Ford know about this? You guys are insane to take on something like that. very cool. I am very impressed with your work. You put a whole new meaning to the phrase " labor of love".. keep the pics comin..
gday doc, yes the doors are as per normal but 75mm longer. i really wanted to do the back section exactly as per original but our bead roller doesnt have a long enough throat to do the middle vertical swages. as you can see in the pic i had to compromise and put 2 horizontal swages in the middle, but all the other swages are right. out of interest what do old tin charge for the back section? when i do the side pieces will post some more pics craig
we have a ewheel, good welder, bead roller, small sheet bender and lots of clamps. as for hammers we have been experimenting with all different sorts, even wooden ones. simple hammerforms can be made from wood. start small, say a 32 style dash, cut out 2 pieces of 20mm plywood the size of the dash, cut your steel 20mm bigger all the way around, clamp together really well with as many clamps as you have and then start hammering. slowly work you way around the hammerform till the 20mm overhang is flat along the edge of the ply. give it a go, you got nothing to loose, and you probably have enough tools right now craig
that is so freakin cool!!! super nice work. VERY impressive. my little brother and i did a wooden hammerform to build him a new upper firewall piece for his 28 RPU. someone had torched the hell out of the original. we did'nt roll any beads in it cause we don't have a roller. it is fun to hammer a part out of a flat piece of metal. even simple parts are very rewarding to make. keep it up and keep us posted!!
Hey Craig, What steel are you using to hammerform those panels from, drawing quality? AK? Or jus 1010? I'm gonna try building roadster quarters, but I'll have to build a larger, tougher swaging machine, as my p.o.s. Chinese one wouldn't handle 19 gage well. Any experance using an E-Wheel as a swaging machine? I beleve the old Frost and Edwards mac- hines came with a handle and shaft for this purpose. The anvils wouldn't be to tough to make. Swankey Devils C.C.
most of the cowl pieces were done from 1mm galvanised, but the doors back we used 1mm cold rolled, a lot easier to work never used the english wheel for swaging, our swager has a throat of about 400mm so that is the limit that we can get a swage line into a panel, hence the 2 horizontal lines in the rpu back panel craig craig
started on the rear cab side pieces today. mark out all your folds onto the piece of steel first, somne have to be marked on the other side as you have to fold both ways to make the swage line around the top and the botttom
our bender is a pretty old one that has a removable blade. we have made a spare blade that instead of a sharp 90 degree V, has a piece of 8mm rod welded to it. this gives a softer bend
go through and do all the bends to form the swage lines, then you can ben up the edges to give the panel the flanges
once you have the edge flanges done we used the metal shrinker on these flanges to gently curve the panel to the shape of the door edge. you dont need to do much to get the required shape
here you can see the difference between a normal door and our longer one. 28-29 doors are 10mm higher at the rear of the door and they are also not square, one diagonal is longer than the other
this is john taking it for a test drive. i think the rear panel needs to be about 50mm longer, currently it is 200mm. also the rear panel is about 75mm too short for the rear side panel. i measured the rear panel off of a snyders( i think) repo one, and the side panel theoretically should be the same height of the rear of the door plus about 25mm for under the door. does anybody have a good pic of how the back panel fits on, does it go all the way to the bottom of the side panels? have i somehow stuffed up my measurements? it is pretty hard trying to do it like this as we dont have anything complete to copy, so we are flying blind a lot of the time.
So I take it that the body that you are building is not the integral Australian UTE body? A fellow HAMBer from down under sent me a series of pictures of his UTE... You've guys have got me thinking here about duplicating this rare (here in the USA) body style.... As if I don't have enough irons in the fire as it is....
you make it look too easy for words. SWEET work. as was mentioned, this gives me too many ideas with too much stuff already needs doing
The first ute built was in 34' everything before that was pretty much the same as what you got in the states or Canada. Though 32 RPU did have the integral pickup rear, they were not Utes. Ute, is short for Coupe utility. Well, thats how I understand it.......... Doc. PS, there is a steel re pop of the 34 roadster pickup available.
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