Next up, I need to build some cross pieces for the chassis table to locate and hold the frame in place. This will allow me to weld the frame crossmembers to the frame.

Here’s some pictures of the progress.

In the mean time, I can get started on the front section of the frame rails.

Starting with the outside shape of the front frame rail I first cleaned off any oil residue using some carburetor cleaner and then hit it with my Dual-Action (DA) sander. This puts a scratch coat on the steel and helps paint bond to it better. Plus it just looks better this way.

First task was to weld the captive nuts to the inside of the frame part.

I realized after I welded the nuts on the frame, that I should have transferred some holes onto the outside part of the frame. When I’m building this frame I’m going to build a truss like structure between the two axles. This will help strengthen the frame where it needs it most. I drew this in my drawing as a series of triangles that are inside the frame between the front and rear axle center lines. Because this is inside the frame, I can weld the truss structure to the outside of the frame, but it’s going to hard to weld it to the inside since it would cover up the truss structure. What I decided to do was to cut out a series of holes where the truss structure would be visible. This would then allow me to weld the inside part of the frame to the internal truss structure. What I needed to do is to make sure the truss structure was in the proper location. What I needed to do was to transfer punch these holes from the inside part of the frame to the interior side of the outside frame part. Since I had already welded up the captive nuts, this took a little extra effort to get it done.

Transfer Punching Truss Holes

Internal Truss Structure

But before I could get to the internal truss structure, I had to weld the top and bottom pieces to the outside frame rail part. But before I could weld up the top and bottom pieces, I needed to drill some holes for the front bumper mount.

Front Bumper Mount

Two of the holes for the front bumper will be inside the frame rail, so I need to weld up some more captive nuts.

Front Bumper Captive Nuts

Now that I had to top part of the front frame section ready, I could start to weld it to the outside part.

Prepping Front Frame Top

Top and bottom welded up.

Front Frame Top and Bottom

As I was welding up the top and bottom parts, I was having a hard time keeping the parts perpendicular to one another. Through the thickest part of the frame rail, it just be 6 inches wide. After I finished tack welding the top and bottom pieces I was about 1/4 inch off. I made up a little tool to push the sides away and then use the truss structure to help the frame keep its shape until the inside piece can be added.

Spreader Tool

After I welded up the truss structure I gave it a coat of Weld Through primer.

Primer Applied to Frame Front

Here’s what the part started out looking like:

Bed Mount Cutout

How I designed this part was that I needed the part to end up being 2 1/8 inches wide. With it being made out of 1/8 inch plate, this would result in a 1 7/8 inside dimension. Using a formula I found on the web

Bend Allowance = Angle * (Pi / 180) * (Radius + K-Factor * Thickness)

I needed to bend the material 90 degrees and using a 1/4″ radius of 1/8″ thick material. Using these values the formula looks like:

0.278 = 90 * (3.14 / 180) * (.125 + .42 * .125)

Where 3.14 is the value of Pi, 0.125 is the decimal value of 1/8″. I’m using the inside radius of 1/8″ and material thickness of 1/8″ and using the K-Factor of .42. K-Factor is the portion of the material where there will be stretching or shrinking.

Solving for this results in a distance of 0.278 inches. This is close to 9/32 inches or a little bit more than 1/4 of an inch.

How I refected this in my drawing was that I drew the inside shape, then added the bend allowance and then drew the side shape. Because I don’t have a press brake and this piece is about 5 inches long, I made a 1/8 wide cutout and left two tabs about 1/4″ wide.

This allows me to bend the part by hand and then weld up the edge. Here’s how it looks as I start to bend up the part.

Bed Mount First Bend

Flipping it over I can bend up the other side.

Bed Mount Sides Bend

All that’s remaining is the top part. Here I didn’t make a relief cut, I should have, and I did put in a relief cut for the side radius, but I put it a bit too high so it didn’t really help me make this bend. After a lot of hammering here’s what the part looks like.

Bed Mount Fully Bent

Here’s how the part compares to the original:

Bed Mount Comparison

After I was done with welding up the part and grinding the welds, I wanted to see how close I was to my original specs. I got the radius spot on at 1/4 inch, but I’m about 1/8 inch too wide. It doesn’t matter for this part, but I’ve figured out where I’ve gone wrong with my measurements and I’ll correct it in my TurboCAD drawing.

Bed Mount Bend Radius

Bed Mount Dimensions

Bed Mount Corrections

Rear Cab Mount

The top version is designed to be bent in a press. In this part I’ve used the “bend allowance” to locate the two holes in the side wings. The two holes that are vertically aligned, these are the holes that bolt to the frame rail. The cab will bolt through the holes in the wings. These holes in the wings need to align perfectly.

The first version I’ll bend up to see if I measured it correctly. The second version without the holes in the wing, I’ll just bend up, and then drill the hole through the two side pieces. This way I’ll make sure the holes line up.

The third version is a weld up one and that’s the project I did next.

Weldable Rear Cab Mount

Here I’ve layed the part out on my worktable. The side pieces are held upright and square to the table by using two small magnets. The aluminum square at the top of the photo is used to align the top edges of the 3 parts. Running through the two side pieces is a 3/8″ center punch, just to make sure I aligned the holes.

After welding it together, here’s what I ended up with. Not bad.

Welded Rear Cab Mount

I’m not sure you can tell in the photo, but here is mistake #2. The holes that allow this part to be bolted to the frame, are off by about and  1/8 of an inch. I’ll have to check how the cab bolts to this part to see if there is enough play or if I’ll have to remake this part.

You can see in the photo how the original piece is bent into a c-channel shape along it’s length, and then bent perpendicular to establish the tabs that were originally riveted to the frame. What I was up against was that I had to make sure that when I bent this up, that the holes had the correct width spacing as well as vertical spacing. I found a formula online about how to calculate what’s called “bend allowance”, but I wasn’t sure I could get this absolutely right, so I made it up into 5 pieces that would be welded together.

First step was to weld the c-channel shape by welding the side pieces to the top:

Body Mount Tack Welded

Body Mount Partially Welded

Even after all my careful measurements, I still made a mistake. Here’s one of the tabs which allow the body mount to be bolted to the frame rail. I’m not sure where I messed up but you can see I was way off. I’ll have to make this part from hand and not used the laser cut parts.

Body Mount Oops

Here I’ve bolted part of the body mount to the original frame rail. The next steps are to bolt the two tab pieces to the frame rail and then tack weld the tabs to the body mount side pieces. This will ensure that the part will bolt back up to the frame rail. Assuming I have the measurements right on the laser cut pieces. As I write this I think I’ll wait to bolt it up to my manufactured part instead of trying to bolt it to the original. Once I’ve tacked it together on my new frame rail I can double check it against the original to see how far off I was.

Body mount bolted to frame rail

When I started off writing this post I was going to go into detail about what’s happened over the last 6 months or so, but this just became too much work.

Suffice to say I’m starting over.

What happened was that I cut built my own frame by cutting pieces out of 1/8″ steel plate using my plasma cutter. Thing were going along well until I put too much heat into the welds and ended up warping the frame rails. I thought I could straighten them out with some heat from the oxy torch but not to my satisfaction, or more likely, I don’t have the necessary skills to do this.

So I’ve decided to start over, but this time I’m going to put a little more thought into it.

Over the last few months I’ve been corresponding with a fellow car nut from Ireland who is also interested in building a ’56 Ford F-100. Problem is, he doesn’t have access to an original frame. Ian turned me on to a builder Paul Horton ( www.welderseries.com ) who has an interesting way of making parts for your hotrod.

These little tabs on each piece help locate the parts relative to each other. Kind of like the paper models I used to put together where you put Tab A into Slot B.

Taking inspiration from this approach I set about making some CAD drawing of the ’56 F100 frame I do have. I started off tracing the outline of the frame onto a sheet of 1/4″ 4′ x 8′ plywood. Since the frame is almost 16′ long I had to trace it as a front and rear section. From this outline I could start taking dimensions to holes that I needed to keep. I’d center punch the hole into the plywood and then take measurements from this indentation. What was really a challenge was all the curves on the frame. I really struggled with this until I remember some high school geometry around tangents and circle radius being perpendicular to the circumference. What I did marked every frame transition from a flat part into a curved part. At this transition, I would draw a perpendicular line or ray. When the curve stopped, I would draw another perpendicular line or ray. Where these two lines met, that would be the centerpoint of the arc. I could then measure this distance and the angle to know how to draw this arc in the TurboCAD.

Here you can see what the plywood ended up looking like when I was through (it’s hard to read all that’s there):

From this tracing I started transfering the dimensions into TurboCAD. After spending several weeks doing it over and over again I came out with something that I felt was close enough to what I needed. And after checking with a local steel company (www.discountsteel.com) around how much it would cost to have this cut out, I sent the plans off.

Today I picked up the parts and boy does this look fantastic. Here are some pictures showing how the front and rear sections will go tother as well as a few pictures for other brackets that are used on the frame.

Frame Front Section

Frame Rear Section

For some reason the rear section messed up. I ended up with two inside parts instead of an inside/outside part. I checked the drawing I sent and both pieces are there. I’m not sure how this happened. I’ll have to check with the DiscountSteel to see if they had to make any modifications to my drawing.

Frame Fishmouth

Here you can see how the front and rear sections will be joined together. I’d be hard pressed to be able to produce this accurate of a cut using the plasma cutter by hand.

Weldable Body Mount

The main body mount to the frame. I’ll go into details on why I made this as 5 pieces instead of one in a future post.

I have a 30 gallon Craftsman compressor that I bought a few years ago for the house. When I moved into the shop I took the compressor with me with the idea that I would eventually replace it with a larger compressor.

When my dad and I had our shop we had a 5 HP 60 gallon compressor and a media blast cabinet. It was great but the compressor wasn’t a true 5 HP and it would struggle to keep up with the compressor, or keep a dual-action sander running. So I was looking for a real 5 HP or larger.

I wanted a Champion compressor, but those things are really expensive and buying new would really cut into my truck budget. But since Karen turned me on to Craigslist, I thought I’d look for a slightly used one.

Boy did I luck out. Not long after I started looking, a used Champion came up for sale on Craigslist. It was in Garland and was just refurbished by an air compressor company and looked to be in great shape. I took an hour off for lunch with the idea of driving over there and making what I thought was an obscene offer. Well they took my offer and now I had to get my new compressor over to the shop in Fort Worth.

When I got to the shop I was able to locate a neighbor who had a fork lift and they were kind enough to unload it for me in the shop.

After pricing what a new oxy/acetylene torch was going to run, Karen started looking for me on Craigslist. She found a guy in Cresson, TX who was selling one. He also had a 18” Delta Drill press for sale which I also needed. I only had this small 10” drill press at the shop and while it was functional, it just didn’t have enough oomph to do what I needed it to do.

Since Monday I was off for Marlin Luther King Day, we drove out to Cresson to pick up the new tools.

He told me he was near the “old Pate Museum” and I asked why he used “old”. He told me that the family has shut down the museum at the end of 2010. A couple of months back I was thinking about going out to visit the Pate Museum. I remember going to Pate with my family when they used to have the Pate Swap Meet held out there. I must have spent a lot of summers in my childhood going to Pate. It was always my favorite swap meet and it must have been my dad’s because I remember us going numerous times.

We picked up the tools and dropped them off at the shop before heading home.

My neighbor Jaime came over and we replaced the hood hinges and put the hood back on the truck.

The previous owner told me that the hood hinges were for the 53-55 F-100 and by looking at them side-by-side, I would have to agree that they are not the same.

I purchased these last year along with the door locks and striker plates. These needed fine thread 5/16 nuts which I didn’t have, so off to Arrow Bolt & Supply to pick some up.

While I was there I decided to pick up some nylon (locking) nuts as well. (man I really need to take more pictures for my blog posts)

We mounted the hinges and started to hang the hood when we ran into problems. The hood has captive nuts where the hood bolts connect the hinge to the hood, but over the years I guess they had rusted but someone in the past had cut out the captive nuts.

Taking the hood off again I took some fender washers and welded the 5/15 nuts to them (picture?) and then welded it to the hood (pictures?). After dressing up the welds we were then able to attach the hood.

Here’s where we ended up today.

So over the Christmas holidays I worked on the truck trying to get it to pass state inspection. I’ve been carrying tags and insurance on it since I purchased it, might as well finish the last few steps to make it street legal.

On the first day back at the shop my plan was to focus on getting the truck running. When I bought the truck it was running but the owner wanted to keep his carburetor so over the last year I had picked up an Edelbrock 1406. This is a mild carb with an electronic choke. It was easy getting it installed but then I ran into issues with the throttle cable.

I didn’t have the fittings to connect the existing throttle cable with the new carb, so began a search to get all the parts I needed. After several months I had purchased a Lokar Throttle Cable, Lokar Throttle Bracket, Lokar Kick Down Cable for the Turbo 350 transmission and everything mounted, but I was having problems with the throttle petal. It turns out that what I thought was original was in fact the throttle petal from the 1970ish Chevy that the engine/tranny and suspension came out of.

I’ve tried to modify the throttle petal to fit, but I just don’t like the way it mounts and it was affecting the throttle by binding and keeping the throttle return springs from doing their job.

Anyway, while I still have this throttle issue to work out I met one of my shop neighbors. He’s a mechanic and agreed to give me a hand getting the truck to idle correctly. He messed with the mixture screws and the idle adjustment screw as well as timing to get the old 350 running fairly well.

Now I was getting motivated, I had the engine running where it would drop into idle allowing me to put the truck into gear, that’s when I pressed on the brake petal and realized I had no breaks, er brakes.

Jaime, my neighbor, and I talked and we worked out a deal where he’d replace the front brakes. It’s been a while since I worked on drum brakes and while I felt I could have replaced the brakes, I didn’t have the tools and I really needed to make some progress on the frame rail jig.

So while I worked on the frame rail jig, Jaime worked on replacing the front drum brakes. He did this in short order and when it came time to bleed the brakes, we just couldn’t get any fluid out of the bleeders. Trouble-shooting this we realized the flex-lines were bad, so back to the parts store to buy new ones. After arriving we again tried to bleed the brakes – and failed. Trouble-shooting some more we realized the master cylinder was bad. You guessed it, back to the parts store. This time we were finally able to get the front brakes bled and I could now drive the truck in and out of the shop.

The next day since I had a running and driving truck I also had a truck with 3 flats, or slow leaks and the one good tire had sat in the brake fluid from when the brake cylinders went out and I didn’t like the look of that tire. So taking the 4 wheels off, I went to Discount Tires and had 4 new tires mounted and balanced. I’m not going to use the Centerlines on the truck when I’m finished with it, so I just bought some general tires to get me around.

Now things are really starting to come together, until the next day. Went in that morning and noticed that there was water all over the floor. Jaime came over and we went over the engine, we noticed that the coolant was more mud, than water. So we took off the lower hose and flushed the radiator and the engine. Man what a mess. It must have ran for 5 to 10 minutes or so before clear liquid was coming out. So now we were looking at coolant and a lower radiator hose. When flushing the engine we took off the thermostat housing and noticed that it didn’t have a thermostat. Man why are people so cheap. These things are only a few bucks. So off to the parts store to purchase a lower radiator hose, coolant and a thermostat. Also decided to replace the plugs since the previous owner was using a Holley 750 on the old 350 and it was just running too rich and had fouled the plugs.

Once we replaced the lower radiator hose, put in a new thermostat and filled the radiator with coolant, we started the engine and got it up to temperature. This is when it started to squirt out a stream of hot water out of the thermostat housing.

That’s right, back to the parts store for a thermostat housing and while I was there a new radiator cap. One more try. This time everything held and it was looking and sounding much better. Or so I thought.

The next morning, another pool of water greeted me when I went to the shop. Jaime again came over and we traced it down to a leaking water pump. Should have figured with all the mud (rusty water) that came out of the engine when we did a flush.

I talked it over with Jaime and we agreed on a price and he would replace the water pump and while he had it up on his lift he’d look at the rear brakes. I could have replaced the water pump myself but since he had a lift and I was really wanting to get further along with the frame jig, I decided to pay him to replace the water pump. This went without a hitch and the next day I got the truck back with the parts replaced.

Now I’m thinking this is getting close to the point where I can get it inspected. That is until I remembered that the doors were held in place by a screen door eye and hook. No way was this thing going to pass. Good thing that over the last year I’ve owned the truck I was aware of this issue and had purchased new Door Locks and Striker Plates from Mac’s.

Here’s some before shots of what he locks looked like.

There should be a star shaped gear on that gaping hole. This is what keeps the door closed.

I ended up pulling out the entire side window mechanism. I didn’t need to do this to replace the door locks, but I’m eventually going to replace the windows with single glass and not the glass/vent window combination that is original.

I’m not going to mess with the windows now. I don’t want to get too far ahead working on stuff that I’ll just have to take off when I really start working on the body, that is, once I get the new frame built. For now, I just want to do enough to make the truck safe to drive and street legal.

That about catches me up with the current state of the project. I’ll do a better job of posting more frequent updates to keep these from being so long.