Well, we have decided to send the door hinges off to be professionally restored......
While we were able to get the pin out of this hinge, it was very dificult.... The '36 originally had 3 hinges per door. But the '40, that we got the doors off of to use on the '36, only had 2 hinges per door. We have 5 intact hinges, but one is bent.... We are SO lucky that the previous owner of our '36 somehow managed to acquire those hinges - because ALL of the original hinges from the '36 AND the '40 were ruined/unusable. Anyhow, the restorer will drill out the original brass bushings, insert *bronze* bushings and new pins. Our shop is just not set up to do this with precision. It really is critical that we get these door hung right - and we didn't want to drill new holes in new framework for old saggy hinges, then have popping and creaking and hard-closing doors.
We worked on squaring up the door openings and getting things tacked into place this weekend.......
The upright body panel pieces (on the hinge side behind the vents) Brian had to make - the driver's side was missing, and the passenger side had 3 notches cut in it for the 3 hinges of the original door. Since we decided to go with 2 hinges per side, we figured it was better to remake the piece than to repair the old one.
We got those new pieces tacked into place, then got the under-door panels tacked into place too - squaring up the lower portion of the passenger side went pretty smoothly, but the driver's side proved to be a little tricky. We will have to work on the upper portion of the openings another time. We have one piece (door reveal piece above the door) that missed the last round at the sandblasters and we didn't want to tack in the rusty icky piece, so we decided to move on and work on the floor instead.........
We got the basic structure of the flooring in - 1x2 tubing, very rigid stuff. The rear cab mounts will be near the intersection of the 1x2 tubing - there are holes already on the top of the frame there that we will utilize. We will frame the trans/driveline tunnel area with 1x1 tubing. We started on the trans tunnel, but we'll wait to show pics until we decide if it's what we want to go with. We bent a piece in our brake (we originally wanted round, but the 18g steel proved to be a challenge to bend that large of a piece!). We are still unsure about the bends on the tunnel, although I have a feeling we will probably just go with it since it will be covered anyhow. Maybe next weekend, we'll be able to get some flooring in! *Hopefully*!
We have decided to make part of the flooring out of wood - the part right by the door opening.... we have lots of maple, and originally we were thinking quilted maple, but our quilted maple is pretty light in color......... our maple burl is much richer/darker in color, so we might go with some of that instead.
This project has definitely challenged us along the way - and many more challenges to come! I have NO idea how guys build hot rods on their own! Some things take more than 2 hands for sure!
with the windshields in temporarily:
This truck sings to me......... ''You're gonna LOVE me'' :)
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