31 Victoria subrails

B

blind-dog33

Member
I've been told that the cowl and steel subrails from a 1931 slant window fordor can be adapted to fit the Victoria body -- Has anyone had any experience with this?
 
The Victoria is completely different then a slant window. the Victoria has a wood sub frame and the slant window is steel. the A400 & 180A sud frame is close but the Vicky is all by itself, the cowl`s are the same but from there on back they are different. I have never seen anyone try to put one in, so good luck if you try
 
Metal subrails for all the cars have formed sills for the door opening. The front doors on the Vicki are so much longer than the front doors of the slant 4th sedan. Soo, if you were to put the slant sedan subrails under the Vicky, the metal stamping of the would reveal you did something wrong.

Someone sold me a coupe subrail saying it was for a roadster and I found out when I got home after seeing that the coupe subrail is wider and door sill opening was longer.
 
with a big hamer a good welder & torch you can make anything fit anything i did that verry thing 25 plus years ago i used 2 sets of 30/31 2dr subrails car is still on the road
 
The 400A and 68C cabriolet would cowl bottoms would most likely be the same. The fordor top section would be the same. They both have wood sills.

For my 68C I needed the sill bottoms and adapted the straight window reproductions to do the the job. My intuition is telling me you are likely to find the slant sedan cowl is close enough to work if not the same. Check out the pictures from Doug in NJ's slant sedan he has online. Better yet just contact him for some pictures. He is a very helpful person.

Adapting the straight window cowl sill footers is not too bad and not a perfect fit. You have to fill in a cutout area and change the metal that goes behind the bottom of the cowl side panel. I also had to re-shape the area around and above the frame bolt hole to match up with firewall. I made up some of the bottom structure of the hinge post area that was rusty. Pretty easy as I did this early on in my learning to metal work days. My biggest mistake was not making up a better locating jig and one of the footers was about 1/4" high at the #1 frame mount point and will need extra spacers.

When going though your body mount bolts keep in mind the #4 bolt is not listed properly in the JS and other places. The repro kits may ship with too short a bolt, some may have changed what they send after I brought the problem to their attention.
 
Here's a pic of reproduction Vicky subrails (and the rest of the wood).
wood1.jpg
 
Dave, Great wood installation photos. Where did you get the wood kit, and how was it to work with?
 
Vern said:
Dave, Great wood installation photos. Where did you get the wood kit, and how was it to work with?
Click to expand...

It really wasn't too bad after I figured out where all the pieces went. (no instructions)

I made a dolly with caster wheels for a square, flat base to screw the subrails to and then did a dry assembly with just screws from there. I then mounted the cowl and doors and fit the rear skin. After a few adjustments, things were fitting together pretty well, so I took everything back apart and glued and screwed it all back together. Then it was just a matter of bolting the cowl on and nailing on the rear skin.

The wood came from Mike's A-Fordable and Snyder's. It's all red oak and was pretty easy to work with. I pre-drilled the holes before screwing pieces together to prevent the wood from splitting and I had to elongate the holes where the cowl bolts on so I could fine tune the door gaps. I also had to block plane and sand some areas in the back along the beltline to get the skin to fit right.

It was time consuming, but also very rewarding.
 
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