1931 Ford Restoration Diary

Lots of work and travel the last 2-3 weeks. About all I did was some more work on filling the cracks in the steering wheel. It’s a rather tedious and messy job, since the epoxy paste is so sticky. It also takes a long time to dry, over 24 hours, which makes the job even slower.

I got the front seat all finished. It looks quite nice. I installed it so I could have the pleasure of sitting in the car and actually driving up and down the driveway. When the weather gets warmer and I am ready to resume painting, I’ll have to remove it again.

I also started work on the back seat. I got the backrest out of the attic, removed the crumbling, mouldering original fabric (the only remaining original material on any of the seats), separated the frame and springs, and cleaned them off. The wooden frame is in perfect shape, and can be re-used as-is. However, the springs got rather rusted on one corner, and I will have to reinforce one section of particularly rusty wire.

I was given a 50’s GM fuel filter, the kind with a little glass bowl to hold the filter element. I hooked it up to gas tank fuel valve, and made a proper metal fuel line to go to the carb. It is not “correct”, but it does have a period look, and looks much nicer than the rubber hose and modern plastic filter I had been using.

The new spring for the front seat arrived, and I have been upholstering the seat. There’s a lot of trial-and-error involved. I have removed and re-tacked several places 3 or 4 times. If I ever do another upholstery job on a seat like this, I’ll be able to do it in a quarter of the time.

I talked to the spring makers, and they agreed to custom-make a spring based on my original if I sent it to them.  So I boxed it up and sent it, along with the incorrect new one that I had received.

I brazed one spot on the backrest spring where a sheet metal strip had broken, cleaned the spring up, and spray-painted it black.  The weather has been especially freezing, so the paint (which was supposed to dry in 12 minutes) took all day to dry.

I mixed up a second batch of epoxy and continued filling in cracks in the steering wheel.  It’s rather tedious and messy work, and there are a lot of cracks to fill.  It will probably take several more sessions to finish the job. After that I will need to sand it all smooth and touch up any places I missed.

Exactly a week after I ordered the interior kit, the UPS guy dropped off two giant boxes, with the kit inside. They managed to make it in about three working days!  I spent some time going through all the pieces to make sure everything was in order.  It is well made, and the mohair fabric is very nice.  I am still not sure what to do about the front seat spring.  Next week I will talk to the vendor to see how much it might cost to have one custom-made based on my original spring.

I was never really satisfied with the color of the special high-temperature paint that I had used a couple of years ago to paint the exhaust manifold. It was supposed to to look like unpainted cast iron, but it had more of a flat tan color. Last fall at a swap meed I bought a can of a different brand of exhaust paint, which seemed to have a more suitable color. Last weekend I took off the exhaust manifold, bead-blasted off the old paint, and re-painted it. The new paint was a lot better, looking almost exactly like the raw iron.

I also used my Dremel tool to slightly open up the cracks in the steering wheel, so that the epoxy putty would bond better.  I mixed up a bit of the epoxy and filled a few of the cracks.  Once the epoxy dries I will see now good it looks.  The putty was rather messy and sticky, and I’ll have to do some some sanding after all the cracks are filled.

I put the seat cushion frame together, and did some final work on it with the router, rounding the edges, etc. It looks fabulous. I also got a reproduction seat base spring. It is well-made, but it is a bit lower and shallower than the original, and I am not 100% sure if it will work well and if the seat upholstery will fit properly over it. But the only practical alternative is to have a reproduction spring custom-made, which would surely be expensive.

I ordered the upholstery kit in green mohair, just like the original (and frightfully expensive). It should arrive in 3 weeks or so, and then I will see how everything goes together.

While I am waiting for the upholstery, I might start trying to repair the cracks in the steering wheel with epoxy putty. But with the Christmas season upon us, I won’t be spending a lot of time on the car…

I think I found a good solution for the seatback tack strip. I ordered a strip of Low-Density Polyethylene from McMaster-Carr. A 3/8″ x 2″ x 48″ chunk of LDPE was only $7.50 plus $5 shipping. And it came the next day, packed in a nice sturdy tube that probably cost more than the shipping charge!  This material (the stuff that gallon milk jugs are made of) holds tacks well, and it is tough and flexible. I cut a couple of 3/8″ x 3/4″ strips, and drilled screw holes in it. The ends need to be rather curved, so I dipped them in boiling water to get them soft and bent them to the correct shape as they cooled.  Besides the LDPE, I had also tried a piece of that “plastic wood” that is used to make decks, and it did not hold tacks very well.

I also got a lot done on the wooden seat base frame.  I needed to make a sort of tongue-and-groove joint on each corner, and I had no idea how to do this without some sort of specialized machine tool.  I did a bit of Internet research and found that I needed to make a  “corner bridle joint“, and I learned the correct trick to doing it with a table saw.  The joints came out nice and accurate.  During the next week I’ll do some more carving, cutting, and drilling to get the frame finished.

In the last week or so, I installed new wooden tack strips on the seat.  Some of the strips were just 3/4″ x 3/4″ wood strips a couple of feet long, and Home Depot sold wood of the exact same size in oak.  To attach those, I re-used the original screws, which were in perfect condition.  There were two other strips that were originally make of some sort of fiber material, long since crumbled away.   I made replacements from 1/4″ plywood.  These had to be riveted in place.  The correct semi-tubular rivets were easy to get, but I had to make a tool to properly set them.  That was easier than it sounds- I just took a 3/8″ bolt that was lying around, cut off the head, put it in the lathe, and cut a donut-shaped depression in the end.

I still need to deal with the long metal tack strip that runs across the top of the seat back.  There is no big rush for that- it will be at least a couple of months before I get the upholstery kit for re-covering the seat.

I decided to try making a new wooden base for the seat cushion.  The original had been not terribly well fixed up by a previous owner, and I was thinking of buying a ready-made reproduction.  But the reproduction is rather expensive, and I realized that Home Depot sells the same 3/4″ x 4″ oak boards that the base is made from.  The base is just a rectangle made of 4 pieces of wood, with some fitted joints and a few holes of various sizes drilled in it.

The seat base springs are attached to the wooden base.  I’ll be ordering reproduction springs.  The original springs look usable at first glance, but several of the wire rods had been broken or badly worn, and a previous owner had tried heroically to fix it up.  But if I re-used them and something later broke, all the expensive new upholstery would have to be ripped up and replaced to repair it.

Last weekend the weather was nice, and I painted the front seat. Later in the week I bead-blasted the metal channel that is attached to the top edge of the seat back. The channel was originally filled with some sort of fiber/leather compound for holding the tacks that fastened the upholstery in place, and I will need to find a suitable replacement.

In the last week or so I managed to sandblast the lower part of the seat and finish fixing the bad welds. With the paint and rust gone, I was able to notice a couple of little cracks, which I welded. The rest of the seat has only light rust (or none at all), and I can clean up the remaining rust with a sanding disk. Weather permitting, I should be able to paint the seat in the next few days.

I also cut some strips of thin plywood which will replace a couple of tacking strips that were on either side of the seat base.