You guys did a excellent job scratch building the rear plywood floor & seat back without patterns. HRP
With some of the things youse guys do with wood, I'm sure fitting a little flat plywood is a stroll in the park. Good job nonetheless.
It looks like Chuck has been decomputerized recently so here is this weeks update: Since the top has been chopped a bit we also have to alter the interior window frames and trim to fit. Steve and Chuck worked on this. Here you can see that one is slightly shorter than the other side. In this shot the altered frame is on top of the unaltered one The interior trim for the rear side windows also need the piece welded in like Chuck posted earlier to even out the area where the windows passed each other, Chuck worked on that while Steve cleaned up the front frame and I cut out panels for the insides of the doors. Slowly but surely we are getting there.
Just caught up with the last few pages. The metal work and wood work is outstanding! I've learned alot just in the last couple of hours, never even heard of rare earth magnets. Looking forward to more progress.
Right you are my friend! Hopefully,Chuck and his crack team will be posting some updates later on today! HRP
Yall are doing an awesome job on this thing. i dig the grill and skirts the chop looks great too. cant wait to see it with the wood on it.
We are trying to get the interior ready for upholstery so that Howie can be working on that while we go about painting the car. All the interior moldings need to be chopped, and this is a helluva lot of work. Not to mention we are short some of the necessary pieces. Steve fabricated these rear corner covers out of 20 gauge steel as the originals seem to be lost forever. The new rear wheel tubs necessitated re-making the side panels to go around these babies! Patterns were made and then transferred onto the new Masonite interior panels. This is a time consuming job, and Dana and Steve knocked it out . Here's one of the panels installed along with the rear corner in place. Lest you think I didn't do anything today, I spent the day welding filler strips into the sliding rear sidewindow moldings. This job sucks! There's eight of em to do. Upper, lower, inner ,outer ,left and right. Then the moldings have to be chopped as well. Nick didn't make it in today, but he's got ALL the wooden ash moldings formed for the entire car! THAT was a long process, but now the assembly of the wood can begin!
How well I remember fabricating the filler panels just to make the rear window slide,,it took forever and you had to fabricate them to except a one piece,,correct? HRP
There's a lot going on right now. As you recall the car has a minor chop. We are going to keep the vent windows, so they also have to be reduced in height. The frame was fairly easy, but the stainless window surround had to be re-shaped. We don't know squat about stainless, but heating and bending seemed to make sense.We heated the stainless till it just began to turn red and then applied pressure. It Worked! Here's the lower bend being re-shaped When we were done the stainless glass channel was a perfect fit in the chopped opening. Nick began the process of fitting the formed ash rails to the tailgate. This seemed like a good place to start, as the tailgate could be laid out on a bench for working on. The precision necessary for this process boggled me. Needless to say I don't have anywhere near the patience this job requires. Nick often spent nearly an hour lining up a single cut! This isn't just a measure and chop job. Every joint is a compound miter cut in a setup on the bandsaw. By the end of the day the tailgate was about halfway complete..... AND GORGEOUS! Steve meanwhile was making new door glass channel for replacing the old rusted pieces. All in all this was a very good day! Dana and I re-worked some of the door garnish for a more precise fit... This project is kinda getting exciting again!
You get words of encouragement from here! Y'all are really a great team. Your talents and ambition appear limitless. Great job. I'm really looking forward to progress with fitting the wood, and finally paint. Carry on mens!
Here's a photo Nick sent over from his shop of all the wooden trim laid out on the floor. You can really see the bent shapes of some of these pieces in this photo. Every single piece has an arc of some sort going on.
Now I can have a visual image of the wood on the tailgate...Nicks attention to detail boggles my mind. Beautiful job on the stainless,impossible to see it has been modified. It is here you need to remind the latecomers to this that Ford Never built a 1952-54 Ranch Wagon Woodie!,,even the 4 door wagon had simulated wood. HRP
Nick came over and got some more woodwork done today, and since there's been a lot of interest in the "woodie" portion of this project I thought I'd do a midweek post. The rails are joined by a series of tenons. Here you can see the process. There's no sense doing tenons if the pieces are not a clean fit. Tenons don't fill gaps or close a joint. If the joint isn't a good fit there's no sense in proceeding. Nick had everything fitting perfectly. Here's another view. Once everything is assembled the entire piece is rigid.Here you can see that the piece conforms perfectly to the shape of the tailgate. We set a couple pieces of mahogany veneer on the tail gate behind the wooden rails so you can get an Idea of what this will look like. Remember, you cant "force" any of this... Its gotta be a great fit from the outset. There's a lot of shaping and routing still to happen here, but hopefully you get the idea.
That is some great work. Lots of patience and well worth the effort. Looking forward to the end result. Don't get me wrong, I love the progress pics also. Ryan.
Chaz, Is Nick using a Festool system to do the floating tenons? That is a sweet way of making tight, strong joints.
The Jalopy Journal
