2013 Street Rodder Road Tour 1951 Ford Roof Chop

a Greg Cunningham with honest Charlie Garage here again proceeding with the 51 Ford that we're building forestry Trotter the road tour car so we're building it for that purpose as you might remember the task at hand is chopping the top this is really fun part of a project because there's a lot of mystique to chopping the top people have been doing it for years but it's always intriguing to see the different ways that you can go about doing it it's going to be a lot of fun and that's what we're about to start on so we've done all the planning here Richard and Elton are going to be doing most of the hands-on work but as a group we've brainstormed about where should we cut it you know how much we want to take out we've decided to come two inches down in the front three in the back that's going to give us this nice little tapered look more of a teardrop shape than what it has now and if we decide that that's not enough of a chop we can always go more but we're not going to cut too much right off the bat we're going to going to take it a little piece at a time something else that's going to help us get that teardrop look is taking this whole window assembly out as a whole and moving it forward to remove a lot of the length of the roof and then leaning it down that's going to give us a more of a streamlined profile make it look more modern and lightweight in the rear we've removed a lot of the kind of the mass of this car by doing the the nose on the hood and and lowering it as low as it is so the roof is just kinda out of place now so we're going to going to do kind of a basic chop I mean there's nothing that hadn't been done before but it's always always fun to do it yourself so and now that all the measuring and marking has been done we're going to going to get to cutting on it so what we've done have we came to our marks we want to pick the straightest point on each one of these pillars making a lot easier when we start setting the top back down to get everything lined back up so that's where we made our critical marks and took a solid now that we have the top lifted off we're ready to make our second cuts on their pillars and hopefully this rear package tray of the window we're going to slide it forward a little bit but we won't really know exactly where we want to place that till we get the roof set back down and get the heights we're looking for when it came to the rear window we had the idea that we did not want to cut on our window opening just make it a pain when you go with your glass later on in the project so what we did we let us out a three-quarter inch line away from our scene because when we go to adding our filler piece in here we didn't want to have to be welding right there and that's hard place to grind so you never really if you can get away with it want to cut it right on your seam you want to go one way or another so we came out here on the flat and left ourselves a 3/4 inch flange on our rear window so you can see we cut this loose and now we're folding the rear window down to get it right in the right plane and so we got the one to loose we've tucked it up underneath the top and we want to get a nice little contour as it just flows right on back to the to the rear and then that's where we're sizing up right now and then later on we're gonna have to come in here and add our little filler piece which that'll be candy that we left our 3/4 inch flange we had our rear window when we call it a pack is just for lack of a better term rested up underneath a roof panel so once we finally got happy with the way it flowed out we just clamped or cut it we actually use clecos and got it cut down you can see our little clamps here from eastwood make it really have it handy gives you your gap that you would want to have for you TIG weld and got it clamped into place where we were happy with it and still going to require a little bit more work here on our flange to get everything to plain out nice and smooth so that's basically where we're at right now getting our bottom line back up and too bad Dennis carpenter didn't sell this piece way to go Dennis yeah I mean it was amazing how everything just came together with uh as you can tell we haven't had to really cut the roof a whole lot just a few simple cuts and just Relocation up some pillars and as you can tell we've done away with a with a tail lights and the little balls that forth came with from the factory so what we're also going to want to take away our little seam seam trim here and we'll just grind that down and hopefully are going to let that back in in the near future but while we're fitting the rear of the top I figure it's going to be a lot easier to go ahead at least get us about six inches of it out of the way so we'll know exactly where you know where we're coming to with our roof panel make sure we get it exactly where we want it when it comes to the package tray now that we have everything in line and right where we want it we're just going to come through here with the cutoff wheel cut the excess off thats hanging underneath and just butt weld those across through there and really it will look like it's untouched by the time we get finished with it but you know that's one good thing you want to look for when you're doing metal work or something heavy to the car we tend to be traditional so we want to keep the appearance as a stock as much as possible so just little tricks like that without you know we butchered it but you really won't be able to we butchered it all right now that we got our air template made our metal cutout see it kind of tweaked a little bit as we were cutting it we'll get it worked out and we had it off the paul he's gonna have his way with the English wheel and should get the crown put into the beneath the nice profile of the car well spot in our filler piece we've got these killer eats with plants were used on this too and just tack a little bit making sure all the panels line up perfectly even even so it doesn't bite us later on down the road that that is a couple templates a couple trials we didn't hit it on the first time with the second time we got right on the money so yeah actually it didn't really take a whole lot of fabrication to make it so I think we're making great progress to be honest with you I mean everything's falling right into place we're blessed and I guess for a lot of do-it-yourselfers or somebody's wanting to attempt to chop top the first critical thing you have to know is how you mate where do you start to make your marks and as far as this we do we want to bring it down about two inches in the front about three in the rear so we wanted to get the straightest portion of the winch to a pillar and windshield pillar that's going to be best place to make your cut and see we didn't take two inches out as far as just like straight down the piece of metal we took into account straight down because if you laid up two inches you would actually be chopping that about two and a half so you just kind of figure kind of like a pitch on the roof you want to bring it down two inches straight which you might only really be cutting out about an inch and three quarters of your pillar so that's how we came to that mark and as far as like back here we took the two inches because that would be coming straight down and so it kind of it worked out perfect bet on the money as you can tell we've haven't had to do a whole lot of cutting on the roof everything's worked out great so far and when we got the top step back down on here we were about a half inch wider at our posts as we were the top so how we compensated for that we came in gave it a little simple pipe cut on both sides brought them in quarter inch on each side and this just lined up beautiful so yeah we knew we were dead on the money right here and then as you come back here as we as the top came forward our post our B posts we're a little off so it did that we came up got our measurement of how far of an offset we had which ended up to be an inch and a quarter so we came back here on the rear window cut us out an inch and a quarter gap along with this and you can see we just swapped places we slid this piece back and put our inch and a quarter Spade got a piece back in back in the gap which lined our B pillar back up perfectly straight did that on both sides and so far so good the main reason why we want to take this piece out are independently versus leaving it on the rest of the top because we're going to be able to put this piece we'll get all of our lines the lines back up and it still looks like a factory window you want that smooth little transition so once we get this piece trimmed down to fit it's just going to look like a factory window Richard and Elton have worked on this roof now for about a day and a half they had a half a day of planning which is crucial when you're doing a project like this there's a lot of measurements and and marks that you need to make on the metal before you cut anything so we're actually looking about a day and a half of progress which i think is really good you know I went went into the the office and came back just a little bit later and I mean look like they're almost done and just you know half the day's worth of work but in reality they're probably about a third of the way done at that time there's a lot of details that that they've been working on I'd like to have Delton in here but I think he's a little bit of camera shy maybe so Richard's going to speak for him but you know what you're looking at here most of the the sizing up on the roof is done he's working out some details and has the doors and rear windows you have to go but I'm thoroughly impressed with what I've seen so far so Richard told me how impressed are you with yourself I tell you what it's a it's came together yeah a lot better than what I initially thought I would say we wanted to go with a nice sleek look so we stayed at two inches in the front and going to come somewhere around when you know when we first thought about it come around three inches but we actually decided to drop the back a little bit further down just to give it more of a teardrop tail dragger look and I think it's really paid off I mean everything is going great we're putting in the filler piece now - we're just in time east one cent our butt weld clamps and we got them out of the box and put them to use right away and makes a lot easier putting in your filler piece yeah I mean everything down to your package tray in the rear everything is working out like you would think it was stamped up in Detroit so it's something that they've done that Richard had mentioned is left the angle of the windshield the same it's going to be an easier glass to manage because it's flat but they've accomplished two things with the rear window moved it forward and laid it down to give it a shorter roof and more of a streamlined look but they also kept their original opening for the for the window so our glass guy doesn't have to worry about doing anything custom there it can be direct installation well Richard and Elton have worked really hard for a week to finish this chop on the on the roof here a week is actually pretty fast I expected it to take longer so I'm really excited about how well they did and how quickly they did it I think that's basically due to their planing involved you can see that on this chop there's still 20 feet worth of welding to do which is which is a whole lot of beads to lay out but that's less than they could have had so they planned ahead and and laid it out to where they're able to move the post rather than section the whole roof you know you come back to the back they lay the window down to bring it forward so they don't have to add material to go back to the window it has little stuff like that they can add up two days worth of work window frames a lot of times are very complicated part of a top modification but Richard and Elton got through this one relatively easy with that planning I was talking about they did one little chop here so we got two welds they they welded in this corner piece had to do a little pie cut metal finish it made it look as easy as that but it's really not it's a it's a hard project you can see you know half a dozen pieces of metal back here but on camera it probably looks like one solid piece of metal it's probably one the finest chops I've ever seen so when you stand back and you see how dramatic this this has changed and in only one week it's pretty impressive you know it's got this the style that is modern it's what we're into we didn't chop it real crazy like four or five inches you know that's kind of the 90s look what we have here is is tasteful adds a little bit of luxury to the to the streamlined look by going for in the back to in the front I guess it's about three and a half in the back but really I'm thoroughly impressed you know the guys just just finished da in it so it's nice and shiny metal again and check this off the list it's time to move on to the driveline you

Channel: Honest Charley

Views: 218,004

Rating: 4.8212833 out of 5

Keywords: honest, charley, speedshop, garage, chattanooga, tennessee, hisself, card, street, rodder, road, tour, magazine, 1951, ford, build, project

Id: HVK_hloBl8g

Length: 19min 15sec (1155 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 17 2012