Hey guys, just built my new frame with ASC rails, went to set the body on, first run was hitting the panel under the seat on my cross member, removed the panel. Then found the body fits very snuggly to the outside of the frame, enough that I found myself shifting weight around on the body to get it to set down. Found that a handful of the precut holes in the ASC rails don't line up with the body. But my main question is in how tightly the outside of the fram should be to the inside of the body? Should it pretty well fall on? Anyone who's had the pleasure of taking a factory body off of a factory frame, how snug did Henry have it? Thanks in advance!
Maybe a quarter inch gap between the inner rocker and outer side of the frame. Don’t trust the repro mounting holes.
So the body should just slide right on essentially? Looks like I'll be cutting the cross members out and back to square 1
I've built 100's of deuce chassis over the years using ASC rails. We did almost all of our rail boxing in house using a fixture designed by Lee Nottingham. When I first started I used the blueprint from Wescott and it served me well. I'm sure many of my chassis over the years went under Henry bodies and I never had any complaints. My experience has been the body holes on the ASC rails have been consistent and seemed to be in the stock location. Most common problem was getting the cowl bolt started. Personally I've done around 30 some builds using chassis built with ASC rails with Henry bodies. Currently I have a Henry 3 window, roadster and sedan on ASC rails with no fit problems. I never worried about the center to center on the body mount holes but paid more attention to the outside measurements of the rails because I figured if that was correct the holes should line up. I'm not gonna BS you, occasionally I had to do a little die grinder work on some body holes but not much or often. 90+ year old bodies may have shifted a little also. If my outside dimensions were correct I never had a stock Henry body that wouldn't fit over the rails. Also did quite a few Brookville bodies and they fit well. There was the occasional glass body that didn't drop over the rails. For a short while I did buy my boxed rails from another manufacturer and did have some alignment problem with the body holes but they have since corrected the problem.
Some thing else is that when you buy a pair of ASC rails they come with a pair of front and rear spreader bar reinforcement plates which are the same as were on original rails. I always used these plates front and rear when I had them unless I was pinching the front horns. These plates combined with the stock width spreader bars 23 3/16th front and 39 1/2 rear will produce the stock width horns front and rear. In conjunction with the stock spreader bars I used 3 square tube bars that bolted to the body holes at the cowl bolt, midway back about the center and just as the rails started up hill toward the rear to get the correct frame width. Probably not the way many of you do it but it worked good for many years. I did the 33/34 and 35-40 frames the same way using shop made front and rear spreaders and square tubing spacers
The Jalopy Journal
