Projects 53 COOP (Studebaker) gets a major makeover

Coming up on 59 years, have pity on the poor woman....

 

After going nuts about my nuts, I decided to detour around the sanding of magic mud for a few days.

Instead, I am focused on the custom grill inserts I previously drew up in CAD. So first, I made the individual 1/4" stainless rods of pre-determined lengths. Using my buddy's lathe, I ground a tool to match the bullet-tip ends I envisioned, cut them to the calculated lengths, and banged the ends against a plastic surface on the floor so that they curved to fit the curvature of the grill surround:



Next I made the rods that get welded behind the grille bars and are positioned in three vertical stands with holes on 0.600" centers. I flattened the ends by heating and hammering to 1/8" thick at the ends:



Then I machined the stands out of 5/8" square stainless bar in the mill. Nice that the spacing of 0.600" holes was an even 3 turns of the cross travel on the mill! The side holes are drilled and tapped for 8-32 set screws, and the tops and bottoms are drilled and tapped for 1/4-28 NF mounting bolts or studs.



So I set it up on my bench with the grille surround registered in place and built what I thin came out pretty COOL (The location of the turn signal will be determined when I get it on the car. I'm going to paint all stuff in the background flat black. It ended up that I used five rows of bars, rather than six, so the upper bar lengths had to be modified via another trip to the lathe.

Whaddayathink?

 

Looks sharp

 

I like it, a lot!

 

Love this project and the grill design looks good. It could b the lighting or the angle but the top bar looks crooked.

To me it looks like the top bar is lower on the right. Also if you keep the blinker in the current position it might look good if you extended the top bar to fill that space up.

Just a suggestion. You do great work and I trust your eye.

 

I tried to keep the "border" distance about equal all around the perimeter, so I had to shorten the top bar to make that happen. Here's a pic of it without the turns signal:



I think it's an optical illusion caused by the very shallow slope along the top of the surround, kinda like what we used to call the three-pronged flux-sucking shunt



When I get the assembly mounted on the car, I will be able to play with the exact location and even tweak the bars somewhat. As to the location of the turn signal, I want to play with it by burying it back in the cavity with power to it, to see how its visibility works, and how it is least visible when not powered up.

 

Looks great.

 

I have progressed to the point of 90% completed the passenger side grille installation on the car. I painted the mounting "posts" and horizontal rods behind the polished face rods with flat black, which I will also do to the housings on the front clip (eventually).



I also fabricated brackets for the amber parking/turn lights to mount to the back face inside, about 4"-5" behind the rods:



I was concerned that the flashing lights might not be sufficiently visible, so I hooked up a battery and:





https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wjk07ArvuWY

Looks more visible than I thought it would. I'm satisfied.

 

Oh dang! That should look great at night

 

These flashers come from where? thank you!

 

United Pacific P.N. 36446

 

Thanks!

 

The LED posts might get deleted for being off-topic.

 

I know it's not traditional, but the lights in the good ole days were not so good. All my cars now have LED taillights (don't like the tradition of rear ender hits...) and both customs have LED turn signals.

 

I also run them for my dash lighting, it's nice to be able to see the speedometer at night !

 

Guys as long as your not posting in the “traditional” hot rod only forum and it fits within the “style” of tradition led and shit you can’t see is for the most part fine on the general forum and always has been as long as it’s just part of the build. Start a thread that’s only about led’s and you’ll probably get the push back

 

OK, so let's move on with this neat build.

 

I wondered to myself how visible they are from a POV not straight on, as in your image. Not so much after dark, where the light and flashing should be visible to someone at 90 degrees to you, but with the 4"+ deep recess, I wonder if it would be better to move them forward and allow them to be more visible with less shrouding, so to speak.

 

I like the chop look.........but think it should sit slightly lower in front to complement it. The Hemi should take care of that though.

 

I also was curious about the visibility, being that LEDs are very directional. That's why I was impressed that the stainless bars helped to disperse the light in other directions. Did you watch the video url I included in post #278?

Here it is again:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wjk07ArvuWY

I also think that the UP 36446, being embedded in plastic that also diffuses the light, helps to "magnify" the effective visible area.

 

It does sit a little lower in the front because of the heavyhemi! I may have to add lowering blocks in the back

 

Looks plenty bright in the video! I think the newer LED stuff isn’t so directional but I know that doesn’t apply across all products evenly.

 

OLD GUY MAKES DECISION:

No way am I going to complete the car for the Custom Car Revival in Indianapolis in June of 2024!

I realized that I no longer could burn the midnight oil in a panic to get done....and we all know that HASTE MAKES WASTE!!!

There's always next year....... Once that decision was made, I called Kevin Anderson and let him know.

I felt very relieved.

So now I will bring you up to date on where I have been focusing my efforts of the last weekend, the trunk latch.

Back when I bought the car, in 2010, I decked the trunk and adapted an aftermarket latch system. The looong cable and lever system that I bought was too short to reach the dash, so I ended up with the lever under the driver side seat. That was functional, but not very satisfying. So a buddy was building a custom '51 Chevy Fleetline for a customer and he was adapting a 1998-2002 Camaro electric latch to operate the trunk. I liked it, so I bought a couple of them on eBay and stored them for a rainy day. I guess last Saturday was rainy, so.....

This is the unit I bought. It has a built-in spring lever to pop the trunk open and a simple 3-bolt mounting:



So I removed my earlier adaptation sheet metal and modified the original sheet metal by removing two reinforcing beads to provide a flat mounting surface, into which I then mounted 1/4-20 nutserts:



Notice the little lever on the front, just to the right of the two mounting bolts. That is for a backup operator,,,just in case.

Using the rotating slot that the trunk key used to operate on the Camaro, I made a lever out of some of the extra 1/4" stainless grille rod, by filing the threaded area to fit thru the slot, where I held it in place with a nut that is locked with blue threadloc.





Then I ran a 1/16" stainless cable thru 1/4" tubing over to the gas filler door housing, where I have a stainless ring I can pull to open the trunk in an emergency....but don't tell anyone about its secret location I also added an extra return spring to pull the lever back to the closed position:





View attachment 5998686



The geometry of opening a trunk lid can be tricky to adapt to. The actual catch rod took quite a few tries to get right, but here's what i came up with (again using leftover 1/4" stainless grille rod:



You know that lever that pops the lid up? Well it isn't strong enough to lift the Studebaker trunk, so I added two door poppers in the corners, along with some sheet metal seats pop riveted into place, and now it pops just fine! I did modify the poppers to limit their travel to better fit the geometry of the lifting operation:





So now I have a nicely aligned and reliably unlatched trunk lid:



So that's how I spent my rainy day weekend.....

later.....

 

Good thinking, also like the option of popping it from the back! Should save you a couple laps to the front and bsck

 

I like that trunk latch idea! I’ve been looking off and on for a while for an idea for mine, I have a manual latch like that, might be a hood catch, don’t remember right now. Never could figure out the hoop, looks like yours works great.

 

I was actually thinking something similar on the 54 210 I'll be getting soon. That'd allow room to recess the plate into the trunk and keep from having to run cables or wires down the trunk lid

 

I did find that the 1/4" dia. rod was a little too wide for the hoop to allow some needed slop, so I ground a little off both sides of the engagement part. That allows the trunk alignment to be managed by the hinges and not put side strain on the rod.

 

Time for a new experiment......The Old Guy's Paint-a-car.

I have been thinking about this for a while and many of you probably will think I'm nuts. I want to do the body work and prep for final finish in sections and, for the most part, without spraying. I have been thinking about my own physical limitations (old guy) and my wife's issues with me painting in the attached garage (sensitive old gal). So when I started on the project I became intrigued with Eastwood's roll-on high-build 2K urethane primer system. I purchased a kit and it's been sitting there the whole time. Now it's time to test it out.

Remember how, after all the welding on the top chop, I rolled on a black DTM epoxy before applying the magic mud? Well, that epoxy was not made for roll-on application, but it worked....except for the "pimples" left by using short nap rollers. The mud was applied while the epoxy was not fully cured to get a good bond with the two catalyzed media, and that worked very well and the contrast with the black epoxy (with pimples) was almost like having a guide coat.

So now, I have found that the foam rollers that the Eastwood system uses (7" wide x 1/8" thick foam) are commercially available on the South American River Store....Amazon, so I bought a bunch. I know I'm going to use a lot of them in doing the prep in sections.

First section: starting at the taillights and working up to the doors plus the hood. A couple of days ago, I applied the epoxy with the foam rollers, including over some of the remaining light blue paint (again, part of the experiment so see if there is any reaction with the old paint). All was sanded with 80 grit.







So far, so good......

Then I rolled on light gray Feather Fill to the almost-fully-cured epoxy:





After curing overnight with the heat still on in the garage, I found that the Feather Fill had a hard shell finish that did not dry sand easily. Oops, maybe not a success.....

So I got out some wet/dry hook and loop 320 and tried it our wet on the trunk, after applying dry-type guide coat:



I moved outside because it was a nice 70-degree day. This was after only 15 minutes with the DA sander with 320. I consider it a success!

Then I did the hood with 220 and that went even quicker.



I consider the experiment a success except for the need to wet sand the Feather Fill. I theorize that the spraying of Feather Fill probably goes on in thinner applications and somehow that affects the sandability. But I can live with that limitation.

So today, I will wet sand the rear fender on the passenger side and get ready for the Eastwood roll-on 2K urethane primer...... which I hope will allow me to dry block sand. But until then, Roll on, good buddy, roll on.

See ya.....

 

Cool! I’ll stay tuned for this experiment

 

So today I cleaned up under the lift and prepared to wet sand the rear fender, including a makeshift trough to guide the water out of the garage. But is wasn't needed, as the extra 2 days allowed the Feather Fill to fully cure. It is still a hard surface for a not-so-easy sanding task, but I was able to dry sand it.