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I bought this 57 in December of 2022, so I've owned it going on a couple of months now. I made a deal with a friend of mine to buy this car as well as a couple parts cars (a 2-door belair post, and a 4-door 210 sedan. I have a few fun things planned for those as well. The hardtop was his mother's car and had been sitting under a tarp outside here in the northwest for about 40 years. It's in astonishingly great shape for sitting on the ground for that long, but the floors will need to be replaced, otherwise body panels are pretty nice, and straight. I think I'm going to strip the body of rust and take it back down the the rock chipped patina paint and do as good of a preserve job as I can. If I can get the silver spray paint off the front fenders (assuming this was to preserve surface rust areas back in the day??) then I will remove that and let the front go back to a cool patina look and just preserve that areas as well. We'll see how that goes, but the market is pretty strong for those materials these days.

When I got it home I got it rolled in the shop right away to strip out the interior and get it cleaned out inside to see what I was working with. Floor is not honestly as bad as I expected given the circumstances, but there are enough areas that need patching that it will be a cleaner and easier job to replace the whole thing. I should be able to clean up the toe board and keep that in place with a few repairs. The trunk floor will get replaced as well, in conjunction with installing mini tubs and deleting the spare tire well, I won't be needing that.

Now I have the body off and working on some frame mods. First thing I'm doing is a rear spring relocation / pocket conversion. I went through Woody's, but the parts came from Performance Online (POL). It seems to be a pretty nice kit and with a few straight forward fabrication techniques goes together pretty well. I have the frame cuts done, pockets tacked in, shackle hangers tacked, and lower frame reliefs completed. I should have that done this week and springs and rear end mocked up with tires on the ground. My new springs as you'll see here in the pics to follow are a touch shorter, and more arced, as expected, and are 5-leaf compared to the factory 4-leaf. Hopefully all my measurements that i used following the recommended placement in various instructions bounced between form the different suppliers (this kit came with no instructions....*** Woody's, over? haha) Danchuck had a pretty slick tutorial on their site that I used. Some reference front spring eye to shackle mount center point (57"), others reference rear of frame cross member to center of shackle mount (11"), others go to the extreme rear (radius end) of the frame to shackle center (15") to locate the shackle hanger at the rear of the spring. All cross referencing pretty much checked out the same but I'm questioning the shackle angle, as it doesn't look like the mocked up example in the pictures. Most of them show a straight down drop in the shackle, whereas mine wound up angled to the front. Hopefully once it's loaded with weight and on the ground the angle will check out.

I'll have a lot more to share, just wanted to get a little story going on here.

Thanks all,

Kruck

 

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You'll see in these pictures I found a pretty cool gem in the 2-door post car. At some point in it's day the owner had some fun with it. The transmission I pulled out was the Dearborn top loader 3-speed trans. The cases on these gear boxes are cast iron and stamped FoMoCo (Ford Motor Company), but what it was all about is from I want to say 1965 through around 1970, GM sourced these from the Ford 3.03 toploader transmissions but they were branded as a Dearborn, as in Ford, Dearborn Michigan, but they has a GM input shaft and were used in several GM cars in that time frame to help side step the insurance premiums of the time on 4-speed cars. GM had the reputably weak Saginaw as the option which wasn't cutting it for the higher performing cars of the day. Long story short, This one came out of an Olds 442 (which is even marked on the Hurst shifter in the pics), but they were used in Buicks and Pontiacs as well from what I understand. Anyway...I think I'll run through it and reuse it in the gasser project. I think it will be a fun and different (unexpected) gear box. I also have a Muncie 4-speed but I like the idea of the Dearborn 3-speed. Let me know what you think or if you have experience jamming on these trannies, I have read hat they are pretty stout, possibly more so than the M22 Muncie.

 

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This was the day I'd been waiting for for years, bringing the hardtop home!

 

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With the post car being pretty heavily damaged, I decided to cut the driver's side off the car to build a fun piece of wall art out of it. I'll patch it up, clean it up and paint it and it will be assembled and mounted as a unit on the back wall inside my shop. I have some fun ideas for it, but it'll be on the back burner for a while. Just wanted to get this much done before I took the car back out of the shop to roll the hardtop inside.

I'm thinking about building a ladder bar and using the US mags I took off, since the other two got broke in the wreck anyway and mounting it nose-high on the wall like a gasser. I have all the pieces otherwise to do it, just have to secure the glass since I cut out a lot of structure, and make some brackets to mount it in pieces so it's manageable.

Should be a pretty cool conversation piece in the shop and it'll be there forever. The rest of the car is going to get put to as good of use as possible, keeping any pieces that can be used. I have a couple friends that have gotten bits and pieces as well. As for the 4-door, I'm considering options for that one.

 

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