Another month has gone by and I have been very busy. I had wanted to do a update a week ago but have spent every spare minute working on the car. Things are now starting to take shape, It's even starting to look like a car.
Where do I start?
I sent the 1935 16" Ford wire wheels into Russ @ Francis Andrew Powder coating for some gloss black, Russ like always did a great job. Next it was the Wide Whitewall Firestones from Coker tire. (We are a Coker tire dealer so if you need any vintage or cool tires let us know) The tires I went with were the 7.50x16 rear and 500/5.25 x 16 front. Most people that have built a "Volks Rod" have used a 700x16 as you run into a lot of issues with anything larger. I wanted the tallest tire I could make fit so the 7.50 was for me. It stands 31" tall! Thats like a good sized Baja tire, I'll go into more detail later on how I made them fit.
Here you can see a test tire I used to see what needed to be done to make them fit.
The forward most part of the inner fender well needed to be removed and then moved forward. This gave a extra inch or so of tire clearance. The next few pic's you can see how it was cut away and a new radius was made.
Also this was the time to move up the inner rear fender mount as when you go to a IRS pan it has a higher mount . I moved mine up almost two inches, for most cars 1.5 will be enough but I need to be able to shim the vert body so the door clearance is correct and more is better in this case.
Once all that was done it was time to look at the spring plates and rear trailing arm. Due to the height of the tire I need to lower the back a lot just to have it look slightly lowered. The spring plates on the IRS car have a long tube that locates the outer torsion bar splines. This tube like with many Baja's can be a problem with large tires, so a custom set of spring plates needed to be made. I used a set of early swing(without the tube) axle plates and cut them to the IRS shape and re drilled to fit the arms. I also notched the spring plate for more travel as well as notched the torsion housing. Once all the mods were done it was off to Russ for some powder coating.
Now that all that was done it was onto the rear arms. The main reason for the IRS pan was I wanted a straight rear wheel when lowered not the "broken axle look" you get from a swing. Most think that a IRS will always stay straight when you lower it, not true. The IRS rear will start to camber in at the top once you go more that two notches. This just wouldn't look right with the open wheel look. The factory rear arms have aprox 1.5 deg of camber built into them, If you flip them upside down left to right you will get aprox 3-4deg of pos camber. Meaning once done the top of the wheel will point out at stock height but once lowered it will sit in a nutral position or straight. The only issue is you must also swap the shock towers and bump stop mounts. I also took the time to lower the bump stop mount and make it height adjustabe to allow the most amount of travel possible.
Below is a pic of a before and a after shot once powder coated.
And a shot installed.
Also above you can see the new Blank drums we have, These can be drilled to any bolt pattern. I had these re drilled to the Ford 5x5.5 and a set of custom 1.25 adapter spacers made to allow the wheels to sit in the correct location. Without the spacers the offset of the front to rear wheels would not look right.
Next it was onto welding the tail pipe holes and starting on the rear "Mini" fenders. The rear fender will give a more finished look to the rear of the car.
Without these it just looks unfinished like the fenders were removed and forgotten about. When you look at it from behind it now flows a little better, more will be done later to smooth out the transition between the apron and fenders.
The rear brakes also got some attention at this time.
Next update will be on the front suspension and the car rolling!
