I have plenty of room to do this job. Most of you would be jealous of my 5 bay shop space. A trucking company was run out of my shop before I bought the place. I added a lift a few years back & have a 30X40 pole shed as well. They are however, pretty full of projects that "I will get to someday." I already have a '36/'37 Chevy truck tore down to the frame for some ch***is work & body mods. Yes, that is taking way too long, but keeps getting pushed back as I work on other projects. I'm not new to any of this. My '39 Standard was body off in the late '70s and still looks presentable underneath now. The Merc is one of my "had to have" cars since I was a boy. Just at my 58th birthday yesterday & my body feeling older than that, I am re-thinking some of this & was curious about what y'all were doing on your projects. On my '63 Wagon build, I left the body on, but cleaned & painted the from frame section so it looked good under the hood. That would be the minimum on the Merc. I had planned to go with something like a 2 link for the rear suspension, but am leaning toward leaving the leaf spring set up with lowering blocks now. I could charge the battery & drive it now, but it will never get to be the chopped custom I want, if I am just driving it to shows as is.
I found that getting rid of "I will get to someday" projects is a good thing at this age.... Keep the one that you are in love with.
^^^^Great advice! There is absolutely no way, no way I would have two off the frame going at the same time. No matter how big the garage is. The 37 project stalled, will the Mercury? They are real easy to take apart. The real trick is putting it back together, putting it back together when you are sick of it. Like I said, they are real easy to take apart.
If you take it all apart, there are a lot of parts to lose and forget how it goes together. A friend has a '57 Olds 4 door that someone gave to him. Its previous owner took EVERYTHING apart and lost interest. Don't think it will ever come together again. Done cars from the bare frame and ones left on the frame and in both cases, it worked.
And this ^^^ is why you do it. Do it once. Do it correctly. Or, at least as correctly as your ability allows.
On the other hand, I never pulled the body off the frame on my 55 Chevy, and I drove it a whole bunch, raced it, showed it, and sold it after 20 years. It wasn't a car that needed the body removed, to me. I expect other guys would have. The Chevy II did need it, it was a different build.
My 1956 Fury body is back off - after doing the floors the first time - I have the body off working on the drivable donor frame. Should have just kept the original frame and fixed the hemi swap issues it had when I first bought it.
Just be happy you can take the body off the frame. I didn't realize when I got mine that the full frame is welded to the body like a unibody car. With no way to turn it on it's side and no lift, any underneath work has you laying on your back. Sure, I could grind the welds off and and split it, but I don't see where I'd be ahead of anything doing that. It sits low enough no one will be looking underneath anyway, so clean it up, fix what needs fixing, spray some rattle can paint and drive it.
@19Fordy I took your advice & ordered those manuals. @squirrel Your advice of getting rid of the ones I'm not in love with, is spot on. I tried downsizing last year, only to find the only ones that sell are drivable. And, those you have to sell for less than you expected to get. Seems nobody wants a project car anymore. @F-ONE You are correct about the truck project. I was never in love with that one either. It was somebody else's stalled project when I got it. I've had to re-do a bunch of work on that one. My '39 Ford is a few hours work away from being back on the road. So, I will have a driver again soon.. It will never be "finished." I also have another project that wouldn't take too much to get it driving either. Plan is to do that, & put it up for sale, before I tear into anything else. Retirement can't come soon enough!
yup. But if it's a liability to anyone else, it's more so to you. If you mock it all back together so it looks like a car, then you'll get more than if it's in pieces.
On my recently completed '39 Chev coupe I seriously contemplated pulling the body off the frame. The floors, rockers, lower 1/4's, lower doors, firewall, tail panel, etc., were all rotted out. But when I jacked it up to inspect underside the frame was almost new looking, and freshly painted. Only two bolts holding the body to the frame too! So I decided not to pull the body off again, and instead began with installing new floors and rockers, and gradually worked my way through all the rotted metal until I had everything replaced. If I ever did another this bad, with a great frame, I'd still do it the same way. But if the frame needed much work, I'd definitely pull the body to address both frame and body.
The 38 Chevy was in pieces when I bought it (1973), some ***embly required The Studebaker was a lot rougher than I thought when I bought it. I even fixed parts of the frame where the body mounts had roached out. I ended up buying three others, using the frame from a 58 Hawk (bigger brakes, heavier ch***is etc). I'm retired, have a decent shop although my wife keeps hogging space Yesterday she said we need to do something about the space problem, I am past 75, wouldn't mind building another building but?? The first time I used the cherry picker to roll the body on it's side I thought it would go over (poor planning?), I called my neighbor while standing on the cherry picker, turned out it was fine, just went a little over center and stopped on it's own, way easier to sand blast/prime and paint laying on it's side.
Don’t ever pull the body off the frame without all the parts and proper tools to do a specific task, and plan to get the job done within a short time frame.
I'm retired. Building is what I do every day to keep me mentally sharp and physically active. I enjoy building more than driving but I do like to road trip my cars. For those reasons and because I have the shop and equipment, I always blow them completely apart and build them much nicer than most. Its just the way I do things and, thankfully I can afford it.
The Jalopy Journal
