Back in the mid-late 50s and early 60s mild customization was more common on early 50s Chevrolets and Ford than more radical work. Most of the custom work was limited to fairly simple things that a typical young, low-bucks car owner could do himself. Changing side trim was one of those typical modifications an owner could readily do on his own. Pontiac, Buick, and DeSoto side trim could have been seen on a number of cars. Mid to late 50s DeSoto side trim was a design I always liked. I have been thinking about putting DeSoto trim on my 51 Ford tudor for a few years and recently learned that there is a product by Clayton Machine Works that makes it fairly easy to make a reasonable look-alike of many hard to find trim designs. After seeing how pricey original side trim can be, I decided I could justify buying a kit that allows me to design and build whatever side trim I can dream up. I am not done, but have made reasonable progress so far. First, I took some masking tape and laid it out in the pattern similar to that of the late 50s DeSoto. tried a variation to the first layout, a little thinner and a little longer. taped paper onto the side of the car and traced over the pattern ponced the pattern, transferred it onto a piece of plywood, and cleaned up the lines cut the pattern out on plywood and made a few shapes to help form the trim. routed both sides of the pattern to create a left and right pattern to hold the trim while it is being formed. mounted the pattern on a scrap of plywood, set the trim piece in and held it in place with an additional shape. started pushing the trim into shape left and right front pieces: rough cutting the ends close to final length-shape, and taping the pieces into place So here is where I am today with this project. ...more to come as I get it done.
nice!! theres a shoebox running around in north jersey that has stock trim with desoto trim undernieth it, looks great... i'm running 58 plymouth savoy trim on my shoebox. pics are in my profile. cool car man.
Side looks good, real good and you do impressive work. But..... I'm just not sure about the wrap around the back strip, but hell its your car right! Doc.
The wrap around trim piece on the right rear is stock, but it fits terribly and needs to be refitted. Is that what you are referring to? That area of the car is going to be a can of worms once I dig into it, a combo of rust and old lead.
Jamco rear springs, I think 3" drop to them. ...plus the sag of their being more than ten years old. Front is a Mustang 2 style with stock spindles, Chubby Chassis, guessing it is about 4" drop from stock, that includes the weight of a 392 hemi and springs about nine or ten years old. Car was terrible to drive when I got it with original suspension except for dropped spindles and rear blocks. Now it is a pretty nice ride, but I am thinking about putting in 2" lowering blocks in the back to drop it a bit more, to make it a bit more of a tail dragger.
No serious commitments. I may do the headlights someday and I think a different grill might look good. ...but I have some 1929 Fords needing my time first. I will consider more body work once I commit to new paint, but I might not live that long. It is a driver.
Thanks for that. Is there any pics posted of the engine? Ive never seen a Hemi in a shoebox before Andy.
A little more progress on the DeSoto side trim this afternoon. I got the left side rear piece fitted to the side contour I cleaned up the ends in preparation for polishing here are the four pieces so you can see how much bending was required on the rear pieces Next, a little bit of buffing and polishing. I do not try to get a chrome like polish, just a normal SS trim level of polish suits this material and the car. ...and next update, I hope to have it all finished.
What is that trim made of, it can't be stainless. How hard is it to make it take shape? A guy could do all kinds of interesting shit with this, I'm very curious to know how hard it is to work and how it turns out. Also wouldn't mind knowing the cost for the sticks but I'll understand if you don't want to reveal that.
The sticks are solid aluminum and bend easily enough. Because of the non-symetrical shape, you need to restrict the pieces from twisting while you are bending. I kept the pieces wedged down as I bent them into the rough shape, as shown in the initial post. Incidentally, the semi-triangular shape is concave going to convex, about the same shape as the shoeboxs trim, but narrower. It gets harder to bend more complex shapes, but it is not that difficult when done with patience, and attention to control its twisting tendency. ...and care to avoid scarring the face sides with your hand tools. I just wrapped the pliers' jaws with masking tape and the trim pieces with masking tape wherever I needed to grab them to tweak the shape a bit. Incidental, minimal damage can be cleaned up with a file and sandpaper before polishing. The Sticks are 8, 6, and 4 they are sold in a bundle of 6 sticks, 2 of each length. That adds up to 36 feet overall and they list for $400; so the cost is about $11/ft. I used only 12 feet in this project. You can google "Clayton Machine Works" for more info.
The 3M industrial grade adhesive tape they provide with the kit lists for about $2/ft in big rolls, so that cuts it to $9+/- for the aluminum. The real advantage of these aluminum sticks over stainless is that they are pretty easily shaped. I imagine most ss trim adapted from other cars is going to take an even larger effort trim to length and to shape than this stuff, and making it closely conform to the curving side of a typical car would be more difficult than getting the aluminum to fit nicely. I finished attaching the last piece of trim today. The tape does a pretty good job; but it is only 0.030 thick, so the trim has to be fitted pretty close to the curvature of the body. My original Ford trim does not fit nearly as well in some places.
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