1929fordhotrod.com

A Rear View Mirror & Mount for the 1928 – 29 Model A Ford Roadster Hot Rod

Well, it sure seems like it has been a long winter.  I really don’t know how time flies so fast.  After the Christmas break I thought there would be lots of shop time working on the hot rod but somehow that just didn’t happen.  Part of this can be explained with a problem with the tendons in my right thumb making my hand very painful.  I guess this can be expected when using the computer for too much of the day commanding a mouse to complete various functions on the monitor.   

This past weekend the clocks moved forward into daylight savings time here.  Now with an extra hour of daylight in the evening there will be more of an incentive to get in the shop and continue with the build of the hot rod.  Then of course there is the 61^st Meguiars Autorama Custom car show in (Motor City) Detroit, Michigan at Cobo Hall last weekend March 8-11^th, 2013.   Attending a car show of this magnitude will get any custom car builder pumped up.  It’s always interesting to see how competing for the Ridler’s Award has changed over the years.  Having the good fortune of living about 2 hours from this event, and the weather was on my side, the decision to attend was an easy one.  I will be posting many pictures of the show in the near future.  

Now that my hand is on the mend, warm weather on the horizon, and attending a fantastic car show, it’s time to get back in the shop working on the 1929 Ford roadster hot rod.

To get things moving again on this website, I will show a simple project that I recently completed.  Every once in a while it is nice to complete a simple project on the hot rod.  This one was completed in an evening.  Back in the fall at a local automotive swap meet, I purchase a rear view mirror.  Now it was time to fabricate a mount for it.

The rear view mirror was intended for a 1947-51 Chevy pickup truck.  This was a new aftermarket stainless steel item.  I felt this would work out perfectly on the hot rod and intended to mount it on the top of the dash rail of the 1929 Ford roadster.  For this I used a small one inch thick aluminum bar.   Using a bit of masking tape on the face of the bar, a simple shape was created for the rear view mirror mounting bracket.  For layout work on the fly, I find the masking tape works well.  Using a pencil the pattern can be easily adjusted till the final pattern is created.     Once I was satisfied with the pattern, the shape was rough cut on the metal band saw.  To clean up the cut edges, I used a drum sander mounted in the drill press.  I started sanding with a course grit drum and finished with a very fine grit sanding drum.  The sanding drums that I used are the same ones woodworkers would use and are available at most hardware stores.  I purchased a set of these with several different diameters and grits many years ago for around $10 for a woodworking project that I was working on at the time.

I drilled and tapped two ¼” x 20 holes that would mount to the top of the 1929 Ford roadster dash rail.  One more hole was drill and tapped for the rear view mirror to screw into.  A small collar was turned on the metal lathe using ¾” aluminum round shaft.  This small collar was used to act as a small spacer to hide the threads on the mounting shaft of the rear view mirror.

To protect the paint on the dash rail, I bit of gasket material was cut to the same shape as the bottom of the newly made bracket.  To finish this off, a bit of time was spent polishing the aluminum bracket.  This project only cost $24 for the stainless steel mirror, some scrap aluminum left over from some engine brackets I previously fabricated and an evening of my time.