MTFCA Forum

I decided to start this thread to share the humbling things that I'm not too proud of.

This is a table I built to hold the engine during its fixin' time.

Vernon would you like to borrow the engine plate so you can put it on the engine stand?

John, You are so kind. I have since acquired an engine stand and made an adapter for it, assembling the engine and trans.

Blame the poor lighting at the time, lack of an auto-darkening helmet, cheap low amp flux welder, and skill, here is a weld so bad I had to take a photo of it. I soon fixed it.

Vernon, I’m right up the road from you if you need something. You’re invited to come join us if you’d like. Lots of T folk in the greater Biloxi/Ocean Springs area.
Best John

Hey guys: The old saying applies here - “Beauty is in the eyes of the beer holder”..Heres a picture of an engine stand my daddy made for me 60 years ago. I love it and might have it finished out to be buried in someday. BTW, it’s holding a complete For Sale 1918 engine with a brass L4 carb.

I have a question about Vern's patch piece for the frame. Should that replacement piece be cut from an original frame so the material is likely the same?
I have to make a rust repair on a front crossmember, and had planned to holesaw out the damaged piece and weld a new circle from another damaged member into the hole.

Allan from down under.

Alan, good question about the chemistry of metallurgy. Yes, should be as similar as possible. What I ended up with was better than the rust that was there. I did not fish plate it either.

The ring gear teeth seemed to be OK but replaced the spider and other stuff.

The springs were in less than perfect shape, got wire brushed and rust treated. No, paint should not be on the metal between the leaves. I think these have the clear Permatex coating. These photos are all from 2016.

The nuts holding the springs together, I did not reuse. So, they are no longer original. Maybe I should have built up a weld on the outside and re-tapped the threads.

I take it that you are funnin' us on the nuts.

I have taken off nuts as bad as the right one on exhaust systems. Provided they were installed with never-seize. It doesn't take long to rust that bad in Michigan winters with all the salt.

This is what happens when you check the oil and don’t notice that the lower petcock is easier to turn than it should be, then go on an 83-mile drive. Though it did run slightly warmer coming home than earlier in the day, it never knocked, overheated, or seized, only an occasional “chirp” from the engine starting about 50 miles into the trip that I thought was the fan belt pulley. I went to change the oil the next day and found the lower petcock 45 degrees from where it should be, and draining the remaining oil only filled a gallon milk jug about a half inch deep. Pulling the inspection cover showed oil drops still clinging to the crankshaft, but a few very small shiny flakes on the inside if the cover. I thought it might be OK, but my engine guy thinks the “chirps” were probably the #1 (aluminum) piston scoring itself, and wanted to go through the engine completely. Looks like Karen and I may be thumbing for a ride at the MTFCI Tour at Cadillac in less than three weeks.

The original poster said this was a thread for things you’re not proud of, and this certainly qualifies…

Yes John, sarcasm.
Yes Miles, open for all to post. I just have so much UGLY saved up.

This guy has been holding strong for seven years mechanically speaking. But it's pitted and I painted it Black instead of Galvanized because I honestly didn't know better. I hope to at least correct the color some day.

We hadn't even had the Model T for a year at this point and knew nothing coming into this project. The radiator fan looked usable and we wire wheeled the thing then gave it a bit of paint. Years later I learned on this forum that it isn't even a Model T blade. We bought a reproduction, replaced the fan, but still don't know what it's from? My thoughts right now are to scrap it.

Neat thread Vern.
Hehe, that fan might actually work. Goll dang, that is a familiar fan. Slant six? Industrial?
I had to do similar. No fan, no water inlet elbow so I grafted another brand's fan on and used a wheel chock(water helper).
Will never be changed, works too good. Even a hacked off late outlet elbow and a wired-on Murray gas tank!
Beauty is in the eye.......

Starting the stainless steel muffler end pieces, looks ugly. It finished OK.

WELDS - The first pass on the shell was ugly as the metal was too thin and I was having issues burning thru. Those beads added mass and I was able to make a halfway decent second pass. It sat like this for years until I had the engine in place to properly cut the pipes to length.
After the second pass, the top was ground smooth. But at least the end caps still look ugly at this point. The stainless steel came from a paper towel dispenser in the men's restroom and the pipe from a stainless grab bar from the handicap stall.

Hey it worked.

mbowen wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 26, 2024 6:16 pm

This is what happens when you check the oil and don’t notice that the lower petcock is easier to turn than it should be...

Ouch!

What about taking your Express Truck to Cadillac?

When I check the oil, I always give the handle of the petcock a small whack with the plier to drive in the taper and "lock" things in place when I'm done.
(I also never bother with lower petcock. If it ain't coming out the top, it ain't full.)

Jerry VanOoteghem wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 01, 2024 4:14 pm

mbowen wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 26, 2024 6:16 pm

This is what happens when you check the oil and don’t notice that the lower petcock is easier to turn than it should be...

Ouch!

What about taking your Express Truck to Cadillac?

When I check the oil, I always give the handle of the petcock a small whack with the plier to drive in the taper and "lock" things in place when I'm done.
(I also never bother with lower petcock. If it ain't coming out the top, it ain't full.)

We took the express wagon to the CanAm tour in Lexington last year and quickly found that bench seat gets harder and harder as the day wears on, plus it has developed a knock in the engine that needs to be addressed. Fortunately, Bonnie’s engine should be done later this week and I have tentative arrangements to help me put it back in the car this weekend. On the advice of several trusted friends I’m replacing the lower petcock with a dipstick.

One of the first tasks with our "new" Model T was to disassemble the frame, fix rust, and repaint which includes removal of all the rivets. Without skills and funds to learn or pay for re-riveting the frame, and due to the fact that the rivets were drilled out using a larger bit, I used grade 8 bolts as a replacement. The ugliest part of doing this, is the interference with the radiator mounting studs. They had to be modified for installation and to allow for continued radiator flex. When anyone looks under the car, the bolts are in your face. The other major problem is that now the frame is no longer a unified ground since I am running a separate ground wire to all the lights and a big one to the starter.

It's hard to say that something is ugly if you cannot see it.
This is supposed to be the sub-floor under the dash for the '26 Coupe. And this is the sub-floor now. It's so ugly I had to make custom floorboards.
I was not happy with the the Model T books, nor forum because I could not get measurements at the time. But I got over it, used lots of photos and took relative measurements to create pieces that could not be bought.
Ugly under the deck lid... and more ugly after it was fixed. I learned the subtle progression of changes on the production line for these coupes after gathering pictures and comparing.

The pulley tensioner was missing some material.
So, I cleaned it up, welded it up, cleaned it up.
Here it is between cleanings:

We unwound the copper coils, cleaned, rewrapped with that special yellow high temp insulating film, soldered it up, and whatever else. But I realized that there is nothing to keep the coils on the stubby posts and if they slipped off, we could have bits of magnets flying through the hogshead at us. This was the one thing keeping me from attaching the trans to the engine and installing into frame and crankcase...and hearing the engine run for the first time in decades. It sat in this state for years.

I did not have the technology or means to bake-glue the magneto into something safe and therefore deemed this art as ugly. We bought a different one from the vendors.

When starting out we knew nothing of the colors available for a '26 Coupe. One suggestion on the forum was to repaint it the way you found it. So, we matched up what engine color was already on it. Luckily, this ugly green was an exact match with rebar anti-corrosion spray paint. Now that the car is assembled, it's too late for a long time.

Vern, I quite like that green. Here it is on my 1917 shooting brake. Allan from down under.

My homemade burner parts were quite ugly before finished. http://www.mtfca.com/discus/messages/25 ... 1326907131

The options from the vendors were too small to patch the rust problem. So, I made some more ugly.

This is the left rear Coupe corner. But it's not as ugly as what was there. Your opinion may differ.

Vern if you have an electric smoker, don’t use wood for the smoke, you can lather on clear glyptal on the field coil and let it dry then bake it for a few hours at 250 degrees to cure it hard. Don’t put a Boston butt on with it it doesn’t taste that good. It was ugly.

You get what you pay for. No not the repair but the shell "as is".

John,
If I had known what to do next with those coils, I probably would have tried to bake it in our kitchen oven, maybe poison ourselves, and ruin the oven in our apartment. Maybe workers did poison themselves 100 years ago.

The Coupe seat sits on two hollow pins that protrude straight up at the top front of the angled support bracket.
I decided to to just use some big screws, grind off the treads and weld them in from the bottom up.
They are not original but should be safer in keeping the seat in place should something happen, especially with seat belts in a closed car.
Yes, I did make them a little longer than original too.

Stuff didnt quite line up so i got another handbrake cam/pawl cut it down the middle and spread it out over the handbrake rod and used 2 u bolts to hook it on. Along with modern lock nuts.
Ugly, but its working. And is non invasive to the original equipment!















And yes, i put the cover back on fully.

Austin, I suppose that's one way to double clutch.


While working on the body, I decided that a longer welding clamp was needed.
My weld was no good and it snapped. So, I welded it again.

I have had great success with high velocity paint before...but this job turned out to be a disaster.
After purchasing Dark Hunter Green, I realized that it was not dark at all, and looks kinda blue (UGLY) to me.
This is when I decided to buy Rust-Oleum in a can and mix to match old paint, justified by being readily available for touch-up in the future.
No insult intended to anyone that likes Dark Hunter Green on their T. It was not close to the paint that I already found.
I mixed 7 parts Hunter Green (regular) with 2 parts Black, both glass paint.
The problem, I think, was using 3:1 paint to mineral spirits as I had runs everywhere.
To mentally survive, I focused on the color choice success and would let it complete dry, sand and repaint soon.

The cab is still "Dark Hunter Green" while other pieces are umm...Vern Green?
More photos and text to this story later.

I realized that it was a terrible paint job. The surface prep almost non-existent and yes, too much thinner, too much coating.

At this point in the build, I just wanted to get it done and put some color on it but decided to sand it down and start over. However, soon after this a tornado hit the building in December 2022 and I spent the next three months putting the walls and roof back together. Never got back to the paint project. Moved the parts out of the paint booth and assembled them instead. The T paint remains ugly. If I ever go into details about the tornadoes, it will be in the off topic section.

I purchased a new skin, because I did not have one at all when we got the T. The skin did not match the deck lid area at all, which necessitated modifying bottom, left, and right sides. The top, at the hinge, lacked a crown outward, to mate with the body below the rear windshield. Last photo shows the 1" wide metal that I cut off, some cardboard templates of the body curvature, and a brown heavy gauge replacement part that matches. But I'm not sure how to proceed because the answer is ugly.

Rather that trying to bend and roll the existing part, I was thinking of fabricating another piece that runs straight down from the body, until it contacts the skin from left to right and just weld them wherever they intersect. Not happy with my purchase as I could have made one from scratch if I had known that none of the compound crowns, that were pictured, would be there. Undecided.

Varmint

That table in the first picture could use a little bracing. A 1x4 or 2x4 attached to the three legs on each side would do it. We do not want to see you with an engine sitting on your toes.