Hot Rods A 40 Ford Coupe for Uncle Mike Build Thread

olsscrounger ,it is good to know that 40 fans like you are following this thread with interest. Feel free to chime in any time if you have some wisdom you would like to share.

Thanks green 73, I hope some of this stuff is helpful to you as you dig into your 40 project. I have foll0wed many build threads on this site and have learned a lot. Don't be afraid to ask questions as I am sure I am leaving a lot of little details out. I do not claim to be an expert on any of this stuff but I am gaining experience as I go and quite willing to share those things that I do know..

 

Crankcase ventilation is today's subject. I wanted to change the ventilation system from the stock passive or draft tube style to a more modern PCV system.

This is a kind of oversimplified drawing of the stock system used on the 59 series engines. Air was sucked into the engine at the air breather at the back of the engine on the same pedestal the fuel pump was attached to. The crankcase blow by gases would then find there way out of the the cam gallery through a steel tube near the the front right corner of the block and pass through a cavity in the block and finally out to atmosphere through a hole in the oil pan.


I wanted to use the more modern system as shown in this Overhead V8 drawing.



So I modified my flathead's system by putting a plug in the cam gallery draft tube and installing a PCV in the front of the intake manifold. I also plugged the hole in the oil pan.

I am using speedways four barrel intake manifold. I have had this intake for 4 years and have not seen one on a driven flathead yet..... I hope the darn thing works OK.I know it is not traditional but Uncle Mike wanted a four barrel carberator and this one looked like a better choice than the Edelbrock or Offenhauser intakes. The intake is a beautiful 2 piece casting.

My main complaint about this manifold and possibly one of the reasons you don't see any of them is that they do not include the flanges needed for the openings at the front and rear of the intake for the breather and or PCV valve.I asked Speedway if they had any thing to fit the openings and they said no and after further questioning they said they did not have any plans to make any either. I mentioned that they had produced an incomplete product and that I didn't think most people would be willing to fabricate the flanges required to use the manifold. Well I guess it wasn't the tech guys problem.... I still don't see any flanges offered in their catalog.

I had to make both flanges.


I designed this part for the breather on the back.I cut it out 1/2" aluminum scrap and then attached it to the face plate on my old lathe for some machining.
A trial fit of the breather.


The finished part. This breather provides the intake air for crankcase. I can't resist polishing aluminum.....

This is the lifter valley intake for the draft tube that vents the crankcase. You can see the plug press fit into the top of the tube. I left the whole pipe in there so oil would not run out of the crankcase into the cavity that leads to the outlet on the oil pan flange.


I machined the plug out of 1/2 aluminum to a pressed fit




A little ultra black silicone was applied to ensure a seal.

This is the draft tube outlet in the oil pan. I made a steel plug for it too so moisture wont sneak up into the block. Probably was an unnecessary step.

Tacked.


Finished .

Up front I had to make another plate to hold the PCV valve I used an aluminum type valve cover grommet to receive the PCV Valve.

The PCV valve is plumbed to a vacuum source in the carburetor adapter plate on the intake manifold.

So that's the crank case evacuation system. Once again let me say the engine has not been run yet so I don't know how well this system will work. I think it should work OK on this little engine if it works on the larger overhead engines of the 60's and 70's. I will be sure to post the results once I get the engine running.

 

You sir, are an artist!

 

I found these nice illustrations yesterday while looking for illustrations for my last post on crankcase ventilation. I thought I would post them as an addendum to my full flow oil filter post.

This one shows the stock flathead filtering system. It filters less than 100 % of the oil but many flathead guys think that it filters enough of the oil to make it worth while.

This is much easier system to install than the one I used.The only block modifications is the tapping required for the so called grub screw as labeled in this illustration and properly locating , drilling and tapping for the hole for the return line. Getting that return line hole thing lined up looked like it would be a little tricky. Over all though this would be a much less expensive modification that would accomplish most of the things accomplished by the system I installed.

This last photo is from an article in Street Rodder magazine. It shows shows the system I installed. So that's it. I just thought the illustrations showed the different systems better than what I had presented earlier and thought I should offer them up for those that might be trying to decide which way to go on a flathead oil pump and filter system.

 

Dear Gawd' man !! Man crush, man crush, man crush ! This is turning into one bad ass read !!!!!!!!!!! You my friend, are doing "most excellent" work ! I love this build. It's beautiful music to the eyes...... THANK YOU so MUCH for sharing all of this. It's one thing to be awesome, but to easily portray same said awesome-ness to the world in an easy to follow manner ?? NICE ! Very nice !

No need for an answer.....just carry on as you do, please ! Love it

 

Finn and Kid Thank you for your comments. Really nothing new here just presented differently than some others have done before.

 

WATER PUMP MODIFICATIONS:
Uncle Mike wanted to run the 8BA style MSD electronic distributor on this engine instead of the crab style used on the 59 type engines. I initially installed the early 59 style pumps on the engine but soon discovered that there would not be enough clearance for the fan belt.

Not the best picture but you can see that belt would have interfered with the distributor.
So I ordered a new set of 8BA truck water pumps from Bob Drake. The first thing I noticed is that 8BA have and extra water outlet to the block that the 59 style pumps do not.
You can barely see the drill punch pointing to the extra water outlet extending past the block.

So the decision was made to plug the extra port. The plan is to drill out to tap size and put a pipe plug in the hole.




I think this pipe plug size was 3/8"


I use this stuff on most pipe joints and especially any time fuel or oil are involved.
Holding one of these pumps in a vice can be problematic I finally used this idea of inserting a bolt through one of the holes and clamping the bolt in the vice. You would not want to apply too much torque to this arrangement because you could brake the cast flange off.




The plug needs to be filed of flush with the pump sealing face.

This pump gets the pulleys out where they need to be for the alternator. As usual each change you make seems to cause another part to need a modification. You can see a an aluminum pulley to the right in this picture. I had buy that pulley to work with theses water pumps. This modification also changed the alignment requirements of my alternator bracket. I will cover that modification next.
Some times I think I should have just found an 8BA engine to build for this car.......
Note: Well it looks like I got a picture out of order here.... editing is difficult after you make a post on here as they do not let yo see the photos in edit mode and the pictures are assigned different numbers. Oh well I tried.

 

ALTERNATOR MODIFICATIONS:
As I said in the last post each little modification seems to lead to another modification. I had purchased an alternator bracket that would work with the early 59 style water pumps and ended up changing them out to the 8BA pumps which stick out further to clear the distributor. Before buying a different bracket I accessed the situation and decided I could make this one work with a little modification to the bracket and the alternator.


The areas marked in yellow had to be cut out to get clearance for the alternators body.

If you ca avoid the flash and look where the arrows are pointing you can see how the alternators body now fits inside the bracket.

The area marked by the arrow was cut out with a sawsall and filed smooth. This was an alternator I had taken off of one of my SBC's. It was a low AMP output unit and so was deemed expendable for this experiment.This is one of those times a mill would have come in handy.

Just another view but it does show how the alternator is now extended out to match the water pump pulleys.

On the passenger side I was able just use a spacer available from the local hardware store. Oh and I also had to buy a larger width pulley for this application. I believe I bought that from Speedway.

 

Carburetor Stuff:
While we are looking at engine stuff I might as well cover the linkage and fuel line fabrication.

The intake is a Speedway item part #910-15962. The carburetor is a 390 CFM Holley 4 barrel #425-8007. I decided to fabricate the throttle adapter gizmo from 1/8" aluminum. I made a cardboard template first . It only took two tries. I kind of copied the steel Lokar version used on most SBC applications.The fuel line is aluminum tube. I will put clamps on during final assembly.

I tried to keep the fuel line well supported and as far away from the blocks heat sources as possible. I will be running an electric fuel pump so hopefully vapor lock will not be a major problem. The fuel filter was a Summit item I think. It can be taken apart and cleaned. I will be installing a new stainless steel tank in the car so hopefully I won't have to deal with a lot of junk in the gas. I used 3/16" aluminum plate to fabricate the fuel line support bracket on the manifold.
Just another view.

And another view of the bracket. I have tried the coolant hoses on a few times and I think the linkage will clear the hoses but I will not really know until I get the engine in the car and try to hook the hoses up to the radiator.

 

That looks SWEET!

 

Thanks biggeorge ! I hope works well. I am getting kind of anxious to hear it run.

 

While researching for my next post I ran across these drawings for two of the brackets I had made.
The firs tone is for the oil filter bracket.

The second bracket is for the throttle linkage bracket.

 

Nice sanitary work.

 

As usual when I get ready to do a project on this car I consider what will make the project easier on my aging body. I knew I was going to spend a lot of time cleaning and rebuilding the rear end for this car. I also knew that it was heavy and awkward. I really prefer to do things standing up so I drew up this design.


The idea is that it put the rear end right at a comfortable work height for me. It also allows me to move the rear end in roughly 90 degree increments so that I can clean, repair and paint it without worrying about the thing falling on the floor. It also allows me to roll it around the shop for work and storage.

I started with the turret parts.The round plate was welded to the upright tube and a center pivot bolt runs through the tube and is used as an axle for the second plate that rotates as needed to orientate the rear end at the desired position.

I cut the basic shape of the base plate with a sawsall and then finished it off on the lathe.

I used the round baseplate to trace the basic shape of the turrret plate and used the flap wheel and belt sander to finish the shape. Then I clamped the plate in the vice heated it up with the torch.

The old dead blow hammer worked well for getting the 90 degree angle I wanted.


To make this stand collapsible for storage I needed to come up with a way to break it down into smaller pieces.I decided to weld a steel plate in the ends of the diagonal cross bar and thread it for a bolt that passes through the vertical tubes.



All it needs now is some paint.


I rigged the rear end with a continuous sling and picked it with a chain fall. This thing worked great for the rebuild and storage as you will see during the rear end rebuild.
A few months later my neighbor John wanted to narrow a few rear ends. He came over with this quick and easy to build stand.

I like it so well I asked him if I could use it when I weld some spring pads on my rear end this month. John's stand does every thing mine does except roll around the shop... It also proved easy to set up the rear end at any angle needed for welding.Just when you thing you have designed and built something really cool some guy has to come along and say what did you go to all that trouble for??

 

I did mine setting on jack stands. Your idea would be much better on my old body.

 

Thank you leadsled! Yes bigeorge we have to take care of these old bodies so we can keep playing out in the shop

When we decided to use the 49 Mercury over drive transmission in the coupe we also decided to install a 9 inch Ford rear end. One of my longtime friends heard me talking about looking for one at one of the weekly gatherings and offered to sell me a 9 inch he had been storing for 20 years. He had decided he was never going to use it and offered to sell it to me at a reasonable price.

The rear end is out of a 59 Ford wagon. The ratio is 3.89 and it is an open differential. According to my research it is the perfect rear end width for a 40 at 57.25".


As usual the rear end was covered with the usual rust, grease , oil and hard packed dirt combination and took several hours to clean. Not wanting to walk around in greasy droppings I built this simple framework and stretched this plastic sheet under the axle.

I must have scrapped 10 pounds of muck off of this thing.

You can see that the stand worked real well for keeping the axle at a comfortable height and allowed me to easily rotate the axle to work on all sides.

The brake drums were not easy to get off and the hardware was a little crusty.

Once the housing was clean I pulled the axles and then used the chain fall to lift the third member out.I used a variety of tools to clean the inside of the housing out. A broom stick with solvent soaked rags seemed to work best.
The ring and pinion were in very good condition and all measurements checked out OK. I did replace the pinion shaft seal with a national seal #7044NA seal. I had a local machine shop replace the axle bearings. The axle shafts were a little worn at the seal location but when I asked the local parts house about repair sleeves they couldn't find any. I think they will be OK though.

I tried painting the housing with Por 15 but was very dissatisfied with the runny results. I had heard a lot of good things about Por 15 but I was only impressed with how hard it was to sand back down to an acceptable surface to refinish with Spray bomb engine paint.
It took many hours to sand that Por 15 off. If you are going to use this stuff on your frame you better not be planning on making any changes that will require grinding the surface down to bare metal....

Finally looks good in semi gloss black.

Another of my gear head neighbors dropped in on brake assembly day and made the brake job look easy. Permatex Ultra blue was used on the third member gaskest and the backing plate and axle bearing gaskets. The backing plates and all of the brake hardware were bead blasted before painting.


New brake cylinders NAPA# 370193 and 370192 were installed along with new brake shoes NAPA #TS-10A and new shoe hold down kit NAPA #80401 were also installed.


I bead blasted the drums and had the local machine shop turn them to a usable finish.

So there it is all clean and rebuilt. I have been rolling it around the shop for a year or two now, usually covered in plastic to keep it clean. Recently I was less than pleased to find out I have to move the spring pads in 5/16" per side to fit my parallel leaf spring kit. My friendly tech guy had told me that I would not have to do that ( but the kit instructions say I do) or I would have taken care of that when I was restoring this piece. Oh well, that's how it goes in this hobby sometimes.... no make that most of the time.

 

Mike the painter came by today with some progress photos.I will also add some taken earlier this year.

The rear fenders were painted together and we have left them this way because they are easier to move and store this way.

I took this picture of the doors in guide coat a few weeks ago.

Well not a real good picture but the doors are done.

Smooth.

The firewall in primer. It will be Wimbledon white .
Quarter panel in guide coat.Ignore the date Mike has never set the date on his camera.


It is soooo nice to see this trunk area this far along .

The plan is to undercoat the bottom of the car and the fenderwells and then cover the undercoat with clear to make it easier to clean. The fenders have already been done this way.

 

Those painted parts are beautiful and nice job on that rear-end as well. Great advice on the POR-15.

 

Thanks lothiandon1940 it's nice to know you are checking in this thread. It's really nice to see the once filthy rusty parts turn into better than new condition. Mike the painter is doing a really nice job on the body. Now if I can just put it all together without scratching and denting it too much.....

 

Very nice work

 

Thanks Chris! I hope to have it up and running for the East West run in 2015.

 

great job--am enjoying your progress. We had a 40 frame that was done by someone in POR 15. Sandblasted on it forever to get that stuff off !!

 

Thanks olscrounger, happy you are along for the ride. I will probably be trying to grind that por15 off of the rear end around the spring mounting pads in the next couple of weeks. I am sure I will be cussing it then.

 

Great thread !! Andy

 

I am happy you like the thread Andy!
Well I didn't work on the coupe much this week as we have been doing some work on my Buddy Don's 37 Chevrolet. I did sneak in a little project though. I keep seeing this third brake light every time I am putting new parts on the storage shelves for the coupe project. The billetness of the light bothers me. Although I know it is good to have a third brake light I have struggled to find one I wanted to use in the car. So I took this thing out of it's bubble pack and had my way with it. It will eventually be painted to match the interior and hopefully blend in well with the garnish molding.

Too Square and shiny


Roughed it out with a course file.



80 grit sanding block


The face was a little harder to do because of the lens.

I will put it away for now and then sand and paint it once I finally make up my mind on a color combination for the interior. BTW I am leaning towards a traditional black and white interior.

Yesterday Don and I dismantled the rotisserie and hauled it out to Mike the painters place so he could roll the coupe to his desire while finishing the paint job on the coupe. I don't know how people (old people) do this stuff without one of these things.
The car barely fits into the booth on the rotisserie but it fits and Mike is happy!

It was nice to see that firewall all smooth and painted. It is hard to believe it once had over 100 holes in it
I also took a little bit better picture of the doors. I have also been working a little on the clutch and brake peddle assembly. I will file a post on that subject when I get a little further along on the project.

 

Well I am pretty much recovered from my surgery and have been busy for several weeks helping my Buddy Don do several projects on his 37 Chevrolet Sedan (in my shop) We rewired it, Installed cruise control, fabricated an under dash panel, installed an electric cowl vent and rebuilt the front seat. As usual several small sub projects were required to accomplish this but it came out well. Don still has several things to do to finish up but will be able to do that at home.

I am delighted to get back on the coupe project. I have downloaded some pictures that cover the frame modifications that we have started on the coupes frame. Most were done two months ago but I like to show the individual projects in a group so I have waited to start writing about the frame until we were back on the project.

The frame was not in too bad of shape. The left front had been straightened previously. They did a pretty good job but there was one tear that I will show you later on that we repaired. We decided to do some initial work before hauling the frame off to the sand blaster.
We welded two 1 1/2" square tube bars one on each side of the rear cross member to make sure the frame didn't flex too much when we removed the rear cross member.
We took the top off of the X member so that we could clean the years of grease and grit out so that the sand blaster could get the area cleaner. My experience is that grease is hard to blast away with the sand blaster.
Once the rear cross member and the top of the X member box was removed and considerable tome was spent scraping the grease off of the transmission area we took the frame off of the rotisserie and suspended it from two pick points and drove the trailer under it for transport to the blaster.
The blaster uses a product called clean blast. It is a black slag product that really cuts a deep kurf into the metal. I don't recommend it for bodies but it works great on frames. He had the frame cleaned within two hours. You can see the rear brace is pretty bent in this picture. I decided to replace it with some 2" x 1 1/2" x1/8" rectangular tube. This tube is about 1/8" shorter that the original member so I had to add a 1/8" shim on each end to make up the difference.

More rivets..... They really are not all that hard to remove. I grind the top of the rivet flat with a 4 inch flap wheel then center punch and drill it a 1/8" or 3/16" hole part way through the body of the rivet leaving enough rivet to allow a pin punch to be used to hammer the rivet out of the hole.
Made this cross member with ears that go forward far enough to catch both the bumper brace bolt holes. Of course I had to make access holes for the bumper brace on the rear of the car. I will make sheet metal cover plates for these access areas so they do not collect dirt. I built this cross member this way so that I could attach a trailer hitch to it in the future.


My welds seldom come out this good so I had to take a picture. This was the last project we did before storing the frame.
So this is how the frame was stored for the last two months.The wheel dollies allowed it to be rolled around as needed to make room for other work.
Today we finished up Don's project and immediately got the frame out and set it up on some steel horses and leveled it.

We stripped the engine down and made a cover for the valve area. While Don was building a lifting plate I installed the turbo 350 transmission mount on the trans and bolted the trans up to the engine. We hope to start the frame modifications to install the overdrive transmission tomorrow.

 

Today we started fitting fitting the transmission and engine to the frame.

Since i am going to run the stock wish bone I wanted to retain the socket so we cut just above it. We will put gussets back in the lower corners of the front of the X member later.

We had to make cuts in the rails for the various things that stick out of the transmission. Top left is a cut for the governor. Just to the right and in front of the X member front plate the small relief is for the electric switch. On the bottom rail on the right side of the picture is a relief for the solenoid. W e will reinforce the frame in these areas before we are done.
The transmission mount turned out to mount directly above the wishbone socket so we had to move it back into the box a ways.The floor of the box had a slope to it so we cut this triangle shaped piece and hammered it down until it was flat. then a piece of 1/4" steel plate was welded in to fill the gap and give us a flat place to put the transmission mount.

The mount is an Energy Suspension polyurethane mount for GM automatics like the Turbo 350 and 200 4R (part number 3.1108G).

Don fabricated this 1/4" steel plate to extend the trans mount rearward a few inches.

So there it is, fits better than we expected. There is still a lot of finish work to do. We intend to tie the top of the X member box together with some sort of steel bridging. There appears to be plenty of room for the drive shaft at the rear of the box without altering it. The headers fit nicely within the rails. I will have to try the steering box in soon and confirm that there is room for that.

 

Wow,great build.
I am amazed by the metal working skills of the members here.
lots of ingenuity and creativity on your build as well as the shop aids you have fabricated.
Thanks for sharing.

 

Thanks for the compliments Candfury! It's great to be back to working on coupe again.

 

Happy New Year all you HAMBERS!
Today we worked on the X Member and Trans mount stuff again and made some good progress.

finish the weld and marked the holes for the trans mount.

Decoded we had room to add back some of the X box face we had cut off so we cut this piece out of 1/8" plate.

Don drilled some holes for plug welds.

Welded the plate in and then added some triangular shaped pieces over the wish bone ball socket to strengthen it a little.

Decided to refill all of the rivet holes with plug welds and welded up the sawsall cuts I had made in the rear panel of the X member while removing the top plate.

I cut this piece of 1"x 1" x1/8" square tube and will be welding it to the outside of the X member where we had to make a rather large relief in the the frame for the OD transmission's governor. Will weld it in next year

Just another view. Does anyone have an opinion on this before I weld it on? It also looks like we may have to make a bubble in the floor for the governor. If not it will be close.....