1931 Ford Restoration Diary

Again, there were zillions of other things occupying most of my spare time.

In the last couple of weeks I sanded down the filler I sprayed on the roof, and the body work on roof panels and gutters is essentially done.
I also stripped most of the paint from the other front door. When the weather is dry I can soda-blast both front doors.
I also mounted the door hinges to the body. I reused some of the original screws and washers (which had to be bead-blasted and Parkerized) and ordered some replacements for the ones that got mangled when I removed the hinges a couple of years ago. With the hinges in place, I was able to temporarily hang the doors and check that they opened and closed properly and nothing was bent too far out of shape. A couple of hinges needed a bit of bending to get the doors to line up nicely.

There have been lots of non-car-related things to do in the last couple of weeks, so not as much progress as I would have liked.

Last weekend I sprayed a coat of polyester filler (essentially liquid bondo) on the roof area, maybe a millimeter thick.  This gave it a nice uniform surface for the final sanding.  I was able to sand one side, and that side’s filler work is now 99% done.

Also last week, I used chemical stripper to strip most of the paint from the driver’s door.  Doors are easy to strip- you just put the door on sawhorses, pour some stripper on, and smear it around.  I got all the paint of the smooth, flat surfaces.  I’ll use soda blasting to remove the rest.

The door has a dented-in area where the handle goes, and I started using my stud welder to pull it out.

Over the last several days, I stapled the chicken wire over the roof opening. I got it mostly attached with old-fashioned staples, the kind you hammer in, but the roof wood is very hard and many of the staples got bent over as I tried to hammer them in. Then I remembered that we had a small, cheap air nailer that also took staples. Its staples were pretty light-weight, and I thought that they would just get smashed flat. But it turned out that the stapler drove them in perfectly. So I pulled out most of the old-style staples and re-did the job with the air stapler, which was about ten times faster than using a hammer.

The wire mesh looks really good; it’s smoothly and evenly stretched across the roof.  Once I get the roof area almost ready for its final paint I’ll put the padding and vinyl on.  It’s best to install it before painting, because the vinyl gets attached with zillions of carpet tacks, and there’s a lot of hammering involved.

I also repaired the trim rail that goes across the body just under the windshield.  It is attached to the body with a bunch of caged nuts that are spot-welded to it, and several of them got destroyed when I took it off the car two or three years ago.   A few months ago I had removed the mangled remains of the old nets, and this week I got some replacment caged nuts and tack-welded them in place.

I did some more body filler, mostly little bits in places where an earlier application wasn’t quite right. The roof panels and some dinged areas around the rear quarter windows are almost there.

I also bought some good made-in-USA chicken wire for the foundation of the roof area.

I also bought a piece of fabric to serve as anti-squeak materiel between the roof ribs and the chicken wire. I cut it into long 1-inch-wide strips and glued a strip to the top of each roof rib.

Finally I bolted the roof ribs into place. I had fitted them, drilled the holes, and bought the hardware a while ago, so it took just a few minutes to install them.

Now it is no longer possible to stand up inside the car and work on the roof from inside. But after I install the chicken wire, I can mask the roof opening with plastic sheet for priming and painting, without having to worry about the cat trying to walk on the sheet and fall through it…

In the last couple of days I put some filler in those dings on the two back doors. Maybe I’ll get a chance to put on a coat of primer-surfacer, but it’s supposed to be rainy for the next several days.

I also fixed a loose window channel in one of the front doors. I had to stick my MIG welder gun deep into the door to weld it where the channel’s mounting bracket had cracked.

I really ought to get back to working on the roof and gutters, and get them completely finished and ready to be painted.

I got a lot done over the last few days. The weather was very nice, which helped.

I applied a coat of liquid polyester filler to the rain gutters. This stuff is supposed to be sprayed on, but I tried applying it with a foam brush. It did not go on especially smoothly, so I’ll have to sand off quite a bit and spray on another coat. The rain gutters had gotten pretty bashed up and last year I spent a lot of time working the metal closer to the correct shape, but they still have a lot of dings, especially the left side. If replacements were available I would have replaced them along time ago.

I applied the phosphoric acid metal treatment to the second rear door, and after letting both rear doors dry for a day in the hot dry weather, I painted them with epoxy primer. Over the next few days I should be able to apply body filler to a few small dings and put a coat of primer-surfacer on them, and they will be almost ready for the final paint job!

Finally, I bead-blasted all the door hinges and painted them with epoxy primer. I also ordered the special screws for attaching the hinges to the body. Once those arrive, I can mount the hinges to the body and the rear doors to the hinges, and the car will start looking more like a car again, and less like a pile of scrap…

Over the last week or so, I’ve been slowly doing some of the remaining filler work.   I’ve been busy, and the temperature has varied between too cold and too hot, so progress has been slow.  I started applying some filler to the rain gutters to get them smoother.  It was really hot and dry today, so I took one of the rear doors that I stripped last fall, and applied a phosphoric acid metal treatement to get rid of some rusty bits.  It’s also supposed to be hot and dry tomorrow, so I should be able to do the other rear door then.  As soon they are dry, I can spray them with primer.

I was on vacation for a week, but before I left I put some filler on a few places that needed it, such as the welded seam of the patch panel that runs across the bottom rear of the body. It’s cold and rainy, so it may be a couple of days before I can continue.

I went to “Cowtown” last Sunday. It is a big antique car swap meet that is held this time every year in southern NJ. There are lots of guys with old parts (mostly 50-70s stuff) and lots of vendors with tools and supplies.

I got:

1: A very nice headlight shell without any internal parts for $10. One of my headlights is pretty dented, but has good internal parts, so this was a lucky find.

2: A two bladed fan for $10. This is a bit more authentic than the 4-blade fan I currently have.

3: An apparently NOS 1st-reverse transmission gear, also for $10. My transmission is already redone and works OK, but someday a spare gear will come in handy.

4: A bunch of sandpaper.

5: On the way out, I somewhat impulsively got an original radiator for $50. The fins were a little banged up, but it looked potentially usable.

In the evening, I bead-blasted the fan, and cold not find any cracks or damage. I also filled up the radiator, and it did not seem to leak. The car’s current radiator looks and works fine, but it’s aftermarket, not original. So at some point I may install the new one.

A while back I realized that the engine was idling really rich, even with the adjustment set as lean as possible.  It seemed to be so rich that the #1 cylinder was not even firing most of the time.

So a couple of days ago I removed the carb jets (a 10-minute operation) and flow-tested them.  This involves connecting the jet via a plastic tube to a water reservoir mounted exactly 36″ above the jet, and measuring how rapidly water flows out the jet.  I threw together a test rig that resembled a hospital IV setup (or an enema bag) using a plastic gallon jug, some rubber and vinyl tubing, etc.

It turned out that the idle jet was way oversize, and was flowing  60% more than spec.  The main jet flowed about 40% under spec.  These were reproduction parts installed by a previous owner, and clearly they were not made to OEM specifications!

The fix was to solder the jet openings closed and re-drill the openings to the correct size.  This involved a bit of trial-and-error, re-testing the flow rate and trying different size drill bits.  I re-installed the jets (another 10-minute operation) and afterward the engine ran much better, firing evenly on all four cylinders.