Projects Modified Lakester Build (THUNDERCASKET)

Got your PM.

I'm not sure what mine is at. It's a bit of measuring, a bit of guessing and a little luck...I think. You need to have the wheels and tires you plan to use, a rough idea of weight, and a few angles. I pulled leaves out of my front spring so it's lower than it should be. I plan to add them as needed. I started mine by setting the frame on jackstands at the ride height/rake that I wanted. Then set the suspension as needed. It the car needs to be adjusted to reach the height I want, I think I can add or removed leaves, I know exactly what you are going through right now. I spent a lot of sleepless nights researching it until I figured it out, and I really don't know how it's going to work .

 

The front and rear are only really centered by the springs at this point. I have not welded in the mounts for the front wishbones yet and I haven't determined the ideal length for the rear ladder bars that RJay's is building for me. I've got some 40 and some Model A rear rods I can bolt on just for the sake of rolling it around but it's not a solid roller yet.

The wheelbase measurement in the drawings is based on the measurements of the frame and the offset from the spring front perches on the rear end. It's an educated guess; I need to measure it proper, but it's definitely close enough for the drawings' sake.

The cab in the drawings may look far beck because it was done with a stretching of the cab represented.

I've got my wheels and tires on there. I went with Radial T/A's because I've driven on them in previous OT project cars, I've NEVER driven on Bias Plys, and I live in Massachusetts where I plan to drive this thing often. My engine/trans is probably around 650lbs. I'd wager i'll have 200lbs in sheetmetal, subframe, and wood replacement. Probably another 130lbs for fuel and battery in the back and another 50 for steering components... so I'm figuring on 1100lbs of sprung weight for starters.

I've gotta decide soon wether I want to pull the axle behind the front crossmember or not. Once I mount the engine, that will be a bit harder to change. Once I do my steering, it'll be a PITA to change. It also influences how much I need to drop the rear.

 

As far as progress for the weekend, I did some work trying to figure out if I can fit these finned steel/iron brakes on my F1 backing plates. It looks promising. Details are over on the technical thread I have going here. I also got my firewall pulled out finally. It was about as much grinding, drilling, bumping and prying as I thought it was going to be.

I used the firewall to make a plywood rough template. So now I've got something useful to help figure out where the cab will go. I'm planning to channel 4" so roght now this piece of wood and a spare cowl are what I've got to work out placement. I've gotta make a new subframe for the body.

I also flipped my rod ends to get my front wishbones angled in a little more.

 

I have another frame that's in much better condition, but not as straight. I've decided that I really need to switch over to it since the numbers can be read and there's less pitting overall. I'll be constructing some semblance of a frame jig this spring. Wish me luck...

But I did get some mockup work done as far as motor mounts go.

I determined the Bronco mounts I bought will require the frame side mounts to be located above the top of the rail, and that will probably look terrible and make for difficulty running hood sides.

Based on where I want/need the motor to sit, it looks like I need to place the mounts below the top of the frame rail. This makes it easier to keep the oil pan seal line about level with the top of the rail, which locates my oil pan 1" above my scrub line and the valve cover inside the hood line.

I'm still trying to sort out where exactly the engine should be located in relation to the front crossmember. My main concern is the radiator. I'd like to run a good sized one, but to do so, I may need to locate it in front of the crossmember, which puts it pretty far from the fan. I'm not convinced I'm even close enough as it sits if I mount a smaller one ON the crossmember.

 

I just got myself a TIG welder. I gotta wait til next paycheck to get a bottle and gas though, so I didn't get to use it this weekend.

I've decided to switch to the other frame I've got since it's a bit nicer. It is however, out of square, so I'll need to straighten it. I want to draw up a plan for building a frame jig before jumping in and winging it. I'm thinking 4' wide and 6'-8' long. I have 2x2 tubing, .188" wall that should do what I need. I've got some allthread to make feet I can level.

I've got my motor mounts mostly figured out but stopped short of fabrication work since I want to have my frame adapters welded in before I finalize them. So, I guess next up is design work and disassembly.

 

Good stuff! If you need help setting up ur TIG or have any settings questions you can pm me anytime!

Whisky...


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Thanks! I'm hoping it's fairly straightforward. I didn't get a Cadillac welder, just the Eastwood TIG 200 AC/DC. I think I can work with it for a while. I'll get a Miller someday.

 

Hey yeah no worries... I started gas welding... You will be fine!


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Man I want a Tig. The first year into my build I began to buy a lot of tools. My friends told me I was wasting my time and money buying expensive sheet metal and fab tools. Two years later, it's worth every penny and they use them often. When time is short, having good tools will get the most work done in a short amount of time.

Although I do think a frame table would be the shit, do you really think you need to spend all the time and money to build it? What if the table isn't square? I was going to build one but with limited space, funds and time I decided it do it old school and on stands. In the end, it's gonna end up where you put it. Getting it as close to where you 'want' it will depend on your time put into it. The frame can be twisted like a pretzel in the middle and as long as the crossmember, axles and wheels are in the right place, the stuff mounted between it won't matter. Obviously we all shoot for perfection, but lets face it, we are not pros. We look at professional builds on here every day, so it's hard to get away from thinking everything needs to be machinist tolerance and shiny bare metal. We are both doing our first builds. They can be off a 1/4 here and there, it's gonna happen, Don't sweat it. The H.A.M.B. is a great place to look up to, but sometimes you gotta step back into the real world.

Here is what made me lose that mind set, from H.A.M.B. Editor Paul-

http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=103232

 

Yeah, I'm pretty stoked to have even an entry level TIG and other specialized tools now. I haven't even gotten to the point where I need them yet but I'm glad to have them. I have a lot of fabrication to do on my body and grille area.

I'm still debating it a little bit, but having a platform I can adjust and level to work on will be beneficial for setting up and fixing the frame as well as building the new subframe for the body. If for no other reason than to get it to a better working height, though I know I could just use sawhorses and shims.

I'm thinking I will make the table train-track style, with two 6' runners, spaced about 2' or so apart, and four or five 4' crossmembers sitting on top. Then weld some 3/4ID tubes into 4 corners and run allthread through them for adjustable feet. That way I don't have to worry about angle cuts with my mediocre chop-saw at least.

And I hear ya on precision issues, I know I'm my own worst enemy with this build. That's a lot of why I'm only this far with very little committed work done beyond cutting the body and tacking in a crossmember. Easily half my time in the shop ends up being staring at the thing working out what should be done in my head.

I'm still totally going to straighten that frame somehow regardless though

 

No real work on the car itself this weekend, but I did finally unpack my TIG and obtain a bottle of 25/75 shielding gas for it. I'll fire it up this weekend to work on my frame table.

On the subject of the frame table, I did get work done on THAT this weekend. I evaluated what I had on hand, three 8' lengths of 2x2 14ga tube and some 1x3/4" DOM tubing and came up with a plan. I cut 3' off the end of two lengths to make the 5' length of the table and the first two crossmembers. Then I cut the last piece into 40" and 44" lengths (with 12" of scrap) to form the last two crossmembers. This should give me enough room to work on my Model A frame and be able to move around the shop. I cut the DOM tube into 4" sections that I'll weld into the corners to give me slots to hold the 3/4" allthread for feet that i can level like screw jacks.

 

This weekend I picked up another rear with brakes and wishbones, some of which may make it into this build, we'll see what I need. More importantly I got a ride around in the seller's AWESOME flathead powered and Halibrand driven 29 A Roadster. That was really the highlight to my weekend.

Back in the shop, I got my tubing sanded and prepped up a bit for welding, and unpacked my Eastwood TIG 200. In my excitement, I forgot to fully tighten my gas fittings, which made for some interesting behavior as far as welding. I came to my senses and got everything set up properly and eventually dialed in my settings a bit. I only blew through my material twice and used half a filler rod making this globby weld. Not bad for 2 years without using a TIG and on an unfamiliar machine. Not that I had tons of experience before.

 

This past week it hit me that I'm really tight on shop space and funding. I made the decision to pause my build and put a rolling project together out of some of my spares to sell off. It'll give me a mental break from my build to put something together without overthinking it to the point of inaction for a change.

So this weekend, I built a shelving unit for my storage shed out of scrap wood and pallets to make room for everything AND my project parts. Then we broke my build down and stowed it. After all that, I had just enough steam and daylight to start mocking up the roller. It's a Briggs A cowl and the back half of my touring body.



There's still a lot to fabricate and repair before I'd have any pride in it leaving my shop. I also need to track down some A hub/drums or some 35 hubs possibly, to get it rolling. Everything I do have has been hit with some penetrating oil for now.

 

Hurry up and get this thing done!! Keek up the good work.

 

Trying to get this roller put together and sold first. I put the steering box in it today.

 

So, the roller project that I've taken to calling Fatguy BuckeT, since it's nice & wide, has been through several versions in the past couple months. At this point it has become a bit of a dry-run for my Modified build.

It started with the Briggs/Murray cowl, then I got into building up a 28 Tudor (I think) cowl out of rescued doodlebug scraps, but now I've decided to cut the spare 27 T roadster/touring cowl loose from my hoard in order to get something that looks right to more than just me and my neighbor.

If I was building this car for me, I'd totally still rock the 28 cowl with the 27 tub and build a hot jalopy. But since I'm building this as a way to make room in the shop and the budget, which means someone else needs to like it, I'm not. I did however figure out how to do it by channeling just the cowl and flipping the body mounts, then making skirts for the T body to blend with the now dropped cowl.

Here is Plan A, the 28/29 Murray/Briggs cowl. I decided the features of the cowl were too different from the T tub to look good.



Here's Plan B, the 28/29 Tudor cowl. It happens that the cowl is about 4" too high to line up with the top of the tub. It is, however, just about perfect as far as width goes. My neighbor suggested sectioning it. I countered with a simpler idea of channeling it the magic 4" to the frame rail depth since I've already got a firewall with its feet cut off. I never put that firewall in, so I don't have any pictures of what it would look like. I may try just for posterity's sake if I have the time and urge.


Plan C, last night, Use the spare T Touring/Roadster cowl I have with the rear section of the T touring body. I've seen buckets, tubs, and Modifieds done in some variation of this form before. Some with filled doors, some sectioned, some not, some with front doors, some with filled wheel wells, etc. I'm going to put this together without filling the wells or changing doors or any of that.

I think what I might do if I want to make this a body that someone can just clean up and finish, is pinch the subrail in to get the doors to line up with the cowl. I'd like to avoid pinching the seat frame and center crossmember if I can and still have doors that shut and look right. I'll fabricate a simple subframe to tie it to the cowl if I go this route.

 

Keep working on it! I've been working on mine for a long time. Jonh Lennon said " Life is what happens while you're making other plans." I got some parts for mine. A 1947 GMC truck dash & a crank out Model T windshield of some kind. Next week I'm gonna see about getting some door latches & handles & maybe a radiator! I'll have pictures on the link soon.

 

Hit up eBay for handles. There's always tons of them. Home in on the ones in a "lot" rather than specific ones if you want to find the mega deals.

I'm nearing the half or third-way point on this roller, so hopefully I'll be ready to get back to my own car soon, with more experience and a fresh mind.

 

It's been a while, I'm still trying to get the roller rolling but the Summer's gotten away from me with vacations, yard projects and parts runs eating up my weekends.

I'm hoping to dedicate most of this weekend to getting the body good enough and some subframe tacked on to the extensions I made before I notched and pinched the body rails. Then I gotta get a rear end under there and the bones mounted (need to make bolt on tabs) so I can take pictures and try to find someone who can't live without it.

Here's the pix of the process. I took some 1.25x1.25" box tube and welded it to the subframe. Then I notched and pinched it. Putting a slab of plywood on the frame helped a lot, instant table.

The drivers side is still a big mess, so I stopped when I got the cowl back far enough. I'll need to straighten the body out a bit before I go any farther.

 

Roller's almost done. Then I'll get back to this MODIFIED or, I may try to do a ROG build.

 

Yet another change of plans, I'm keeping this build on the shelf for a while longer. I decided to keep the roller project and build it. I'll make a build thread for it when I've got it together enough to be worth reading about. Plans are to properly pinch the cab to meet the cowl instead of the somewhat janky way it's done right now. Metal Supermarkets just opened a location in my town so I'll be able to get all the fresh steel I'll ever need in an hour instead of a week. Here's a few pix:

 

I'm waking this thread back up because, while I'm still going to build the initial idea with the Big 6 and long wheelbase someday, I've shelved it for now but I'm not far enough in to want to start another thread just yet. That's why all I've really posted about lately are parts I've been collecting or looking into like the Flathead, Inner Channel Boxing Plates, and the 40 rear end.

See, my wife got the idea into my head to try to build a car for TROG a little while back and I decided to go for it. But after this weekend, with only a couple months to go before the cutoff, I'm having my doubts that I can put this rig together just working by myself on the weekends, particularly with a hip and a knee that seem to have 30 years on me lately. I may just be grousing because I forgot a few facts about spindles over the weekend and ended up taking up almost my whole weekend putting a dropped axle back into the mockup though, bear with me. (you can see the janky-est thing I've ever done that I had to do just to get it rolled back into the shop Saturday below):
...yeah. This is why it's sitting on the F1 setup I had with the Radials now. NEED 37-48 spindles!

Now that I'm done grousing, here's where I'm at and the ideas I'm toying with.

For the Body, I want to try a shortened Touring configuration and see how it looks. I have concerns that the proportions won't work but it's hard to tell for sure with a towel. It may end up looking too... medium sized, and since I'm going to plow forward with the Torque Tube I have, as-is, correcting that with the wheelbase is off the table at this stage. The grand idea of this is that I would make an aluminum tonneau which would capture the sweep up as a sort of deflector/spoiler feature. (tires are just for rolling, don't get on me for radials, the Wide 5's are in the background)



Now here's where things are getting tricky. My torque tube measures out at about 53"
Currently, as it sits, the car is at a 95" wheelbase. That's not going to happen unless I plant the engine on top of the front crossmember from the looks of it but it's still hard to visualize what's going on without taking stuff apart and putting the new stuff in the car so I did what I could with a piece of wood strap.


So, this is telling me that I need to flip the bells on the 40 rear and bring the crossmember forward somewhere in the neighborhood of 8" give or take (how much remains a mystery).

How much room to you guys typically leave between your firewall and radiator on a flathead car?
I kept coming up with measurements between 27" and 31" with my tape.

Finally, here is a pic of the short touring body configuration with the 32" Super Traxion tires I think I want to run (not these particular rotten ones though) sitting at 103" WB and the Transmission to Bellhousing union sitting just outside the firewall.

Offers of help and words of encouragement welcome. Tagging some local guys & folks I've been conversing with here: @general gow @'54Caddy @mike bowling @BenLeBlanc @wheeldog57 @Mikel50 @biggeorge @BOSTONCAMARO @Bruce Lancaster @porknbeaner @tb33anda3rd @volvobrynk @alchemy @Pete @Beau @Robert J. Palmer

 

LOL low on tools? Shot bag dollies and one of everything else.

We all started somewhere, some of us had a head start and the rest just started where they were. Build it to the abilities that you have and let everyone else be damned.

you'll do fine, I am sure of it.

 

I'm as new to this as you are. I don't know much about the flatty stuff or what that takes to install. Wish I could help ya.

As far as advice and motivation? It's very easy for me to want to have one of everything. It's also easy for me to remember I have no time space or money to have everything. I was told to figure out what I want for a hot rod, and build that. Once that's done, then I can build the next dream. My advice is to really sit down and figure out what you want to build, stick to that plan, and only buy the parts you need to complete the project. Also after just passing the three year mark on my build I'm really, really excited to NOT build something this in depth ever again. It takes a lot of time and sacrifice to build a car. Without a clear path and direction, things won't get done. I have over $16,000 just in parts and RENT to build my car up to this point (It's maybe worth $4,000 if I'm lucky). The time, well that's gone. Granted I learned a lot, but I could have bought one kick ass car and modified little things as I went along to make it my own.

Keep up the good work. Mocking up a million times is how it's done! Have fun!

 

Well, that was 2012, I have more rusty legos now

@Beau yeah man I'm in the 5 figure range in parts accumulation at this point and I've got enough to start or mostly build up about 5 different cars right now. I'm just missing a few key pieces for THIS ONE at the moment and the damn thing kicked my ass this weekend.

I'm hoping to get the rear tub quarters liberated this weekend and pull the other body out of the shed so I can bolt them on and get a good look that does not require a towel and so much imagination.

 

When I posted I didn't look at a date or even how long the thread was then after I posted I noticed that there was a lot of thread and work had been done.

I am thinking that there is a place to post my thoughts on building hot rods but it may be considered a rant so I have been avoiding it. A real hot rod falls someplace between a millennial traditional rod and a rattled out piece of crap. That is hard for most of us to understand. Keep it simple, don't spend all your time trying to do that really fantastic techy looking stuff and don't sweat minor imperfections and you will have a real hot rod. You are well on your way. I am not really as big on lakesters as some but I like what you are building here.

 

Here's another pic I took showing the car sitting at 95" wb and the 40 rear sitting on the ground at 113"

because pictures

 

Heh, yeah man, I fugured.

I'm not going for full polished show rod on this one by any means. The body is a bit clapped out still. I can't really even get to it until I lock this wheelbase and chassis down.

Then I can make my decision wether to go Lakester Modified or with this wacky Shortened Touring / Landspeedy Dragster look I'm toying with. I was hoping my oldtimer neighbor would ride over on his mower and give me an earfull of opinions this weekend but he can't see far enough anymore to see I was working I guess.

 

LOL get yourself a big assed banner and wave it when you are working on your car. Was he a squid? There is a flag the Navy uses as a distress signal, he would be right there if he was Dept. of the Navy in a past life.

A lot depends on where you actually plan to sit but if it were mine I would scoot the body back enough to make the wheel wells line up better with the rear wheels, even if the wheels stick up past the wheel well. It certainly isn't necessary to the build it is just a pet peeve of mine.

You can make yourself crazy trying to make one of those old bodies perfect, I like to make them presentable but perfect has never been in my project scope. Mechanically sound is always in my scope though. Handle well (for what it is) and presentable enough as to not look like a scabbed together piece of excrement.

 

It took me a while to figure this out.