1932 Ford Roadster Part III: Progess Continues

In our last post we’d tacked together the headlight bar, then left for a couple days to attend the GoodGuy’s West Coast Nationals. Upon returning to the shop, we still liked the headlight placement, so with Todd’s blessing, Gary welded it up and ground it smooth.

We made another little change at the same time, and it made a big difference.  When Todd’s roadster first arrived, we just weren’t feeling the front-wheel-and-brake-drum set-up. We felt there was too much drum exposed, so we swapped the 4 inch wide Coker wheels for a pair of 4 ½ inch wide OEM Ford truck wheels. Check the new wheel and brake combo in the photo below versus the earlier photo below that. An extra half inch of cover made all the difference.

When the car arrived there were also issues with the front suspension.

The car had come out of a quality shop in Southern California, so we think it’d just been hastily assembled for its trip to Santa Cruz. The front leaves looked like a row of hillbilly teeth and, when bolted up snug, put a helluva bind in the shackles. We disassembled everything, cleaned up and beveled the ends of the leaves, straightened the shackles, adjusted the wishbone length — and eliminated the problem.

We also mounted the taillights, along with a couple of panels under the dash: One for the turn signal, another for a power port, courtesy light and remote battery-disconnect button. We completed the clean-up of the floorboards, mounted the steering column, and modified Todd’s original Deuce column drop to make the steering wheel locking mechanism functional.

Gary machined a fuel block for Todd’s two 97’s, then fabbed up a beautiful bracket to mount his oil filter canister to the firewall.

Gary’s wife Jenny loved the big, polished Hildebrandt canister – but felt it could be put to a much better use: