Manky's Pop.

[Manky Monkey]

Mr Loon was busy welding Mrs Archie's daily driver today, so while waiting for his welding attentions, I had a play with the door mirror. These are reproduction American mirrors, ('32 Ford?). I bought them for their curved stems. They're supposed to mount to the side of a wing or door, but I wanted them to follow the curve of the headlight & tail light mounts, so the only place they could go was on the top face of the window opening.
That meant they sat at an odd angle though. Luckily we have the technology to fix that. Following Old Newbie's suggestion, I bought a couple of small blocks of 10mm thick Delrin plastic from Ebay & Loony Senior milled them into wedges. Drilled & sanded to shape, they sit into the rubber mirror bases & alter the angle so they sit level. A bit of messing about, but hopefully no-one will notice them. Mirrors might seem a trivial job at the moment, but they're required for the MOT so need to be done.
Just sat in place on the door here, ready to be bolted on.   

[Manky Monkey]

.

[steven brock]

Very slim wheels on the back iz that the final look?

[Manky Monkey]

Yup. Tall skinny crossplies. It's a 50s style hotrod, not 70s.
Fat tyres & nose down stance would be 1970s.
The 50s were all about building with what you could get hold of at the time. So mixing & matching components from different makes of car, stripping it down to just enough parts to make it stop, go & point in vaguely the right direction. Single colour paintjobs, no chrome. A hopped up jalopy.
The 60s got a bit wilder with lashings of chrome & new metalflake colours -a bit more show than go.
Customising didn't really take off here till the 70s, reputedly with the launch of the film American Graffiti -which was all about the 50s.
Here's the Pop when we first got it running. Half the bodywork still to do & running on open exhaust headers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51dS8q9zogM

[triker_Chewie]

Von Dutch : "Who can see both sides of your car at the same time? Why should they be the same?"

[Manky Monkey]

That's weird Ben -we quote that all the time in the workshop! I thought it was Ed Roth though.

[triker_Chewie]

http://www.kustomrama.com/index.php?title=Von_Dutch

[Al]

andy
is that heat pipe we can see on the back

[The North]

It is getting there now. .

[Manky Monkey]

"Who can see both sides of your car at the same time? Why should they be the same? This way, you get two different designs on your car to enjoy for the price of one".
Al, where on the back? All the round tube on the truck is ERW "steam pipe" -same stuff most people here use for trike frames. The "roll cage" inside the cab is really just a supporting framework for the body, so we can lift the cab off the chassis in one piece without it wobbling about like a jelly. It's 1" bore, the same as the trike frames. Eventually the whole cab, including the interior & cage, will be painted pale green. Then we'll make black upholstered panels that'll fit in the square spaces between the cage tubes.
The top rails of the pick-up bed are made from 2" bore. 

[one arm bandit]

"Who can see both sides of your car at the same time? Why should they be the same? This way, you get two different designs on your car to enjoy for the price of one".    

thats what the designer of the american a/c pacer was thinking when he made the passenger door 5" narrower than the drivers

[Manky Monkey]

  The 2 doors & their openings are definitely different in measurement & design, but not enough that you'd notice until it's pointed out.
I've reworked the front of the drivers door opening to better follow the curve of the door top. Then I started adding the return edge that the door shuts into. On this side of the car the surrounding metal was less rotten, so I've made it from a folded length of sheet steel, whereas on the other side, it was pieced together from several flat pieces, giving that side a slightly more angular look. Don't worry -I know that doesn't make a lot of sense, but if you saw it in the flesh, you'd understand what I mean.
One piece to make around the rear corner & that's the top of the door opening done.

[Manky Monkey]

Both doors have dropped slightly as we've worked on them, meaning the swage lines don't quite line up with the bodywork. We can modify them later though, by adding to one side of the swage & removing from the other until they look right. The door's slightly ajar here -they're not that far out!
Getting there.

[Manky Monkey]

Just need to add the drip rail & seam weld everything that's tack welded at the moment, & that's the top of the door done.

[Manky Monkey]

We're expecting a joint visit from Misters Kapri & Brock tomorrow, so I needed to charge up the battery. It lives in a box under the pick-up bed. Took me an hour to empty the bed of all the stuff that I'd piled in it over the past few months. I'd forgotten what it looked like empty.