1931 Ford Model A
Added 4/20/08
Bill and I finally had a Friday where we could both spend the day working on the
'31 Coupe upgrades. Below are the latest photos of the damage we did to
the project.
Thanks to my buddies Dave and Tom for coming out to offer encouragement (and to
help out a little too). Thanks for shooting these photos Dave.
If you're curious, I bought the rear suspension parts from Speedway Motors. The kit came with everything needed to attach the new suspension and coil over shocks to the car. The only modification we made was to change the way the shocks attach to the car by fabricating our own custom upper and lower shock attach brackets rather than use the parts that the kit had.
Bill taught me how to use the MIG welder today. I did the easy stuff like
welding the brackets for the radius
rods onto the rear axle while it wasn't underneath the car. This is Bill
getting ready to weld the hard stuff that
had to be done underneath the car.
This is the front attach bracket for the radius rod. If you look at the
far side exhaust pipe you can see where I installed
the spark plug for the flame throwers. The red thingy is the aooga horn,
I know that 4 links work better,
but I just like the look of the radius rod setup better on this car. There
are threaded joints at the ends of the rods
and at both ends of the panhard bar so this suspension setup will be completely
adjustable.
This will be a drastic improvement over the old rear suspension which was welded
in place.
This is the rear end of the radius rod and the bracket that I welded onto the
axle.
Not a bad looking weld for my first time.
Another view of how the radius rod attaches to the axle. We are now
mocking up how we are going to install
the adjustable coil over shocks.
I figured as long as the car was out of service for awhile that now would be a
good time to pull the transmission
and send it out for overhaul. That's the flywheel on the left and my new
Gennie Shifter in the middle falling
out of the hole in the floorboard. Note that we didn't remove the
transmission until we had taken all the measurements
and started the rear suspension installation so that we wouldn't screw up the
drive shaft length.
Bill and I put our heads together and came up with a design and then fabricated
new lower shock mounts
which can be seen in this picture between the shock and the tire.
Like I said before, Bill got to do the difficult welds. This is him
welding on the newly fabricated left shock mount.
I did get to grind on the new mounts after Bill welded them up to make them
pretty looking though.
That's me on the left and Bill's dad on the right checking out his handiwork.
Bill is jacking up the car so I can pull the jack stands out from underneath so
we can test this baby out.
I bounced up and down on the hitch and everything flexed up and down just like
it's supposed to.
Those coil over shocks sure look good and it will be nice to be able to adjust
their height too.
I do believe it's time for a beer after a hard days work. Stay tuned for
further updates.