Thought I'd post up a few pics of my current project. last January I picked up a real nice "A" frame and tudor body from 37Gasser and brought it back from Detroit on an overnight run. The frame was real nice but the tudor body needed some work. I decided to use the front section, which was real nice and ditch the rear half. The doors had been welded solid and there were some pieces were missing from the rear along with the usual rust. To get the chassis in order I swept Zed front and rear, hanging a '48 Merc banjo along with a homemade K member and a cobbled together 48 case with late gears and a double detant tower. I hooked this to a '60 283 with an ancient adapter from PovertyFlats. Some chassis pics...
As you can see the frame was made right with the world and boxed up nicely. On to the body. As the front was usable but the rear needed help I decided to build a sporty out of it along with a lift off roof like HomemadeHardtop57's. I cleaned up and repaired the cowl and doors and channeled the whole thing over the Zed rails using pan bent box sections, (no tubing), to keep the car as low as possible. For something different I elected to use a '27 style rear instead of the A bone thing. This was fabbed out of 18ga. As my skills aren't what they should be I made it in sections and hammer welded it together. I them wiped the whole thing with a very fine coat of poly to take any minor defects out. This is not a bondo bucket bt any means, but I know my metal finishing limitations.
The beads on the rear are made of 10ga. I cut to .375 wide and dressed with a file to the correct profile and then plug welded them in place. Talk about primitive! The next was to fab a roof. In this instance I wanted to try a wood framed roof so I went to work and bandsawed out a bunch of Maple bents and epoxyed and carriage bolted the whole mess together.
This whole mess was covered with .032 Aluminum rolled to fit and epoxyed in place. I held it with rivets until the epoxy dried.
While I had the top open I put a set of cable drive wipers in with the tube being the dark thing you see running through the top bents. This will give me decent wipers on the coupe, (a rarety in these parts!). The motor is located behind the drivers seat and should be relativly quiet mounted on the vibration insulators I used. After this work I covered the top in 5/16" closed cell foam and it will be wrapped in black Hartz cloth with snaps along the bottom like a regular rag top. This is a shot of the profile...
I have fabbed a set of swing pedals copied off Homemadehardtops origional set and using offset cranks on them I am able to have the pedals function through a bellcrank to actuate the master cylinder and the mechanical clutch under the floor. I just don't like junk on the firewall and they work suer smooth. Along with a Mopar box cowl steer. I burned a newpittman arm out of .75 plate and ground away everything that didn't look right. This is hooked to an origional '37 banjo wheel. I made a steering shaft out of .75 bar from Speedway and had the taper and key cut to fit the early Ford wheel. That's a '32 dash with a reworked A dash rail.
A few shots of it as it sets now... [ IMG]http://i861.photobucket.com/albums/ab179/larrykoz1/100_0382.jpg[/IMG] I'll update with progress. Thanks for looking and I'm always open to suggestions, comments, and downright brutal criticisum.
Larry ( Koz) is one of the best chassis guys I know around my way. He's very modest and doesn't post too much pics of the stuff he does..but alot of guys around here are running around on frames done by him. I'm glad he started this thread. He and I spent many nights in his shop this past year hammering away on the top of my sport coupe. He's a hell of a guy and a great rod builder. This was a really rough model a sedan that he started with. It's amazing what it's become. You can't really see how nice the framework is with the body on..maybe he'll post up some pics when he yanks it off
Thanks for the kind words guys! Most of the parts including all the drivetrain and body stuff are all HAMB finds. I'll keep this thread updated as I move along. I was really hoping for a Fall Wildwood coming out this year but that didn't happen. Now I'm shooting for the Violators spring run. I need to stay moving!
Koz......is this going to be alled the *Clark-Laboranti Special*???? Best of both worlds.......and really nice work.... ...but, what's *plug welding? CB
Thanks again for the encouragement. Cuzinbrucie, plug welding is when you drill a hole in something and then weld through the hole to make a blind weld. Common on structural items but very useful; when you want to weld something and not see the weld. If your up this way stop in and I'll show yo a trick my Dad taught me years ago on how to make them virtually invisible, (and doesn't involve a grinder!). The welds on the strips were finished with a plain mill file, actually pretty easily. I could have bought the right T strips from Macs but they are about $250.00 and the homemade ones cost $0. I'm hoping to have the body off later this week for final finish and blow the chassis apart for paint and final assembly. I'll post some pics of the brake clutch detail along with the chassis sweeps then.
A couple of people have asked me about the Mopar box as the bottom bolt flange is gone. What I did was strip out the box and have the snout machined as a light slip fit into a piece of 2 1/2" .250 wall DOM tubing. I then drilled the DOM and tapped a reciever into the snout for a set bolt to lock the box to the tube. This way the box will not move in the sleeve. The top bolt on the box remains as is. This sleeve is welded to the square tube structure visible under the dash which also holds the pedal assembly. The bottom of the tube structure is bolted to the frame in the front and the stock Model A body hangers, (the ones with the two holes), which are riveted to the frame. Very sturdy and the added 1 1/4" of clearance above my pedals is amazing.
Great looking car, I like sport coupes. You gonna fix all those holes in the deck lid? Too lazy to count how many louvers did you punch? you gonna punch the visor and hood top to match? Uh are you putting a hood top on it?
I was dressing out the blocking primer on the trunk I often considered closing them up, (not really). No hood on this one. I've picked up a set of chrome early Olds valve covers from Studematt on here and I'll be fabbing rings to put them on the Chevy. Too much work to hide! Also I'm reworking the top on the Offy intake to accept the 2x2 setup as opposed to one of those adapters. If I can do it good enough it will look very similar to a mid fifties intake. The car should look like about 1655 or so, a little earlier than a lot of my stuff.
Normally I would stick my tongue out at the olds rocker covers like this but I do think with the rework of the offy it will be a nice imposter and I am a firm believer that all hot rods are imposters. Keep hammering away it will be done before you know it then you'll look around and say "Now what do I do?"
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