors back off the strippers tomorrow. a full weekend of two dooring ahead. I only chose the four door as it was free and going to be crushed. I thought I'd have a play and see what I could do. Two dooring was something I'd never done, so i thought 'why not!" If I made a mess of it, I hadnt wrecked a good car. I have built a four door kustom, which I sold in February.
Oh man, that's beautiful. I assume that's the one you sold? Best of luck for the two dooring! I'll get those drawings to you as soon as I have them finished. Rich
The BEST 53/54 Chevy EVER was the Bill Hoffman car. We have discussed it here many times. It is a post that he hardtopped but didnt try and copy the HT compleetely. Post 1/4 windows are 11" longer than the HT, made the car look chopped even though it wasnt. I will try and find a pic.
I would love to see that, I'll do some searches. I haven't cut into mine yet, but would be glad for the extra inspiration. Mine's supposed to end up somewhat of an art piece anyway, traditional in every respect, but I do want to think out of the box a bit, build a custom that someone might remember. FatnLo, sorry, don't want to take over your thread. Rich
Trent, is that the car that had the slide in rear windows?, and it sat about 1/2" off the ground. It was in the back on a R & C a few years ago, when they were showing old cars that had been in the mag. Farmall
That's pretty cool looking. I wonder what type of bracing I would need If I di that to my '50 sedan. I assuming that's why chevy did it with coupe bodies. I may be wrong though.
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