With the front floor and firewall together again it’s time to get back to forming the rear-side windows. After I extended the door skins to fit their prospective openings, I had started working the rear quarter window surrounds using the upper part of the rear doors. The main focus for me on this is to end-up with a smooth shape that will be able to be duplicated on the other side. I’m working with an oval here and obviously don’t want two different shaped windows so that means taking measurements from various points along the way.  Continue Reading »

Yesterday’s post discussed the need to get back into the shop, cut the newly welded floor back apart, align it property, and put it back together. Today, we did just that. Although it’s about 16″ in length, just the one seam running perpendicular to the outer edge needed to be broken. It didn’t take the plethora of tools involved in the initial install; but it’s nowhere near as easy to un-weld something as it is to weld it. Looking at the left edge by the ubiquitous bolt hole in the existing pan one can see that it’s been lined-up, but the piece of the floor that used to cover the cross-support, well that’s in the next paragraph.

We were able to cut out small areas for a few patches but about two-and-a-half inches in from the edge of the floor there’s a longitudinal ridge that disappears about 1-1/2″ to the rear of the seam I just re-did. The fade is right in the middle of one of the patch panels so it wasn’t a pair of straight bend in opposite directions, but with a little figuring we got it done. To think, all this for something that’s going to get covered in sound deadening material and floor covering.

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It looks like somebody just took my toolbox and dumped half of it out into the car! Would you believe it would take this much effort just to fit the front floorboards and lower half of the firewall?! That’s what I thought when I flipped my helmet off after welding-in this section and looking at what it took to get it all aligned properly.  Check-out the come-along pulling the front door posts together to get the right width. And as you might guess a 75 year old car might also ”settle” a little bit… so you’ll notice the jack that supported the cowl/driver’s door post sticking into the lower left corner of the picture.  This was a job. At least it was fun!

Here’s a shot of the same thing when I stopped for a second to take the pictures. You can tell where the lower part of the firewall was put back in after taking the 3-1/4″ section out to make the channeling job work and still keep as much floorboard area available for foot-room as possible. 

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Looking back over the old posts, I see it’s been some time since I’ve updated the progress on the ’36 (April). When we last left off, I was stretching the passenger-side door after converting from a 4dr to a 2dr.

Remember: Two-door cars have larger door openings than do their four-door counterparts to allow easier access into the back seat area. It would’ve looked out of propoprtion had I simply welded the rear doors shut and left the fronts alone.

I started forming the rear side window opening after I got the door swinging. Removing the pillar allowed me to create one large opening where there once were two (one window in the back door and one behind that). You can see where I’ve put the curved reveal in the back and am starting to form it to meet-up with the top after the chop.

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