Hot Rods Trying to spruce up an already nice '34 3-window

Last Summer a long time family friend approached me looking for a good '33/'34 coupe. He preferred a 3-window but would've settled for a 5. Anyway, I told him about one I've known about locally and gave him they guys number (this was on a Friday). He got ahold of him and setup a meeting for Sunday. The car was a deal and he bout it on the spot. The highlights are old lacquer paint. unmolested chassis, wood grain by a local paint legend that is of relation to my friend & a great running 21 stud. The bad/odd.... They'd integrated a weird power steering rack setup, a power brake assembly that hung way under the frame & the wiring/plumbing was a mess. It also had a Columbia 2-speed from a '46-'48 that was real wide.



Scott drove the car for the rest of the summer & began making some improvements. He called to talk to me about the rear axle situation. The car leaned hard one way and seemed bound up. He brought it to the shop and I began tearing into it!!.....

 

Thats a nice 3 window. I see the roll down back window, rumble seat car?

 

Wild guess, the rear axle is a PITA and therefore it must be fixed.

 

Congratulations to your friend! That's a great start.

Shitcan the Wheels, remove the hoakey power steering stuff, and drive the wheels off of it. I'd love a Three Window in that shape as a start. Looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

PS - if he wants a 5 Winder I'll trade mine in a heartbeat!

 

Yes. He's wanting to convert it to a trunk & it came with everything to do it.

 

What's a PITA? Yes, the rear end was the first thing on the agenda.



The rear spring was extremely bound up and the shock mounts didn't cut it. Plus the axle was roughly 3" to wide for the car. I don't know how they crumbed the straight spring into the curved '34 crossmember.



We found out the drive line pin was also broken. It was missing a bearing also

 

Luckily I had a nice '34 rear axle assembly I had gotten from a restored car that was doomed to be street rodded.
You can see what had been done for a drive line. They shortened the later drive & used the '34 torque tube.


I had a spring that I had the local spring shop (White Front) reverse for me for another project bur Scott needed it more than I did. Paired with some longer shackle it'd make the car sit like it should.

 

P-pain , I-in , T- the, A-ass

 

Hard to imagine such a pretty car having such issues! Glad you have the stuff to make it right.

 

Haha Yes it was! The spring was so stuck in there and bound up it took a large pry bar & some B.F.H. action to get it to pop out.

 

Did the Columbia work? If it did I would have tried real hard to come up with a combination to get it serviceable in the car . How wide were the rims? Maybe a different back spacing would have worked with the wide rear ? I wouldn’t start yanking off stuff on the car . Drive it with the power steering. You may like it better than not driving the car with a stock steering setup . Also - those rims and tires have some life with different caps or no caps at all . It’s hot rodding - My 2 cents -

 

It worked but was cable operated, to wide & the related suspension was incorrect & bound up. The wide Columbia wouldn't have been correct for what we're doing.

 

Starting to address the front. We wanted to lower the car all the way around more so we added a reverse eye spring. The steering was functional but twitchy & also bound up so it all got yanked in favor of a more traditional steering setup.




The remote power steering pump was kind of neat though.

 

I like where this is heading. Get rid of that cobbled on modern crap.

Those curved 33/34 rear springs are still so wild to me, I can't think of any other leaf spring ever made that isn't straight end to end, whether they were parallel or transverse. I've heard you can grind a straight spring and get enough relief in the sides to make it fit into a 33/34 rear crossmember, but if it doesn't have enough clearance it's bound to bind up. (no pun intended).

The Columbia setup is really neat but I wouldn't want to try to narrow one, if it's too wide for the car, I see no reason to keep it (at least, not in that car).

Still loving the Crown Vic/Park Lane wagon! Nice to see it driven.

 

Wow major improvement’s what a nice old car

 

32 also takes a curved spring

 

Here's where the fun stuff began to happen. I guess....

Because we went back to push pull steering I wanted to replace the aftermarket spindles with some '32-'34s that have the integral upper steering arm.



Next, I tackled the job of changing the hole configuration a little different. I began by welded up the holes.



Then cut out some rings to emulate later round spindles.



Little simple jig to re-drill the holes.



Here's where it got a little tricky. He wanted to re-use the disk brakes that where on the front which needed these little spacers to sit flush to the spindle.

 

Very nice work! Keep the updates coming.

 

We used a new king pin kit from @Dennis Lacy along with there adapters. We also got there hydraulic brake system.






And paired it with the new Roadster Supply Co. Master Cylinder that is a hybrid of mustang & early Ford.

 

Bravo! That's some really nice work.

 

A functional Columbia rear axle is worth between 2 to 3.5K. I run a '40 Columbia in my '32 Roadster and love the sound of it activating at 50 mph. I reshaped the '40 spring to fit the stock '32 crossmember and widened the rear wheels 2" on the inside to bring them closer to the body. Unfortunately Dan Krehbiel has passed and was our local Columbia expert.
Rockets you're bringing this beautiful '34 3W back to being a great driver. Excellent vision!

 

Great work on this 34, but considering what you did on that wagon, we shouldn’t be surprised.

 

I know that you know that you can buy aftermarket bolt on steering arms so that you could use a regular 40 spindle, but they would never look as nice as the ones you built. Those are a thing of beauty.

-Abone.

 

I wont bore you with the re-plumb. We also did a new fuel line. It was all rubber hose. We then turned our attention to the shock mounts.

We started with some F-1 mounts in the rear. The hole spacing was about right on.



The fronts needed to be modified in order to clear the steering. I've done this on a few other cars & it's worked well.

 

Super nice work. Thank you for sharing your process of making all of these improvements!

 

That’s a neat coincidence that the rear wishbone bolt spacing is the same as an F-1 shock mount. Nice solution.

 

Amazing

 

Incredible work…

 

50 Merc wheels and hubcaps would really help the look.