MTFCA Forum

The discussions about wood plans has me thinking.
Does anyone have wood plans for the 26-27 Tudor?
There is not much wood in the body, most of it is in the roof.
Anything out there, contact me?
Thanks

Mike,
Lang's has the kits you need, Part #s TWH5 & TWK3. Not worth the experiment of doing your first ever.

Ken,

Thank you for the reply.
I know that the parts can be bought and both Langs and FordWood sell good quality stuff but it is more simple than that.
If I have to rebuild the entire drive-train, fix the body, buy glass, upholstery, and buy wood the project will never get done.
The project simply becomes not affordable and the body goes back into the scrap pile where it came from.
The body is in such bad shape that no one else wants to even touch it. It has bad rust, dented, missing parts, mixed up parts, bad repairs, completely disassembled and more.
I am working to build a car to drive in colder or wetter weather than I can in my open cars. I am tired of getting cold and soaked! I have other better and more important cars and projects that I can work on to stay busy.

With sample parts or plans it is just work. I have built or worked on re-wooding 3 Model T touring bodies from Mel Miller plans over the last 40 plus years of working on old cars. In my youth I helped on cars where there were no plans, drawings or documentation. Often parts were made from a few pictures and matching dimensions.

Model T's were made for the average person to be able to repair or rebuild keeping them running.
We should not forget clubs Mission Statement: "The Model T Ford Club of America strives to preserve and promote the Model T Ford for future generations by educating people of all ages in the history, lore, and skills of maintenance of the car that put America on wheels."

Even a set of 26-27 Coupe plans would help since the bodies share common cowl and rear window assemblies plus have a similar roof construction.

Mike, I own a restoration shop that also includes a wood shop (pix below) where we cut & fabricate wood infrastructure for bodies. On vehicles we do not have patterns for, sometimes we use original wood as our sample. Sometimes we use body filler to make our sample. I can expound on that if that is an option for you that you are unfamiliar with. In your case without much original wood to sample from, have you considered purchasing a complete body wood kit to use as your sample, -and then once you have patterned or replicated all of the wood pieces you need, then sell your kit used for patterning to offset the initial costs of the kit?

I'm sure you already know that many prints for the pieces are available from the Benson Ford Library however as someone who has purchased many, many Model-A prints from Benson, the cost of each print adds up very quickly.

Brent,

Thank you for the reply.
I am familiar with your shop and hope to visit someday.
Most people are surprised how much wood there is in a Model A sedan.
Your web site has some good pictures of Model A wood - https://www.model-a-ford.com/

I did not think Benson Ford had any wood drawings, I have gotten things from them in the past.
Yes, sample patterns can be made from anything lying around and I usually make them from scraps in the junk pile.
Bondo can also be used for quick and easy bead or metal shape patterns to make dies and patch panels.

There are enough pictures of roof structures I can make something up.
Example - http://www.mtfca.com/discus/messages/41 ... 1416232233
It needs to be light, strong, flat inside, slight dome outside and waterproof.
In the end it is all covered up.
Thanks

Thanks Mike. Most of my research at Benson has been for Model-A pieces. I probably now have over 1,000 prints of wood for different bodystyles from them, however the difficulty in researching those items is you must find the Assembly drawing first to find the individual component part numbers that makes up the piece.

As far as the body filler (Bondo) trick is using an open-car door for example, we use the door as the mould and spray Silicone on the inside of the door. We use Play Dough to build a dam to form the edges. Then apply the filler into the inside of the door around the flanged edges to define the curvature and dimensions. Sometimes we make our patterns in two or three separate pieces and we just assemble them after they have been removed. This gives us something to trace directly onto the wood, -or onto MDF to make a blank with. We also use body filler to add to sections of deteriorated wood. We first add TotalBoat's penetrating sealer to harden the existing wood and then apply filler to the exterior to add onto the length or into voids.

For those that do not know about the Benson Ford Research Library:
It is part of "The Henry Ford" museum in Detroit
They have most of the early Ford drawings and documentation, some have been lost to time and a fire many years ago.
https://www.thehenryford.org/collection ... -drawings/

To get part drawings you need the Factory Number.
These can be obtained from either looking up factory numbers in the on line file, or in the digital copy of the Bruce McCalley book "The Model T, The Car That Changed The World" (The Model T Encyclopedia), or in the parts books.
If you show up in person the cost is $5 / microfiche
They can do the research for you if you it costs $35 per hour.
If they do it for you each print costs $30 sent to you.
Yes, it can get expensive really quickly.

Maybe someone nearby has leftover wood nearby to me that I can use to get the critical dimensions off of.
Mike

Mike

Assured you have searched the forum posts for earlier questions on Tudor top wood. Since that is the majority of wood in the '26 body. Even the kits don't have instructions, so observing photos of work on top wood helps as you have experienced.

This thread has some good photos and hints. One poster use scrap wood to get approx. fit of the framing on a few tries before using finish ash wood.

Another young woman, pieced the top wood sections of her own design to complete the framing, worked out well in her case.

https://www.mtfca.com/discus/messages/3 ... 1380406044

Yes, I have had this project for 5 or 6 years now and have searched for how it was done on several occasions over the years. There is a lot of great documentation with dimensions on the 26-27 coupe along with pictures on various forum posts. There are a lot of pictures of the Tudor roof but dimensions are not there. The Tudor roof is just a stretched version of the Coupe roof. All this can be used to make a reasonable copy of a Tudor roof with some thought. I like to make things as accurate as possible plus it would make things easier and faster. There are several 26-27 Tudors not real far away but they are all assembled and complete so I can not take them apart.
Health issues changed my finances and made it very difficult to tolerate getting cold or wet so I need to get one of my closed cars going to continue to enjoy the cars in less than perfect weather.
Maybe this is just an exercise with no results but I am going to try.
Enclosed is a picture of what I am starting with, a pile of parts in the corner of the barn.
Mike

Mike,
I have made coupe roof wood using the Ford drawings. You can get the factory drawing numbers from the Ford Parts Manual also called the Ford Body Price List. The body parts factory drawing numbers and the body part numbers are the same number. If you do not have a copy of the "Ford Price List of Body Parts" you can get it free on-line from the Cimorelli Model T site. The coupe roof and the tudor roof are very different. The tudor roof has wood slats running back to front over the bows, the coup does not. The top wood not only forms the roof, it also is part of the interior upholstery structure. If you are going to go to the effort to make your own parts I would suggest getting the prints and making them to Ford specs.

Yes it is true that the Coupe and Tudor wood parts do not share any common part numbers for the roof wood.
But I believe there is a common style between them.
I prefer to look up factory part numbers in my digital copy of The Encyclopedia.

26-27 Tudor Wood Factory Part Numbers
Frame (Roof) Assembly 50324X
Rail (Roof) Front 50613X
Rib (Roof) No. 1 50620X
Rib (Roof) No. 2 50621X
Rib (Roof) No. 3 50622X
Rib (Roof) No. 4 50623X
Rib (Roof) No. 5 50624X
Brace (Roof Rib) No. 2 R.H. 50178X
Rail (Roof) Side R.H. 50614X
Rail (Roof) Side L.H. 50615X
Rail (Roof) Assy. Rear 50325X
Slat (Roof) Short 50642X
Slat (Roof) Long 50641X

While it would be really nice to get a copy of the factory drawings it would take 9 or 10 drawings to get a set.
At $30 per drawing (according to their form) it adds up to $270 or $300.
If I lived near Detroit I would go over and get them at the self service price of $5 each for a total of $50.
When the budget says NO there are only 2 choices: Don't do it, or find a way.
At this point I don't think that 26-27 Tudor wood plans even exist.
The best I can hope for is a set of old wood to copy and make my own drawings.