Hot Rods Finally building my high school hotrod, 20 years later

So Ive been on the HAMB since 2008 and had been meaning to start a build thread since then, but I wasnt really "building" my car back then so it never felt right. But now Im in it and making enough progress to finally start so here we go.

Back in 2003 I was getting ready to graduate high school. I was working at a hot rod shop and just sold the 79 vette I was daily driving and was looking for something I could build. I found this 1931 Fordor on an online blog. I showed it to my boss saying Id really like to build something like it and he actually knew the car and the guy that owned it. The owner was kind of a hermit but a good word from my boss helped make the sale. The guy actually inherited a bunch of properties from his father who had loaded them up with cars. Luckily when his dad parked the '31 he had parked it over some boards which prevented it from sinking into the mud. This is the blog post that I had found and when I got the car home.



Back in 2003 I had a much different idea of what I wanted to build plus I was a dumb kid so I ended up throwing away a lot of pieces that are not easy to replace. Lots of money and many hours of online hunting have taught me that lesson.

I tore the car apart and then parked all the pieces on my dads property before I moved to SoCal for college. Just before I left I picked up a '62 Lesabre that I ended up pulling the 401 nailhead and the finned brakes off of and giving the car away. And the car sat as a pile of parts that I would visit for the next 10+ years. I graduated, moved to MI, got married and started a family. In 2015 I bought my first house with a garage and I told my wife that I was going back to get my car.

Rented a flatbed, went to CA, loaded up the parts and road tripped back. I love a good road trip.



Even before it could move under its own power its been to the salt.

 

It looks like a good start. When I was in high school in San Francisco 1957-1958 a fellow student, Grover Ledford, was his name, had a model "A" Fordor for a daily driver, and drive it he did. It was his only transportation, a nice ride for the time.

 

Got the car home and in the garage. I had cut the original frame up when I took the car apart and it wasnt really usable anymore for the evolved direction I wanted to go so I had picked up a frame in Ohio (which ended up being junk) Plus I picked up a '40 banjo.



With the second frame being junk, I decided to make my own. The general ideas were right but I hadnt done enough homework to know what I was doing plus I had never welded anything before this. Mistakes were made, eventually this frame would be scrapped too. (thats frame #3 for those counting)



I had also joined the SuspectS motor club around that time and before winter hit that year we got together and chopped the car about 3in. It was good but it didnt feel enough so about 2 weeks later I chopped another 2 inches out.


3in chop

+2in more

 

These pics Ive shared here before. i borrowed a set of wheels from a friend just to get a mock up of the car after the chop. 7.50x16 rears and 6.00x16 up front. My vision for the car is a hot rodded poor mans Duesenberg.

 

I'm loving it!

 

Very cool! I was standing in the exact same place at Bonneville about 3 months ago!

 

Can the split front wishbones be mounted to a bracket welded on the inside of the frame rail?Instead of the normal outside of the frame rail. Visually the wishbones will sort of disappear under the frame…a little bit of how they do on a stock A.

 

@A Boner this frame ended up getting scrapped. The current frame I'm building has a much cleaner wishbone setup.

 

Looks like a cool project and I like your vision for it. Also looks like you are in the same car club as my brother according to that tag on the back. I’ll be following along with your progress!

 

Two things come to mind. One is you hit the 20 year mark. My class had its 50 year class reunion last year (I was not invited) and second you were driving a '79 Vette for your high school car. Damn man.

Looks like the build is going in a good direction. My dad would have applauded your engine choice.

 

Sounds like Someone had a purpose for you to still be here. My youngest son drove a 75 roadster 4-speed Vette for his first daily as well...that I need to sell since I guess it is mine now.

 

Cool A.
Has a super fun vibe going on

 

So in 2018 I moved again and started setting up a legit garage that I could build out of. Picked up a 1964 Oldsmobile Jetstar 88 for a new daily and kept gathering parts. My club brother passed along a Muncie 4 speed and my wife found an adapter for Christmas (she's a keeper!)


Also found a Frankland champ quick change with a no slip diff and a full set of gears for $200! I was pretty stoked. A QC was one of those "would be cool" parts but never thought I'd have one.

 

You'll have a good time with it !!
When I was first building my 28 roadster in the mid to late 50s,a new kid moved in to our hood, Steve Reep.. He loved cars too,like all our group, and hung around an helped out a little,didn't know much at first!.
A few short years went by. We both drove our hotrods to high school.
He got a old 30 sedan 4d. I helped him with,he soup'ed up the banger a little. Then he later found , just a 2Door body, that we put on too, the 4D frame.
Just after that; I helped ,we add a V8"Y" n tranny with the rear from a 56.
That "A" was a lot of fun with ether body.
Used it for our group<it held 4 to 5 of us on some trips.
This was a camping trip,but on the way we broke a axles . Had to fix it be side the road,a long way out side of town.

 

Just an FYI:
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/boxed-a-frame.1282768/

 

nice build thread...

 

Cool build! Good luck! Model a frames can still be had for 100 bucks btw, look around a bit more

 

Way to go.

 

Hope you saved the portion of the old frame with the serial numbers on it....So you could weld it in the new frame....

 

So end of 2019 I had a bit of a side track. A friend of mine announced that he was gonna put on a vintage drag race at a local airport in 2020. (Heres the thread on the Invitational at Five Seven Delta.) So my club decided to build a rail job to race. Found a model A frame, '46 banjo, '54 olds 324 and a '50 merc 3 speed. Since my garage was the only one with extra space and tools it became the fab shop. The '31 got put on hold and we started on the race car. When COVID hit and everything locked down it ended up being just me working on it. The race had not been cancelled yet so I was under the impression that the car still needed to get built. Thats when I really got to cut my teeth and learn how to build stuff.

A neighbor was throwing out some I beam from the house he tore down so I grabbed that to build a frame table. I spent a good amount of time learning and practicing my welding. Up till then I was just "point and shoot" but I really worked on my technique and understanding the concepts of welding. I also didnt want to repeat the mistakes I had made on the '31 frame so I spent a lot of time here on the HAMB learning frame geometry.

This car really deserves its own build thread but I was so busy getting it done that I never got a chance. I might still make one though.
How it started.



some quick build pics. The race got cancelled in 2020, and again in 2021. By 2021 some of my club brothers were able to come over and start helping on it which made dealing with the pandemic a lot easier.




With 57D cancelled in 2021 we were not sure what to do. We almost had a completed car but nothing to do with it. One of my club brothers suggested we give T.R.O.G. a shot since they added OHV engines that year. We sent Mel some pics super late in the game and he told us to "Get that thing done and get it to the beach!" so we pushed hard the rest of the year and this is where the car ended up.

photos from Xander M. Cesari



We had never moved the car under its own power until about 11pm the night before the race in NJ. Did a quick lap around the parking lot then went to bed. The next morning I got up and put my foot to the floor on the sand! This thing was so damn solid! It drives amazing and is fast as shit! It gave me so much confidence to get back on the '31. I knew after this car that I could build something that was gonna be strong and reliable for a hot rod. We named the car Suspect Device after the Stiff Little Fingers song for obvious reasons. Again Ill probably make a build thread for this car eventually. We changed it up some more for 2022 and went back to TROG but got rained out. Trying to put together a race season for it now.

 

Soooo that brings us up to last year. With the race car done I really wanted to buckle down on the '31. I turn 38 this year. Ive already missed the chance to have the car done by the 20 year anniversary mark but I do want it driving by the time Im 40. With 3 kids and a full time job I figure I can get it done. My wife is on board so that makes it easier to pull off. Sorry for all the back story. I have hundreds of pictures and moments I considered milestones only to have to pivot or start all over. I dont really feel like Ive done real work until last year.

So like I had said before, the goal is a "hot rodded poor mans Duesenberg" feel. The story on all the frames has been complicated. The original frame I had cut up thinking I was only going to use the front half of it. It was super pitted and I never found any numbers on it. I found the second frame in Ohio for $100. Brought it home and found out that even though the top of the rails were strait, somehow both rails were twisted in the middle. At the time I didnt have any idea how to fix it so I cut the crossmembers out of it and Ive been using the rails as scrap steel since then. The 3rd frame I built is the one in the pictures. The reason I decided to build it out of box tubing is cause Ive added a lot of length to original model A dimensions. With a spring behind rear axle I added 7.5in to the back. I also added 3in in front of the cowl to give me some extra space for the nailhead. Plus with that frame I added a 2 inch kick up in the rear. With all of that I should have the same (or close to) a '32 wheelbase. It will give the Fordor a bit more presence without being a cartoon. Plus I really dont want to flip the firewall but I also dont want a huge hole punched in it either.

I cut in the appropriate tapers where they would be normally. For the long kick up to the rear crossmember I saw a technique here where you mark off 7.5in at the back of the rail, then cut diagonally upwards from the bottom to the top. then when you slide the crossmember back you just line the bottom of the rail on the crossmember chunk to the top rail of the rest of the frame. It seems a lot more complicated but it also knocked out 2 birds with one stone. I had already attempted this on frame 2, so I just copied those dimensions and built the kick up out of square tube.

Nothing on frame 3 had been built on a jig. Just jack stands and a centerline on the floor. None of my cuts were clean or without large gaps. It was "roughly" square. I had notched the tubes for the front crossmember but then didnt know how to account for the proper caster angle, so I just buttwelded the pieces back in (with no reinforcement) and welded the crossmember to that. It was a mess. After the race car I put it on the frame table and found that I had severely warped the rails at each end when I had welded the tapers so I decided to scrap that frame and start over again.

 

I went to one of mine, trust me, you didn't miss much. All the chicks I thought were hot back in school were just a bunch of old hens. I was depressed.

 

I did not mind at all. They tell me a total of 3 people showed up. LOL

 

IMO, you got the chop right the second time. It looks great.

 

Since the frame was going to be a bit longer than the race car I cut the frame table apart and rebuilt it. I also raised it up enough so I could get the legs of my engine hoist and my floor jack under it. ( it couldnt before and that made parts of building the race car tough)


I was able to snag a set of @GearheadsQCE Champ adapter plates and pulled the bells off the '40 rear so I could mock it up and locate it on the table.




I set frame #3 up on the table cause even though the build quality was questionable, the dimensions were close enough to what I wanted. I cut the rear crossmember off and raised it up some more to be a 4in kick up and picked up some fresh steel for some new rails.

 

Around this time I managed to find one of the things I had thrown away when I was younger. The Fordor seats are a lot harder to come by than I had imagined. These are in great shape. They were redone a while ago and its held up pretty well but still needs to get redone before the car is "finished"

 

Neat car, my dad has told me about his buddy’s Model A chopped four door that he had in high school (mid-late 50’s) downriver Detroit area. It still had the A engine, his dad worked in the experimental lab at Ford and built a stainless steel header for it. He traded it off for something else and never seen it again.

 

used the flat on my frame table to secure the rails as I tacked the tapers in this time to prevent the same warpage I had before. Also picked up a new front crossmember that had the caster already stamped in it.


Once the tapers were done I pulled the old frame out of the table and started in on the new frame. Got everything squared up and the new front crossmember in. And finally into "new territory" and working past just a perimeter frame.



Bolted up the radiator and started locating the nailhead. I got a set of Hells Gate engine mounts that I cleaned up a bit So I could finally give it a home.




I added that insert as a seperate piece that would be held in place by the mount bolt. My original idea was to make it something that could be chromed or polished to add a little bit if interesting detail to an otherwise overlooked area. Im not sure if Im gonna keep it but it looks cool for now.