Long time lurker, new member here. I may be completely nuts with what I want and am going to do and have taken a beating about it on other forums, but here it goes.
My wife and I picked up this 1938 Pontiac touring sedan in 2015. It was in the hometown of my mother in law for years and when she went back to visit family she saw it since she was a child and always loved it. We had the opportunity to purchase it and we brought it home. Digging around in the car to clean it up I found a chauffeurs license from 1945 in it, confirming this car was used as a limousine in its time. Visiting my wife's great grandma, we went through some of her old photos and found it was her wedding car.
I see nothing wrong with this proposal.
Welcome.
You will fit in just fine!
Amazing story about it being your wife's great grandma's wedding car.
Really cool.
The car looks really solid and complete as well.
More pics!
Taking a beating? You'll get quite the opposite reaction here! Carry on...
Some poorly timed suggestions for you:
Late P71 suspensions are very friendly fir people looking to create reliable easily maintained cars.
I am not off of the LS the world bandwagon but with something like this I suggest a port fuel injected, sheet metal manifold, twin turbo 455 Pontiac running a Holley Terminator X and a 4L80E.
watching. welcome to the jungle!
I appreciate the kind words everyone. It was very exciting to find this family connection. Here is a picture of the mouse chewed liscence
Take lotsa pitchers and post 'em here along with detailed verbiage about what you're doing. Please.
This is gonna be great.
My $0.02: While an Art Morrison chassis is the easy button, a scratch built chassis with Quasi's TT455 suggestion is what I would do.
Carry on...
When we got the car home it sat outside for a bit while I finished another project, had kids and moved to a different place suiting our new family better. At the new house we were able to roll it into the garage after some heavy cleaning and my wife and I finally got to sit in it together. You could say it was not exactly comfortable for either of us. I am not exactly a small guy (6 feet tall and 240) my wife and I were almost touching shoulders. She asked me one night if it was possible to widen the car. This sent me down the rabbit hole. I put a lot of though in to how to make a comfortable touring car that we could autocross and road course and perhaps take on a drag and drive even. Safety and reliability were the paramount factors, next was serviceability and budget. Doing my research we did a crappy photo mod with 7 inches added into the width of the car to make sure the proportions were good. This wasn't just random because I pulled a 2011 P71 crown vic front suspension from the junk yard (plans include 2012 GT500 rotors and C5 corvette calipers) I also came across a complete 2017 Mustang track pack IRS and car needed to be widened to accomodate these parts.
First thing was to find ceterline on the car and start to level everything out. I then made braking inside that was adjustable and used as a jig to widen the body
Everything was marked out, documented, leveled and as the car progressed, more supports were put in. I made some 16 gauge angles that I shrunk the edges on to match the same crown in the roof and lock it in with my adjustable jig. I am also happy to have the extra room in the engine bay not only width wise, but because the top of the cowl peaks, the cowl also has to move forward so that the window channels match. Plans are a single turbo LS, running AC, so more room for plumbing and heat exchangers! woohoo! here is a better view of my bracing. it is mostly 1 inch electrical conduit
I knew it was going to be a bit of a challenge to make the pieces fit together properly
Cleco cleco cleco! Try to hold everything together! I also had to move the catwalk out to the back, which caused a need to section about 3/4 of an inch out to align the trunk channel as well as add filler pieces in the package tray and add a filler piece to move the seat mount forward. I ran some beaeds in it at an angle to sort of look factory
I made some sweeps for the back of the car using body sweeps to capture the proper crown on the car. I made a planishing hammer a few years ago, so I used the linear stretch die on one flange while checking with the sweep, then tuned it with the kick shrinker stretcher. This way I can cut and align the trunk lid with 3/16 key stock for the gaps, cleco the sweeps in place and measure what I need for filler panels.
now that the car was stabilized, I checked and locked in the roof to the proper radius. If you look back in my pictures you will see the grid I drew. The number correspond to the sweep radius. This allowed me to start making the filler pieces
I love to see projects that are even wackier than mine!
This looks like it could turn out really well, I'm looking forward to the next installments of the build!
i like where this is headed! and i'm always up for seeing how people solve various sheetmetal problems. tools, techniques, etc. keep it coming!
Sonic
UberDork
12/15/23 1:15 p.m.
Wow. This went immediately to 11. Great work.
Started getting the pieces welded in, here is the front
Thank you everyone for all of the support! I am really happy I posted here!
Here is where I am as of today! I need to finish some welding, do the rest of the metal finishing and I will spray it in epoxy primer. I will do some more bracing and pull the body off of the chassis. I am thinking I will have to bring the inner wheel wells in 3.5 inches on each side to the stock location and widen the rear fenders by 2 inches. I want to fit 335-30, 20 tires in the back, Thinking a michelin sport cup 4S???? but not completely sold, but I want some fat meats out back, also thinking of 305/30/20's in the front. Also, when I build the frame to accept the mustang subfram, I may need to massage the floor and the back seat area a bit to make it work, so I don't want to get too far into the body work past getting this in epoxy. I may work on the trunk lid a bit first though
