1936 Ford Big Truck Project

[luisv]

Once all four perches are in place, I move onto placing the welded brackets in place. The brackets I made a few weeks back. I left the large base plates there to allow me to angle them as needed. I will cut them down to size later in the finishing phase. These are placed in their general locations and I scribe the bottom to locate it and clamp it down. Once we had that, we did the opposite side and then compared. That allows us to match the angle in and out to lineup with the arms perfectly. Essentially, I mirror the brackets left to right then they are tacked in place. The uppers were done first and tacked in, then I did the bottoms.*
*
Here are a few shots of how I aligned them and clamped them in place. Look at the lower arms and you can see the vise grips on the frame and the c-clamp on the axle if you look closely.*
*

*

*

*
This is the best shot to show you that the arms are parallel to each other (horizontally) and they are the same lengths. The distance between the bolts (upper and lower) on the axle and frame match at 9 inches. So going back to your high school geometry, this essentially forms a parallelogram with the four bolts being the corners of the box. This is, of course assuming you are looking at it from the side. Here is the shot....
*

*
Anyway....once the brackets are in place, they are all tack welded in place. That is where the front suspension is right now.... the four perches are in place and final welded and the four brackets are tacked in place. The lower frames are all bolted in place as well now.
*
Here is are the brackets on the perches.
*

*

*
As mentioned, those brackets are now in place on the frame and the front axle is mounted and articulating in place perfectly. The suspension is now sitting on wood blocks up front and rear is simply bolted in place with the leaf springs. Essentially, I can now roll it in and out of the garage as needed.

More recently, we moved back to the body. More on that when I get the pictures out of the camera.

 

[luisv]

So we have done some things in the past few months but I had not gotten around to posting photos and progress. Since the last update in June I managed to mount all the frame brackets and was able to mount the front axle with some wooden blocks. Basically now the front axle is in place enough that I can move the truck on it. The rear axle is also mounted with some bolts. In short, I can roll it around now. After that, we did not do a whole lot.

Not going to post a hundred photos on the process of each thing but I will on the more complex parts. Suffices to say it is all similar so no sense in repeating everything.

Fast forward and we got to getting some real work done. We decided to move on getting the cab done so we got to get some banging done to get dents out. We started going around the cab and a bit at a time got dents out. The worst of areas was the back side of the roof area. It looked as if they had carried some very heavy logs on there. It took us both about 5 hours to work out all the dents. This is the worst area of the cab we had to do. Looks pretty good now.

From there I moved to the next trouble spot, the windshield. The windshield on these trucks pops out to let in fresh air. On our truck the frame around the upper portion of the windshield was toast. We took out the mechanism and windshield frame and I got to work on rebuilding the frame on the cab. It took me all day but I got it done. I had to build out the lip a section at a time. The end result is here:

I still have some cutting to do to get the "hinge notch" on the passenger side. I also will get some of the holes plugged on the driver's side of the lip. Lastly, the holes from the windshield wipers are all being plugged. We want a smooth look there so we will not be replacing them. They will all get welded shut.

 

[luisv]

So staying in the windshield area I moved inside the cab. Inside the cab there is a header panel that has the hinges for the windshield hinges. I had to remove it by cutting out the spot welds (don't know if it was supposed to be welded) and cutting a few pop rivets. Once out this is what we had.

The driver side was better than the passenger. The passenger was pretty much destroyed. To get it done I had to replicate the driver's side and mirror it. It was rather difficult but I had to replicate it bending and hammering it out a bit at a time. Here it is in progress.

 

[luisv]

Once the outer large complex curve was 95% there I had to put in the bend to form the lip that will support the hinge mount. To set that I used a piece of tape to give me the line. Once that is there, I created the bend 4 inches at a time until I had it done.

This is the piece from the front once the lip is bent in. I had to make some more tweaks but this is pretty much the final piece. I will, obviously, have some dent removal work to do, but the final product is not too shabby given the fact I did it all by hand with nothing more than a few dollies, a hammer, vise and some two-by lumber to let me form the curves.

 

[luisv]

From there it was just a matter of welding the patch panel in. The process I've mentioned a few times. Basically you stitch the panel in one spot weld at a time to avoid the panel warping. As I go I bang the panel weld flat and move on until I finish. Then I grind everything down smooth.

A closer look at the weld

Once the panel is in I flip it over and weld in the hinge support from the back side into the lip I built in.

The hinge support was a bit thin on one side so I welded in a small plate for added support.

 

[luisv]

Now I move onto the rocker panels. They were pretty much garbage. From the outside they seemed OK with a few holes, but when I got them off, wow.....

Once I took off the rocker panel, this is what was left on the cab.

To try to avoid this again I painted the inside of the new rocker panel and the support on the cab. This way, once the rocker panel is in place the inner portion will be protected. I will not be able to paint in there once it is all done.

Now that it is all prepped up, I cleaned up the panel ends, made a few more cuts and clearanced the part to get the best fit of the new panel. The frame member on the cab has a pair of tabs that are there to align the new rocker in place so it's pretty straight forward. Once everything fits well I pull off the rocker and then punch out a number of holes to spot weld. This is how it looks when all setup.

From there it is a matter of putting in the spot welds which then get ground down and smoothed out. The end results look like this....

 

[Roothawg]

Looks good. I'm interested in the newer axle setups. I'll be watching this one. I've been thinking of building somethiing like this for an all purpose work truck.

 

[Roothawg]

Oh and here is a pic of the one we restored. It now lives in Montana.