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Posted By Discussion Topic: Howdy, from a 'new' 47 Super Deluxe owner -- page: 1 2 3     zeke3 10-15-2021 @ 8:04 AM reply profile send p.m. Member Posts: 77 Joined: Apr 2011 I love your Halloween decorations and the stories of your rescue operations. Thanks, Funeral Director 10-15-2021 @ 8:17 AM reply profile send p.m. Member Posts: 14 Joined: Oct 2021 My pleasure, Zeke! Funeral Director 10-15-2021 @ 9:31 AM reply profile send p.m. Member Posts: 14 Joined: Oct 2021 By now, most of you know that the timing on the matter of the '47 was fortuitous because IF were we successful in getting it out and, IF a few other necessary things fell into place I would have something to add to the annual Halloween display. After which time, I would have an engine to play with without any guilt whatsoever if it turned out to be a klinker. Besides, one can appreciate a car even if it's not a runner. The same applies to engines. If the engine is junk, there's no reason why it can't be tidied up and made presentable. Who doesn't love the aesthetic of a flathead Ford V8? So, here we are, with all this potential goodness, firmly pinned to the ground by a tree, and as it turned out, a few OTHER surprises as well. This sort of endeavor begins with sizing things up. We would require shovels, picks, rakes, certainly a chain saw and a variety of jacks. Hi-Lift jacks, bottle jacks, low-profile floor jacks were all used, along with any number of large wood blocks which were employed to keep things up in the air. By the way, if you happen to have a motorsports business in your area; one that sells things like CanAms and such, those often arrive at the dealership with large center cut wood blocks as part of their dunnage. The dealership in my area can't wait to be rid of those and I'm always happy to take a few as they are a very necessary part of the hobby. Our number one effort would be to preserve the wretchedness of the car. I know that sounds crazy but that was really all the car had going for it at the moment. Our plan of attack was to cut the tree (obviously), jack the car up somewhat, dig out the wheels, remove them and put wheels on the car; wheels I pilfered from one of my rollers, then pull it out. But first we had to get into the car because things like dealing with the possibly the car might still be in gear and having access to the steering DO make the already difficult job of removal far easier. Naturally, it was all locked up....or so it seemed. The hang up turned out to be rust upon rust and that required using both the inner and outer handles simultaneously to get them unlatched. Of course, at this point I didn't know that. So, assuming the doors were actually locked, I did what any good former cop would do and made an effort to get in the traditional way....through a vent window. All the rubber in the window moldings and door seals had long since turned to plastic so I chipped some away in order to make an effort to unlatch the vent. During a rest period I realized that it had not occurred to me to look in the trunk. The trunk latch would not turn but the lid came up with just a little resistance. The final remnants of rust gave way and....Oh look! A room with a view....of the ground!...AND the interior of the car because all the material on the back seat was g-o-n-e, GONE. What WAS there in the trunk was a rather good looking spare (no longer roadable but a rather lovely display piece) and the heads for the engine! So, with a big grin on my face for having located the heads, I temporarily abandoned my efforts at the vent window. With a longish steel rod with a ring at one end, I was able to run it through the springs of the seat back and manipulate one of the window crank handles and get a window rolled down just enough to be able to work two poles across the breadth of the car and manipulate a vent window catch open. From there, it was all downhill. I got another window opened fully and then got the doors open, one by one. This was not my first rodeo. There are two takeaways from this. The first thing was something I already knew and that is, vehicles in this condition can and WILL fight you. The best way to fight back and achieve your goals is to look for weaknesses and exploit them. Sometimes it's better to let the car guide your efforts rather than stubbornly follow your own plan. Fellas, there is almost always more than one way to skin a cat. I would not have been further ahead to pursue my original plan of getting into the car through the vent window. The second thing is to examine not only the top and sides of the car, but also the UNDERSIDE. Had I seen the condition of the trunk floor I would have been in the car far earlier. Since the door panels were toast, it was easy to access the workings of the door catches and with generous doses of PB Blaster I worked the latches (and hinges) until they moved freely. I deal with a great many rusted things and penetrants are an absolute necessity. These small victories keep a project moving forward. Rome wasn't built in a day and the car had been sitting there for 60 years. If I didn't succeed one day, I would return and succeed the next. Here's the set up for what comes next. The ground in the area where the car had been parked was rather loose which made the digging easy. It was a combination of detritus from the trees and silt from the run-off from our occasional heavy rains. What we found was, the ground was actually higher around the wheels than elsewhere on the car as they tended to captured the stuff being sluiced through that area. So we dug around the front bumper and the base of the tree. I have a bad back (from too many years of wearing body armor and battle-rattle) and the business of cutting that tree off at the base was no picnic. In fact, it was so difficult that I would cut for about a minute, then rest and I did that over and over again. Let me tell you....that tree was as hard as woodpecker lips. There was no quarter given by either of us. I just attacked, attacked and attacked until the cuttin' was done. Which reminds me, I need to send a Thank You note to the folks who make Ibuprofin. This business of freeing up the car was accomplished over a period of a week. What with time and tide, my days of working until I fall over in a bloody heap are over and it's not my age, fellas. It's the mileage! We used the Hi-Lift jacks to lift the front of the car...the idea being that this would also lift the front wheels somewhat. All it really did was allow us a little better view of the ground below the car. This view was very promising because what we found was a great many dry, grey, feathery leaves which suggests a rather dry environment, as opposed to flat, black and rotting leaves which would mean a lot of moisture under the car. That left me feeling very optimistic. We jammed the floor jack under the front axle and tried to lift the wheels out of the earth (I hate digging) and one side came up, the other did not. What th..? Hang in there. More to come! Cheers, TJ This message was edited by Funeral Director on 10-16-21 @ 8:57 AM Funeral Director 10-15-2021 @ 2:02 PM reply profile send p.m. Member Posts: 14 Joined: Oct 2021 So, there we were, at 10,000' AGL with only one parachute between the two of us..... Oh wait! Sorry...that's another story.... So, there we were with the right wheel refusing to come up out of the ground. Well, there were hundreds of little viney, rooty things entangled in the front suspension...none of it of enough consequence to really hang things up THAT much. So we (meaning, I) dug some more and uncovered a root as big around as a man's...um...thumb that had grown through one of the narrow gaps in the steel wheel. My buddy Bill took the easy side, the lucky sod! Digging out around the outside of a wheel wasn't so bad. It was INSIDE the wheel that was the real bugaboo. The car was jacked up and blocked up so there was no real danger but it was a very close, very tight space to have to work in. Having to do it over again, I would have gotten my reciprocating saw and made a slice right down into the dirt and call it a win but at that point my muses had fled the scene altogether and I was left to my own devices, armed only with stubbornness (and a shovel) to get me through. Once that root was finally cut, lifting the front of the car became a simple mathematical equation and off came the old wheels and on went the roller wheels. I will admit, they do look highly questionable but every one of them has a tube inside and that, making them round and capable of holding air, is really the only point of roller wheels. We were able to jack the car up high enough that it paid to pack the dirt back in below the tires before setting it back down now much higher and happier. The process was repeated on the rear end in far less time, we being wiser about what to expect from early buggy-style suspensions with transverse leaf springs and our also being...root-less. (Is that a word?) Suddenly we had a car that was ON the ground, rather than IN it. By this time, the car had fought us harder than the M37 ever did if you take into account all the cutting and digging. Would it roll? Could we squeak it out from between the trees? After hooking up tow-chains, cables and a sheave in order to guide the car out of the tree corral to a place of safety, Dirty Gertie got involved once again and with her motivating the poor, sad thing it moved. It ACTUALLY moved! Yes, for the first time in SIXTY YEARS, the '47 Ford Super Deluxe made its way out of the woods and into the bright Texas sunlight....dragging its dirty little feet all the way. Finally, it was out of what would otherwise have been its grave. The wheels would not roll, or break free and roll and it was at this point, the car got its name. NAILS. As in, 'as tough as nails'....because the car certainly wasn't cutting us a single break. Plus, Nails is a heckuva lot easier than saying Forty Seven Ford Super Deluxe which is a mouthful in any language. Wheels that don't turn just aren't practical. You guessed it. More to come! Cheers, TJ This message was edited by Funeral Director on 10-16-21 @ 12:16 AM Funeral Director 10-15-2021 @ 2:14 PM reply profile send p.m. Member Posts: 14 Joined: Oct 2021 Suddenly, there was a hole in the forest where a car should have been! I know! WEIRD, huh? Funeral Director 10-15-2021 @ 4:20 PM reply profile send p.m. Member Posts: 14 Joined: Oct 2021 With Nails being moved around to the casualty collection point, things were beginning to look a little crowded. It was time to get the M37 (which is a '51 Dodge) off to it's new owner. Out with the old and in with the.... older? The M37 is destined to be parted out and those parts will support a street rod build. A M37 street rod? Well, your imagination is probably as good as mine. This is a crazy place where anything is possible and all of it is GOOD and the quality of the work is top notch. When we arrived, this 'sweet thang' was in the parking lot waiting for some small bit of work to be done. What could it possibly need?! According to the shop, very little of this 1950 Ford is not customized in some way. Cheers, TJ Funeral Director 10-15-2021 @ 5:23 PM reply profile send p.m. Member Posts: 14 Joined: Oct 2021 Meanwhile, back at the ranch... Nails hadn't magically renewed herself in any way, shape, or form. No matter how long I've been doing this and no matter how much experience I have had doing this I simply cannot return to a project like this and not expect that somehow, SOME WAY, something will be different when I return... Never happens. Nope. So when we came back to it, we were armed to the teeth with my latest genius invention which is based upon a badly damaged Ford bolt pattern rim, size 2X, WIDE. The chief difference in the freeing-the-wheels process between Nails and the M37 is that Nails has those ridiculous, in-your-face, cartoon-balloon fenders which almost preclude any notion of breaking the drums free of the brakes using my earlier method. Almost. With a 2" x 2" section of square steel tubing welded across the breadth of the wheel, we now had a pocket into which a long section of heavy gauge pipe could be inserted. If you study the picture you will see that the rim is badly bent in on one side. Why that is 'good' in this case is, anything placed in the square tubing extends outward at an angle, providing clearance for the fenders which is doubly important up front where any leverage applied makes the steering want to go hard over to one side or the other. I postulated that two fat guys applying their weight to the end of said longish pipe would, thereby, be exerting enough force that the rust bond would surely be broken and all would be well once again. I am told Archimedes said something about having a lever and moving the world. So far as I know, he did NOT say one single thing about the quality of the lever. Ours just bent. Que the long, sad trombone! Womp-Womp-Womp-Wommmmmmmp. I can tell you this. I commented upon the quality of OUR lever. I surely did....and it is not repeatable here. But, in the plus column, we already had proof of concept, having achieved good results with the M37, albeit in a vastly overpowering fashion, while hooked to big Budd rims that are nearly indestructible. And, we had my lovely new wheel tool thingy. The fact is, we just didn't know how to use it yet. So, we pulled the darned thing off and ran back over to my place for Plan B and I fabricated a new method of putting horsepower, rather than manpower, to the wheel. I used the same pipe but far shorter, with a cast off shackle from the M37 welded to the end. This would be inserted into one end of the square tubing. Since the pipe was obviously willing to bend if it was working alone, I took a long section of jack hammer bit, welded on another shackle and inserted it into the other end of the square tubing and into the pipe. Now, we had a really serious piece of metal in there which, if it did not work out, could be removed for Plan C....whatever that might be. For just a moment, consider all the work we are doing for this cr*ppy old car. Now imagine what I would be willing to do for something that was actually worthwhile! The following day, we returned to Nails with New-&-Improved in hand. This time I had done my homework. Courtesy of the internet, I figured how to bring the toe adjusters for the brakes up and into a neutral position. The heel adjusters had been underground and under water for 60 years and I didn't bother with them. We hooked the trucks up with chains. One truck to anchor and the other to pull. I had a feeling Gertie might murder this old car, so I left her at home. Annnnnd, the first pull bent the pipe again. Well, isn't that wonderful! But that's not what I REALLY said. So, we bailed out, went back to my place and cut that black pipe down to REAL short. Now there was nothing really sticking out of the square tubing TO bend. We returned and bolted everything back up and gave her a B---h Slap. Nothing. What th....! Now, I suppose some of you know what a B---h Slap is....and THAT wasn't working. So we gave it a FLYING B---h Slap because if Nails wasn't going to behave like a lady, we sure weren't going to treat her like one. BINGO! The wheel turned. We removed the pullers and inserted another long pipe and this time, two fat guys DID move it. We worked it back and forth and it became clear that the lower half of the drum was where the real problem was (not surprising since it was below ground) whereas the upper half was pretty clear. We repeated the process on all four wheels and one FLYING B---h Slap after another got it done. I must admit, I really hadn't envisioned us getting this far. NOW what do we do? Stay tuned! Cheers, TJ This message was edited by Funeral Director on 10-16-21 @ 9:07 AM Funeral Director 10-15-2021 @ 6:14 PM reply profile send p.m. Member Posts: 14 Joined: Oct 2021 Frank, had been monitoring our progress. He is a mechanical engineer and I'm pretty sure he had at least some appreciation for what we had been up against. On the other hand, old cars have been part of my life for many many years and between all those oldies, the four years I spent in Afghanistan and the seven county fairs I have been to, there isn't much I haven't seen. So, when Frank saw us pulling Nails in circles around his house by means of a chain, WITH ALL FOUR WHEELS ROLLING, he came off the porch to enjoy our victory laps. We rolled past Frank three times because as they say, THREE is the charm. There was also purpose behind this because whoever happened to be behind the wheel at the moment would be listening for strange, dangerous noises...like screeching metal on metal or the rumble of unhealthy wheel bearings. But, aside from the grinding of rust nodules being relentlessly reduced to dust in the brake drums, there was nothing to indicate trouble. In fact, when we finally stopped in front of Frank, Nails actually rolled backwards until the chain was taught which was a VERY good sign, if I do say so myself. Sharing in our victory, Frank grinned from ear to ear. "Frank", I said, "I think we're going to go get my tow dolly. I'm feelin' lucky." After loading up Nails, Frank sauntered over and told me he had something for me in the house. When he returned, he handed me the ancient Texas title for Nails with several registration receipts attached to it. WOW. I had not seen that coming. THANK YOU, Frank! Nails was officially mine...every little rusty, nasty, awful bit of her. We towed her over to a local restaurant for a victory dinner and parked out front in a place of honor; a horrible-looking car with an actual tree growing out of the front bumper. Certainly NOT something one sees every day. Absolutely filthy, we walked in like a couple of war-weary Spartans, washed up and ordered dinner like we owned the place. Victory dinners are not only mandatory, they are exceptionally sweet. And with just enough daylight left over, we brought Nails to her new home. Kindest regards, TJ This message was edited by Funeral Director on 10-15-21 @ 6:18 PM efv8CofAAdmin 10-16-2021 @ 7:10 AM reply profile send p.m. Administrator Posts: 411 Joined: Feb 2016 You really tell a great story. Thank you for sharing -- it made me feel like I was there watching you. Web Administrator Funeral Director 10-16-2021 @ 9:13 AM reply profile send p.m. Member Posts: 14 Joined: Oct 2021 Now I'm wondering if any of you are going to want to see the process of recovering the '49 ute. It's going to be brutal (lots of cutting tools will be involved) and photo-worthy, I assure you.... Cheers, TJ This message was edited by Funeral Director on 10-16-21 @ 9:15 AM

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