Projects Im getting Married! Project 46 ford begins!

thanx good seeing you also got the last bits for the rear axle/ brakes today and snagged a running complete motor from a friend warm weather is coming around and so must the thrash!

still got a good gas tank, radiator, rear axle/brakes front and rear springs and the 3 speed trans up for grabs. maybe some other knick knacks as well im sure. would for sure trade for a good th 350 and converter for some of it. im tired of tripping over it all lol.

 

this is an awesome story man. those of us who are fortunate enough to find women who are supportive and appreciative of our passion are very lucky men. i wouldn't even have mine if it wasn't for my girl. keep up the good work and good luck!

 

thanx man shes a keeper for sure. this week alone she 'dragged me' to the hot rod dentist office in conway arkasas, pete and jakes shop in kansas city and to world of wheels in omaha haha

 

havnt posted pix in a while, because honestly most of it was boring lol.

i finally got the brakes all buttoned up and filled the pig with fluid!









pretty much used only the housing and the backing plates from the axle i started out with but oh well, now i know its all new haha.

i also finaly got it under the car! my helper decided to go fishing for 2 days instead of helping me out but with two creepers and a floor jack i got the job done!

i need to figure out some u bolt/ bottom spring plate alignment issues and then itll actually be bolted in and ready to roll out in the sun

but for now heres some pix of it in its new home and a pic of the wheel/tire sitting on the bolts. turns out i dont have lug nuts that fit either haha.





the car is on jackstands in the photos but im guessing it should tuck at least an inch of rubber with all the weight on the tires. from 9 out of 10 angles it looks spot on and the 10th angle it looks like the tire could come out another half inch or so.

but with all the weight on it the little tuck could be needed to clear the arch of the top of the fender, i guess we'll find out. i reaaaaaaaaaly want to run the stock wheels but im not positive theyll even clear the new front brakes. i've been hearing about half and half they will or wont.

so the plan for now is to wait and see if the front clears, if it does ill stick a spacer on the rear and call it good. if the fronts dont fit ill buy new wheel i guess and put a fatter tire in back to take up the space.

still hunting for a th350

 

hmm thats showing up with a "this image or video has been moved or deleted" icon but when i look at the account they are still there?

hopefully this will self resolve and youll have some pix to check out

 

Did you upload the pictures on here then go back to your PhotoBucket and move them into their own folder? That's usually the cause..

 

nope straight to photobucket from the desk top :\ guess ill give it another go

edit* figured it out, html code instead of img

 

wow! great thread!

 

so what i learned by parts hunting for the rear is that i've ended up with a 1974 ford bronco rear axle, that is the 3300 lb variety with the one, maybe two? year option of 10 inch drum brakes. thus leading me on the hunt for wheel cylinders.

the leaf spring kit seems like its going to sit the car roughly were the old sagging spring sat if not an inch or so lower, and for all the hassle drilling all those holes in there vaugly laid out positions everything didjust pop right in to place when it was time to drop the axle in.

my only snafu right now is that when i put the U bolts over the axle to bolt the bottom pad on the tube seems to be just a lil fat so the U bolt ends are spaced out a little to far to go into the plate nice and easy.

could be the coating on the axle tube? ill mess with it and see what happens, maybe it just needs some convincing

 

just picked up my good to go trans from jrusslle. now if i could get those stinkin ubolts to work out id feel like i was gaining some momentum haha

 

Really enjoying reading your thread, Tim. Great work! Your '46 is going to be awesome.

Yes, we "car gals" are real keepers!

But, as a "car gal", I gotta say that we consider ourselves really lucky when we find a guy who can tear down and rebuild a car as well as you can.

Major kudos, buddy.

 

hoot

 

alright progress!

the car rolls again i ended up sanding a layer of the coating off the axle tube and then "modified" my spring plate and got everything to line up.

passenger side u bolts instillation time: 5 hours
drivers side u bolts instillation time: 5 minutes

funny how that happens right? haha. either way got it all put together and on the ground then went threw and made sure all the suspension was all tight. only thing i need to tweak as far as i can tell is i need some washers for my lugnuts. otherwise its good to go!

oh, so photos cuz other wise it didnt happen right?



on the ground with the weight of the car minus any spring settling, gas tank, or interior etc.

also it seems worth mentioning that the car has no drive-train in it so the front of the car is going to come down almost a foot which i can't imagine wouldn't effect the rear height.



had no reason to move it but when it hasnt rolled for what feels like to long you can't expect me to not roll it outside for a minute



gasser style haha. ive got about a dozen holes to drill and maybe 6 or 8 stubborn rivets to destroy and ill have the motor/trans/wishbone split mounts in. then ill pull it apart to cut and weld the wishbone and switch front leaf springs. feeling good!



kept seeing this car posted in the round up photo threads and decided to steal one to show the direction im headed. other then the blacked out grill, im keeping all the stock brightwork.

just snarky moonshine sorta sleeper style

 

lookin good. i always get inspired reading build threads but then find i can't actually do anything because i'm broke

 

alright well i obviously overshot my goal date of Jay's HAMB BBQ but I'm thinking that I shouldn't be off by much. Life is super busy but I'm shooting for it moving under its own power and obviously stopping under its own power by the end of may.

That way I can drive it the 45 miles to my new place, yup two weeks ago went from being 5 miles from the car to 45 miles to the car :S The current plan is get it running and stopping and drive it down some country roads to the city and sneak threw to an exhaust shop before headed to the new garage thats 20 steps from my front door

Then I can pick away at things that are cosmetic or stuff that's not totally necessary before/after work.

that being said i took a trip and...



came back with this I feel fueled for a thrash!

crossing my fingers I'm hoping to have the motor/trans installed by Monday the 6th.
~by installed I mean painted, bolted to each other, full of fluids and bolted to the mounts. not wired, plumbed or cooled.

lets see how it goes sorry for the lack of photos lately, its either been boring work or just full on hustle trying to get it done when i have time.

 

Good to see you're making progress on this even if it's not significant in your eyes..

Keep up the good work (even if it's purchasing parts)!

 

thanks man, i figure if my actual hands on time with the car is limited that i dont want to be waiting around for parts to show up to work on it. I've been trying to stay "parts/supplies" ready for about two steps ahead of where im at so if the ball gets rolling i dont need to wait around the next two weekends should yeild some results but we all know how that can go ha

 

might tag on some photos later but for now they look to boring so its just a text update.

i took today and yesterday to start into installing my motor and transmission mounts. The transmission mount also incorporates the new mounting points for the eventually split wishbone as the trans is a little girthy for the unsplit wishbone.

I'm using the kit offered for the 46-48 ford to install a sbc and auto trans as offered by chassis engineering inc. figured id put that all in here so if some ones searching for info about the kit itd be easy enough to pull up in a search.

ok so anyways, the kit seems pretty straight forward. the motor mounts are kind of a C shape and wrap around the inside of the frame mounting with 4 bolts, two on top and two on the bottom.

the measurements on the directions were very easy to translate onto the car as they give good measurements from several directions so your not left wondering if thats realy were its supposed to be.

i started with the passenger side and after marking everything out i found that a rivet head was right in the way of sliding the bracket on. I had no idea where my new holes would line up, or if i would be reusing any of the existing holes in the general area of where the mount lands so i just took a grinder to the head and smoothed it out.

the mount fits pretty tight to the rail so it takes a little muscling around to get it to slide around and line up just right but to be honest i found that the mounts, both sides actually, seemed to just gravitate to where they were supposed to be. dumb luck or good design, who knows but ill take it.

as it turns out the far forward hole for the new mount had about half its diameter were the shank of the rivet remains in the frame rail. i figured that id just leave the shank of the rivet in the frame as id feel better having a round hole that is half in shank and have in frame rather then an oval hole. other then that nothing needs to be moved off the frame, though you might have some front brake lines in that area to navigate, for the top holes.

i threw the top bolts in and moved onto the drivers side figuring that having the top bolted in would make it easier to figure out where the bottom holes will need to be with out using clamps.

the drivers side mount it a couple of inches forward to of the passenger side to account for the stock steering box, you then in turn run into the drivers side front bump stop being right in your way.

a fun note to include would be that the nut on the inside of the frame rail holding the bolt that goes into the bump stop is affixed to the frame. i thought that it was lose and so figuring that i couldn't get a wrench on it and turn the rubber end with out tiny hands and hulk like grip i went to work trying to cut threw the bump stop figuring if i got to the shank i could cut it and pop the shank and the square nut on top right out.

well 3 hours of every tool i could think of to use i realized that the bolt was fixed and a couple quick twists it was off. i think this is were the facepalm pic goes?

yeah. anyways.

so with that out of the way the drivers side mount slips right on, one of the top holes cuts into an existing hole a little. making it slightly a slightly ovaled hole like i was trying to avoid with the rivit situation. and thought the bottom bolts are not yet in the mounts~ keep reading for more on that~ it does look like the hole for the bumpstop might be used for one of the bottom holes.

i realize that old fords are different from year to year and honestly car to car so its possible that some of the pre existing holes might line up for you and some may not have random rivets chilling out in your way. but this is how mine went.

so i went to move onto the bottom holes only to find that the tierod/draglink etc and even the axle itself was in the way of actually getting a drill under the rail to make the holes.

awesome.

so i went ahead and disconnected the sway bar, the pan hard bar, and took the friction shocks right off the frame as well as pulling the front spring u bolts. i had already pulled the cap off the wishbone mount on the x member in preparation of installing the trans mount, that sadly i didnt even get to.

anyhow, the jist is i pulled the entire front suspension out so i could get to the bottom holes for the motor mounts. it was going to have to come out to cut and weld the wishbone and replace the stock front spring but it sure would have been nice to have a heads up on having to do it now so i could have planned better.

either way all im needing to do right now to roll the front end out is to shimmy the sway bar shanks out of the little dogbones and disconnect the tierod end from the steering arm on the steering box.

the pin and nut came off with out to much hassle but i can not get the full length of the shank out so it can disconnect. you can see that the bar runs to the passenger side under the wishbone but because the car has no motor in it the bar is resting against the bottom of the wishbone thus leaving no room to bring the head of the tie rod end up and out.

the front of the car is on jack stands so i used a floor jack to compress the front spring hoping that taking some slack out of it would give me the needed room but with out the weight of the drive train you'll lift the car off the jack stands before you'll get it to compress enough to separate the bar from the wishbone.

i see that there is for lack of a better word a collar around the end of the bar that extends to the tie rod. it has two 'rings' one on either end with a nut/bolt so i took those out figuring there must be some sort of adjustment at that point for alignment and maybe it would let me disconnect the tie rod end from the bar but i wasn't really seeing how it all worked so i decided to call it a weekend and see what the hamb had to say.

that being said i got to drive 'my engine' the other day and it seems to be a nice strong example. super happy that i didn't end up having to buy a motor that wasn't already in a car to test out. it's in a friends pickup so we'll pull that on saturday so he can drop in his new unit and ill take it back home and get it all painted up and bolted to the new trans etc so when i get the mounts done it can slide in.

I won't have time to mess with the front end until next saturday night so im hoping the power of the HAMB fills me in on some way to free up that end and ill be back to drilling holes quick

 

I love these style coupes.. the moonshiner look is killer, what are your plans for the small chev motor?

 

Right now my plans are just to clean it up and make it look nice so it does t stand out like a sore thumb. It's a bit of a mystery motor as neither of us have any idea if any things been done to it outside of the eldelbrock intake, it does sound solid though.

My only plans for the motor are to eventually throw an rv cam in it and drive the shit out of it. I'm trying to keep things pretty simple/mild so I can drive it on some longer road trips.

 

You got a good car at a good price, I looked at that car and almost bought it to part out, But decided it was too good of a car to tear down. And I do not need anymore project cars right now...Enjoy it

 

Ha! that's awesome. I agree way to nice to part out i cant believe how solid it is after tearing into it.

Once i got under it i started pulling the lose old undercoating off to see shiny paint! and once i pulled the interior, dash, and swept out the floor it still has gloss black paint on it, i can see my reflection like a mirror on the interior side of the firewall!

creeping closer and closer to it having pretty much everything redone and back on the road

 

Alright update time!

I think I left off last time about half way threw the motor mount installation when i got stuck having to pull the front end out and messing with a drag link in the way.

After a little HAMB investigating and with a car full of parts I headed back out this weekend. I went right into working on getting the front suspension rolled out of the way and tried effort one of getting some clearance on the drag link, ratcheting it down.

A bent up lever later I had only gained a 1/2 inch of clearance, Heavy duty ratchet strap my ass lol. Effort 2 was to spin the collar off the tierod/drag link. after sitting with some kroil it sprun off with out to much effort and dropped the link down for me.

Then all that was left holding the front end in was the sway bar half of the dog bone that connects to the axle. The nuts came off easy enough but thats about where the easy stopped. they must be a tapered shaft or something because they would not even budge. so after a quick search showing they weren't that hard to come across new and not $$$ i just cut the center out with a 4 inch cutting wheel and figure ill heat and hammer the studs out later.

with the front out of the way i could get to the bottom holes for the motor mounts with no trouble, i ended up buying another small set of Irwin bits to get the 3/8 inch one i actualy wanted. can't seem to find single metal bits for sale? oh well $20 later I had my split tip black carbon bit. As much as I hate spending money these things are a life saver. I've tried multiple brands of bits on this build and nothing comes even close to matching the cutting power of these bits.

you end up drilling threw about a 1/4 inch of metal by the time you get threw the boxing plate so its worth the money for sure.

the motor mounts primed, painted and installed i moved onto the trans/wishbone mount. i wiggled under the car and got in all clamped in place with out to much drama and popped the holes in like a hot knife threw ...well hot butter haha. I've gotta go grab a bigger bit for the wishbone mounts but other then that its all buttoned up. pretty straight forward oddly enough haha. no drama.

after that i started cleaning up the engine, i spent the better part of Saturday pulling it out of a friends recently lifted pickup and at first it looked pretty filthy but it seems the valve covers were hardly tight at all and most of the grime was just new oil all over.

so some rags and some dawn/water and it was close to being clean. threw it up and over the front of the car to check clearances and what not and found the stock battery tray is in the way, the HEI is going to clear but not by much it seems and the center dump exhaust on the drivers side just may clear the steering. Kinda iffy if the mech fuel pump will clear though. its pretty close to the stock crossmember right now, i guess with the trans bolted to it and pushed around it place better we'll find out.

yanked it out and got started on the trans, got it primed and painted and installed the convert. Wiggled it all around and bolted up the bellhousing only to find that the converter and the flywheel were nice and butted up against each other guess it didnt fully seat off it comes next weekend.

I thought I heard it pop 2 times but i must have heard wrong. sad day.

any how thats what i got done, god willing and the river dont rise.....anymore, it went up 9 feet the last day i worked on it and 10 more over last night, its got 9 more feet till the road to the shop is under water haha... but yeah hopefully get the trans/converter sorted out and re bolted up. clean the engine and get it and the manifolds painted and drop it all in the car hopefully for the last time

we know how that all works but humor me

anyhow here's some photos now that im done rambling. Because everyone knows a thread it pointless with out photos haha.



stock trans mount gone



remains



motor mount positioned in primer



deluxe midnight working accommodations you can sorta see how the mounts are offset here



pulling the motor, pulled the 38's off the front to make it a little easier to yank. and it was a "little" easier



100 degs and every thing's black, and not a shade tree in sight. great.
every wrench at this point was a 'hot wrench'



buddy and his dad making sure every thing's looking good.



a tornado watch and its at the shop



front end out!



air ride?



cut dogbone



taking a break and taking pix

 

striking a douchey pose to show off how paranoid i get about getting metal in my eyes drilling under the car and how i got myself to freak out less about it. haha.



clamped in and ready to drill!



before





during



after



this should all move back ( to the left in the photo) about a 1/2 to 3/4 inch so maybe the pump will clear? if it does itll be tiiiiight.



driver side, looks like i should have enough height to clear the box but if it wont ill snag a 68/9 pickup passenger side manifold that kicks back to stick on the driver side so itll kick forward a little bit. its all fairly tight so we'll see what kind of wiggles itll take to get it done.



ball park clearance on the firewall, im thinking ill lose about a half inch but figuring that those fingers equals about 2 inches im not to paranoid about having clearance issues there



mating ritual

 

the car feels so different just sitting closer to ride height. the top of the front fenders have been about chest high for the last couple of months so seeing it about 2 feet lower realy stokes the fires

 

Nice work. At this rate, your'll be done by the end of next week.

 

Haha I wish, I only have Saturday night past 8pm till Monday night at 8 ish to work on the car right now so it's a little slow going but after the motor/trans is in for good and the front brake swap is done I'm sure it'll speed up

So close but so far away, let's see how far i can get by the end of may

 

hopefully get everything painted and bolted down in the car sat night/sunday, im almost positive that the stock mech pump isnt going to clear the crossmember with out taking a chunk out of the cross member so i grabbed a block of plate and will plan on running an electric pump until i can figure out something to make a mech one clear.

looks like im getting realy close but this 2 days a week thing is killing me, might have to take some days off work and thrash shooting for a 50 mile drive june 4th ish

 

Alright quick update, it was mothers day weekend so i didn't have as much time as normal but i still made a dent.

After a little fussing around I got the converter to seat and the trans bolted to the motor. What seems like was happening was the converter would jossle around and more or less un seat when i was bolted up the engine because the trans was on the ground and the motor on a cherry picker so the angles just didnt want to jive perfect.

took 3 trys but i got it seated and bolted up and then went ahead and bolted the converter to the flywheel.

I also managed to get the stock battery tray out of the car. the bolts were either rusted solid or super hard to get at so it was a little work. I have seen photos of the stock battery tray being used with a sbc but as i dropped the motor in the first time it wouldnt clear the manifolds. oh well, ill put the battery in the same spot just lower instead of up on legs and I shouldnt have any trouble.

a hot hot hot torch and some slip joint plies i got the cross member that ties the halves of the X member together clearance for the tail shaft and dropped the motor and trans in together to make sure everything would clear. granted i dont have the drag link hooked up right now but fingers crossed it will clear and we will be looking good.



i also managed to get the engine painted, plus side of having tins and plug wires on the engine that i dont care about is a whole lot less masking haha. should look sharp all dressed up.



And Sarah made the delightful discovery that the trans mount holes are pretty stripped out so the drivetrain came back out so i can re tap them next weekend.

It was the first time for her to mess with engine swap stuff so she had a good laugh at spending 45 minutes to get the motor and trans into the car and then it taking about 4 minutes to pull it out. Yup, thats how it goes.

got an order in with Macs for a bunch of kinda random harder to find bits and was delighted to find all but some little brackets in stock, and hit up Julianos for some front seat belts. A couple more trips to the parts store and i shouldnt have any issues with waiting for parts to show up for me to make progress.

next weekend i hope to have the motor and trans in for the final time~ fingers crossed, get the spring off the front axel and the wishbone cut so i can send it off to get welded up, get the bigger holes drilled for the mounting points of the split bones and start in on brake lines. i'll be realistic and be happy if i get the new pedal/mc and prop valve painted, plumbed and installed in the car. but id be more pleased if i get the lines to the back brakes done as well.

guess we'll see ill keep you posted

 

alright no photos as honestly they look a whole lot like the previous ones.

I managed to get the front spring, shackles, and the remnants of the dog bones that attached the swap bar and shock arms to the axle all removed. As well as getting the rear of the wishbone split and ready to have the threaded tubes welded in for the tie rod ends.

I then muscled the axle into the back of the pick up and got to delivered to the welder to make it all 'one' hopefully they'll be ready next weekend but i'm not holding my breath it might be the next weekend, we'll see. Oh, and i got the bigger 9/16 holes drilled in the X member for the new split mounts.

With all that done i finally got the motor and transmission in! It was a bit of a battle as 'some trimming needed' was a whole lot more then i had expected and not wanting to take to much out it was a lot of back and forth. but its finally in there.

Didn't even get started on the brakes but i guess that leaves me something to do next weekend