1931 Ford Restoration Diary

I finally got around to applying the “bugs” to the window glass. Those are the little safety-glass markings etched into each piece. About a year ago I got a special kit that included a custom-made stencil with the correct “Ford XXX Plate” marking for May 1931. The stencil is stuck to each window pane in the correct location, and special glass etching cream is applied to it for a minute or so. It’s sort of nerve-wracking: if you put the stencil on wrong or get the cream where it doesn’t belong, you would have to remove the glass from the car and go through a lot of trouble to polish out the mistake.

I finished one little project that I started several months ago. The front and rear bumper bars have a lot of peeling chrome and rust, and re-plating them will be expensive. So I had decided to try a “temporary” hack: I took the rear bumper bars, bead-blasted them, sprayed on several coats of rattle-can primer, wet sanded them, and sprayed them with “chrome in a can” paint. It took more time than I expected, but the cost was about 20x cheaper than actual chrome plating. I bolted them onto the car, along with some repro bumper clamps. It looks nice from a distance, but wouldn’t fool anyone close up.

I got the floorboards finished and installed- it was just a matter of tacking on the weather stripping and painting and riveting on the mounting brackets. I also finally finished buffing the zinc door sills. Once that was done, it was easy to screw them in place.

I’ve been busy, and on vacation. One thing I managed to do was to make a new set of front floorboards. I cut them out of a piece of 3/4″ plywood from Home Depot, which was a bit nicer than the original plywood. Fortunately I had a set of detailed plans to work from. After cutting them out and drilling a few holes, I painted them with a mixture of black wood stain and black paint, which looks a lot like the tarry glop that Ford originally used. I still need to attach some weatherstripping material and mounting brackets to them.

I got the last door panel (rear right) installed. It took a couple of iterations of the peel-cut-glue technique to get it to fit. I had originally tried to install this panel about a year ago, only to discover that it was oversize and would need trimming.

I replaced the front brake rod return springs with the improved late ’31 style. The old ones had lost their springiness (or never had any), and the brake rods were rattling. I also need to do the rears, but that is more work. Working on the brakes was much easier back before the splash shields and fenders were installed!
Finally, I fixed some dents in the cowl trim band, buffed it, and installed it. There were a couple of dents that I couldn’t remove, but after buffing the band it looked all shiny and pretty, and you have to really look carefully to notice the remaining dents.

I’m not sure what I will do next. The weather has been extremely mild, and maybe I can resume painting soon. I could take care of the front bumper braces, the headlamp bar, the horn, and the grille.

I installed the driver’s door panel and one rear door panel. It was a hassle to install the handle and window crank on the driver’s door, because the reproduction panels are thicker than the originals, and it was hard to push the handles on far enough to get the retaining pins to fit. This was less of a problem for the rear door, but that panel was excessively oversize, and I had to peel back the fabric and trim about 1/4″ from the top edge. This has been a constant issue while installing the interior kit- I have spent a lot more time re-working the panels than actually installing them.

After that, I installed the interior carpets.  For the front, all I had to do was attach a few snaps to underside of the carpet, but for the rear I had to make some holes in the carpet for the seat belt mounting bolts.

Finally, I soda-blasted the door sills.  They are zinc stampings that had gotten painted at one time.  Before I can actually install them, I need to hammer out some dents and polish them.

I bolted on the other spare fender, after removing a bit of bondo that was preventing it from fitting properly. Then I bolted on the headlights and horn, and the car was more respectable-looking than it had been in many years. The biggest flaw is the lack of bumpers and the peeling paint on one spare fender. So I decided to introduce it to society by driving around downtown Princeton a couple of times, and visiting the supermarket.

After that, I started preparing the driver’s door interior panel for installation. I attached the windlace to the front edge of the door, and started installing the mounting clips to the panel.

All I’ve done in the last four weeks is attach a spare fiberglass front fender to the right side of the car. This was more complicated than I expected, since the set of fender bolts I ordered were not at all correct for this model. I ended up using mostly hardware-store nuts and bolts, but at least they were the correct type and size. It took quite a bit of fiddling to get all the joints and holes lined up properly. Maybe in the next week or so I can get my other spare fender installed on the other side, and go for a drive.

To get the doors lined up nicely, I had put a couple of extra shims between the frame and the right side of the firewall. Some time later I noticed that this caused the firewall to be a bit crooked relative to the radiator, which in turn made the hood a bit crooked and the gap between the hood and the cowl a little uneven. So I re-did some of the shims, so that the firewall and radiator were both perfectly level, the hood properly aligned, and the doors even with each other.

Because of the holidays and the inevitable end-of-year crunch, that’s about the only thing I did to the car in the last two or three weeks. The weather has been very warm and snow (and salt) free, and if it continues like that I may bolt on my least messed-up set of front fenders and drive the car some more.

I took the original right rear fender, cleaned it off, drilled some holes in it to mount a taillight (these cars originally came with only a left taillight), and bolted it to the car. I put some duct tape over the rusty inner edges, so they would not scratch up the nice paint on the body. Then I installed a right taillight, and now the turn signals work fine. While driving the car, I realized that I was always forgetting to turn the signal off after making a turn, since it does not automatically flip off when you re-center the steering wheel, like more modern factory supplied turn signals do. So I added a little buzzer to the circuit, to remind me.