1929 Model A Ford Roadster Body Modifications – Part 1
Well the last few weeks have produced a considerable amount of progress on the 1929 Ford Hot Rod. I try to get in the shop every evening now. Weekends are hit and miss, depending on what else is required of me. Last weekend was our Thanksgiving Holiday. Both of my daughters and their friends made it over for the day and the meal on Sunday. My wife also invited a co-worker over who was alone for the weekend. I prepared the turkey and peeled a bag of potatoes. Jan did the vegetables, rolls, and made up an apple and pumpkin pie. What a feast! Monday, we drove my youngest daughter back to her apartment in Waterloo with a load of groceries. Both of my daughters are in different stages of their university education and require a considerable amount of help. Again, these are good hot rod building distractions that cannot be ignored for a pleasant family life. So to say the least, there were a few very good hot rod building distractions this weekend preventing me from working on the 1929 Ford Hot Rod.
The build on the 1929 Ford Hot Rod is actually much further along then what is shown in this web site. Actually I just might be able to take the 1929 Ford hot rod for a test drive in the lane beside my home in the next few weeks. Along with building the hot rod I am also creating video for various aspects of this build. This is something that I did not think of originally, especially when I bought the video camera for my wife’s birthday a few years ago.
It would be nice to have a few teams of helpers to move things along a bit quicker. Wouldn’t it be great if I had one team of workers to produce the material for the web and another team of workers to work and build the 1929 Ford hot rod? Oh well, I am a one man show with a great day job, an amazing family and numerous commitments, so everything will happen in due course. My main intention of creating this web site is to illustrate to the reader that this can be an inexpensive hobby with a bit of imagination. Not only that, anybody can build a good looking and well built hot rod. I find that that true craft of building things is slowly being lost by a large part of the population. Enough of that for now and lets get back to building the 1929 Ford Hot Rod.
The chassis / frame for the hot rod using the C4 Corvette suspension components is now complete and ready for mounting the body on to it. During the design of the hot rod chassis / frame the body was on and off the chassis several times. By narrowing the rear width of the custom hot rod chassis / frame from the stock frame dimension, several body modifications to the Brookville Roadsters Model A Ford body were required. To start off, I removed all of the metal floor pans. The Brookville Roadsters body I acquired through an interesting chain of events was set up for a rear rumble seat. With the four inch rise in the rear of the C4 Corvette hot rod chassis / frame along with the width of the chassis / frame being narrowed, all of the metal for the rumble seat was also removed carefully from the Brookville Roadsters Model A Ford body. Using a drill with a small drill bit, all spot welds holding the floor pans and rumble seat metal was removed without any damage. All of the removed parts were advertised in the Old Autos newspaper a Canadian publication devoted to car enthusiasts http://www.oldautos.ca/ . All of the parts sold almost instantly. A fellow drove a few hundred miles to my place just so he could restore an original vintage vehicle he was working on.
1929 Ford Roadster floor pans removed - all floor pans needed to be removed from the Brookville Roadster Model A body.
1929 Ford Roadster rear floor and rumble seat metal removed from the Brookville Roadster Model A body. This was necessary do the to custom frame design. Notice how the rear frame rails will go in between the body frame rails.
- 1929 Ford Roadster rear floor cross member removed and body rail notched so the the Brookville Roadster Model A body will fit onto the custom frame using C4 Corvette suspension.
- 1929 Ford Roadster rear floor cross member removed and the body frame rail cleaned up in perparation to weld the floor crossmember to its new location. This was necessary to make room for the 4 inch rise in the rear of the frame.
My policy in the shop is not to keep anything that I am not currently using. My shop is full of shop equipment of every kind. It is also the home of the 1929 Ford hot rod and the 1987 Corvette convertible. I have noticed that many builders keep everything in storage with the thought that they may have a use for it at some later date. To often that some of these builders eventually die of old age and the estate is now responsible to liquidate everything. Many times, when this happens, the people selling everything do not know what they have, and out of frustration, send a good part of these rare vintage parts off the salvage yard as scrap steel. What a waste!! I personally seem to find just about anything for a good price whenever I need something which is also the reason I sell off un-needed items. Why be a keeper of stuff, let somebody else make use of it and enjoy it?
1929 Ford Roadster rear floor cross member in its new location just in front of the 4 inch rise on the rear of the chassis.
1929 Ford Roadster rear body rail notched to allow for the mounting brackets for the C4 Corvette rear end assembly. The rear of the body will be modified later on to compensate for this notch.
1929 Ford Roadster rear floor cross member welded in place.
1929 Ford Roadster rear floor cross member was only moved a few inches towards the front of the car.
With the floor pans and rumble seat metal removed from the Brookville Roadsters Model A Ford body, the body is starting to look sad. In order for the body to sit flat on the custom hot rod chassis, I needed to make a couple of modifications to the body. The first was to move the rear floor cross member a few inches forward. The second is to notch the body frame rails to allow space for the rear mounts of the C4 Corvette rear end. By notching the body rails, I felt that some of the strength in the body frame rails has been compromised. In another post I will show how I over came this problem and how the very most rear body mounts were created. With the body frame rail notched and the rear floor cross member moved forward, the body will sit flat on my new hot rod chassis / frame.
Having worked on many old cars, most of them rusted out, I must say that having a fresh steel body that is a reproduction of an original car is great. Brookville Roadsters steel bodies are well crafted from what I have noticed when removing the floor metal. I find that having the new steel body is a real time saver and in the long run can be cheaper. Remember, replacing old rusted out panels is very tine consuming and reproduction panels are not cheap. Having done it both ways now, I will continue to use reproduction vintage steel car bodies like the ones Brookville Roadsters http://brookvilleroadster.com/ sell for all of my hot rods.
