My cowl on my 1921 touring is leaning backward causing the door closing a problem. My uncle had a piece of haywire from the windshield down to the front frame horn with a turn buckle. The wire is in the way of opening the hood and is not the best looking fix. Suggestions?
Rewood the sills in the car.
Top too tight
More then likely caused by the "G" force created by the high speeds the car achieves in forward motion. If not that then most likely bad wood in the framing and needs to be replaced.
P.S. (Driving backwards at high speed will not correct the problem)
poor Jack has a sagging problem and youse guys are trying to confuse him.
we all know that Jack needs a jack to counter the sag.
You will need to crawl around underneath and check several things. If the wood is old, deteriorating wood body sills is likely. You need to crawl under and/or pull the floorboards to look them over, and maybe poke them with a knife or ice pick.
Another common cause is the frame bent or sagging. It is not easy, but you may need to carefully measure the frame to determine this. There are several creative ways to do this on an assembled car. IF you have an exceptionally flat concrete area, you can measure up to the frame to check it. You must measure up to the TOP of the frame rail because the bottom is tapered from the factory. That makes it tough to do the math. The top should be straight and flat all the way from the front to the back. You do need to level the frame from front end to back end first (just jacks under the front axle usually) in order to make it easy. Side to side could lean a little due to spring mounting being off a bit.
Either frame sagging, or soft sills, can be "improved" temporarily by shimming the body in the middle. You usually need to leave the firewall and rear-most body mounts down on the frame as they are supposed to be. Then the two pairs of mounts in the middle (front to back) need to be shimmed up by removing the bolts, then lifting the body a very small amount. I often use a tire iron to lift with and wooden wedges placed in to hold it up. Slip an appropriate amount of flat washers between the mounts and replace bolts. It usually takes less than a quarter inch lift to straighten things a lot (this is of course only an illusion as the frame or sills are still bad, but at least the cowl may be straight and the doors close).
If it is the top too tight as Jeff H says, none of the shimming may be necessary.
There are at least a dozen other odd causes, like bad body repair in the past, miss-matched body panels, miss-cut wood work, wrong kind of wood warped. You get the idea. You won't know until you crawl around and under it to check it out and measure a few things.
Good luck.
Drive carefully, and enjoy, W2