Nice work ! I was gonna chop my 47 sedan till I found the rotten coupe body so now its a chopped coupe I would love to see you cut a more door in the same stlye...whats another 100 feet of welding anyways Keep up the good work I am looking forward to some more pics!!
I like the way you are doing that and obviously putting a lot of thought into the process.. I also like it that I picked up a couple of things off your photos to apply when I start making the pieces out behind the garage into a new truck cab.
here you guys go. been finishing up getting everything lined up on the back end of things. dealing with decklid alignment then realizing the decklid is actually not sqare in itself, and the fact the holes for the tailights arent even on the fenders, this has been an interesting 24hrs straight at the shop. decided to ignore the tailight holes and move them if need be once i get the actual mounts in hand. and i figured if im sectioning the decklid anyways i might as well fix the fact that it isnt actually square. so here we are. first you guys asked for some outside pics. here you go. now here is after doing some piecuts and adding the pieces to the edges of the qtrs and the rear of the fenders.
The pic in my avatar is my 41 that has a 4 1/2" chop. I bought it from a guy that did most of the chop and got burnt out on it. I still need to shorten the rear fenders up. It's nice to see another one that still has a full size rear window and doesn't look too flat on the roofline.
Looks really nice... Have you considered laying back the windshield to fill the gap in the roof? (or perhaps half way) Sam Barris one mentioned that after he had built the Joe Urritta 1941 Ford Convertible that he would never chop a 1941-48 Ford again without laying back the windshield. They sure improve if that is done, and I think it would also look good on your car. What are your other plans with the car... Hot Rod or Custom?
Rikster, I actually don't like the look of the laid back pillars on cars. I think it disrupts the flow in my eyes. I have no problem adding 10 extra hours for it to flow right. I'm charging the guy a set price on this so extra hours spent is on me. If it has my name on it, then it has to get my complete approval. And I'm drenching the headlights and recessing in the license plate. Trying to talk him into lowering the back a little but he is an older streetrod .
Could the front of the roof perhaps be a tick higher? To create a hint of taper towards the back. It looks like it may be heading a little downhill as it is.
It does have a little rake. The customer was set on a certain windshield height. Now with taking that much out everywhere it made the top look flat. If it were a 50s sedan that wouldn't have been as drastic looking. But because these more look like fastbacks they need to have a constant flow.now because of the drastic rake in the stance it is more dramatic trying to talk him into bringing the ass end down like 2".
how much did you chop it ? what is the windshield height ? you are doing a nice job. I'm glad you didn't lay back the windshield.
here you go. marked out all my cut lines for the inside of the decklid. braced it, cut the edge of the skin off of the bottom section of the bracing and made my cuts to the structure. put back together all of the edge structure and folded bottom edge of the skin over the structure. i didnt do the inside of the structure because in frencing in a license plate. so im just going to wait until then. i just wanted to mock it up and started looking at the area below the decklid. so i will take pics of the structure all done when i get there. so now i started cutting the bottom area up to match the curve of the bottom of the decklid when i found a ton of filler and a seam. now i was told that this area was replaced by a guy that i know very well. problem here is no one asked for pics of it being done. you do this while having a car being fixed so you know the work is correct. heres what i found. areas over the seam were 1/2" think. now i thought this area was fixed decent enough to be workd with until i saw whe the back looked so smooth. it was smoothed over with metal to metal. If you only get one thing out of this build thread take this in. ALWAYS get pics of the work being done and ask to see work during the process. if you are going to pay someone to work on your car, find someone thats doing the work for the end result. not for a paycheck. this all upsets me not because of the quality of work here. im upset that someone got paid to do this. i feel bad for him but i still need this area to be decent to work with. so worked a full 36 hrs straight just to have to wait for a replacement part. man this sucks...
Thanks for that, really nice work. I've a '40 Tudor that I'd like to chop, but suspect it's beyond my abilities, at least around the shortened rear end and trunk area. Bummer about the previous 'workmanship' - I've seen a couple of examples of that reported on over here recently, and is the main reason I always try and do as much work as I can myself.
Dam John, that's a lot more than I'd want to tackle, I'm impressed. Good to see your still hanging in there with work...
so here we go, been doing a lot of small pie cuts and tweaking of everything to make stuff line up. after tonight all pass side quarter and roof is all welded up and drivers side quarter is pretty close. this is extremely time consuming but all mudwork is not going to be thincker than 1/16". and that seems like a lot to me. so here we go some pics. cut down the original rear corners of the qtr glass. i did it by making my cuts roughly 1/2" apart starting from the center of the curve. then started welding up all the cuts in the back. now i didnt take a lot of pics, been running on little sleep and feeling the cold thats been going around. here it is all welded up.
now on to the roof. i already added the 2" strip in the center of the roof. then we had this problem. and i know, pics jump from side to side, i get ahead of myself and forget to take pics. this is where i am super anal about my work. the drip rails dont line up with each other perfect because of the horizontal curve. so we do pie cuts to fix this. then here is the pass side all finished. still need to do some metal work on it, but its all solid and cans of yet. now here is another one, these pillars arent completely perfectly matched when it comes down. so ive got the whole center of it all welded up, now im going to pop off the lower section of the driprail and pie cut the lower side of the pillar to line up that edge. then re install the driprail.
i grind my weld down with a flap disk, then work it with a hammer and dolly, then vixen file, then 80 on a long board, finished with the orbital sander.
very very nice and clean job. I'm very glad you post these pic's. it's a perfect guideline for me. keep on going. did you also take photo's from the inside ? wat did you do with the frame on the inside of the quarterwindows ?
havent gotten to those yet. in all reality, the back end of the window channel is sunken a bit from the edge. so if it sits 2" back or 4" back its going to have the same look. im not messing with that until i mess with the garnish mouldings. mounting locations on that is going to play a big part in the locations of everything. if you are looking for certain pics, let me know and i can take them. ive made a ton of extra little pie cuts everywhere, and didnt sweat the little things in pics on here. so let me know what you are looking for.
I like the thought process and initial planning you put into these chops...this one came out really neat! I would have never noticed those rear fenders being shortened unless you told me.
lets just say i sat and stared for close to 10hrs on those things. about 6hrs after the initial cut. im glad you guys are liking it.
ok, so ended up having to strip all the mud off of the rear fender and metal working it all. 1/4" thick on the whole thing. everything on this i have to move at all is smothered in this stuff. so here is the quater and rear fender worked. still working on the bottom corner, but you get the idea. then i started working on the drivers door top. the gap on the b pillar was really horrible before i chopped the car. i was aware of this when i started on the chop. so instead of building the edge out of weld, i actually maved the door top to match. quarter windows are now the same size as the door windows. now the back of the car is a little funky. i didnt take the full amount of chop out of the decklid when i sectioned it. it would have made the decklid look really small compared to everything else. so instead i split the difference and took the rest out of the bottom pan. now figuring out the inner structure of this was a little funky and it finally came to me. here it goes, i will try and explain with out any pics, will take more today when i finish it. here is the whole mock up from the outside. so back to inner structure. i took the flange from the edge of the fenders and swapped the from side to side. so this way i got correct flow of top flange to inner part of the fender. the isnide channel is sectioned to match the new height of the decklid. next i added about a 3/16" to either side channel to make up for the difference in width.
The Jalopy Journal
