This 1940 Chevy has its regular home in San Angelo, TX but its owner brought it up to Colorado a few days ago for me to chop. His original request was for me to remove 4” from the front and 6” from the rear of the roof.

Before anything else, the first thing I wanted to do was to brace the body. You may not normally think of a vehicle roof as structural support for the sides, but you quickly realize how it is once you remove it, weld it back together and nothing lines back up. A little pre-planning goes a long way towards saving a lot of aggravation later.

I also removed the paint from the areas to be cut to make for clean welds during reassembly and then laid everything out on both sides equally with a sharpie. It may be difficult to see the blue lines on the bare metal in the pictures, but they were quite visible to me. Continue Reading »

Ironincally, I’ve spent very little time during the warmer months of this year in or around the garage and probably more out of motivation to clean things up a little than to actually work on Rex the ’58, I’ve put together some of the pieces of steel that I’ve been kicking around and saving for the last 6+ months with the intention to make a set of push bars.

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Last winter I spent several months working away from home.  This meant that I had lots of time but since I couldn’t bring the garage with me I couldn’t work on the ’51.  Being disappointed with this state of affairs I brought the steering wheel along with me to work on during the long winter evenings.

I figured that it would only take a week to finish the steering wheel, two at the most.  I guess that I was partly right because it did only take a couple of weeks to do the steering wheel paint.  What I didn’t figure on was doing the job multiple times at two weeks a try.

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