Thread: Brookville 32/ Fitting Hood

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Maybe I can shed some light.

There really is no cut a dry system to body to chassis alignment but the first steps are after you have the car assembled completely and on the ground with the wheels and tires you will be using :

1. Make sure the body is final bolted to the frame using the correct blocks, webbing and pads. It should be done, IMO, several days prior to anything else to allow for settling (where I'm currently in trouble)

2. Install the grille, shell and radiator (filled of course)

3. Install at least the hood top(s). This will give you your base for body detail lines. At this point you may have to shim the grille/radiator assembly or possibly even the body to achieve reasonable alignment.

4. Install the hood sides - and not to make light of it, you may end up redoing everything you did previously or at a minimum, tweak it some.

5. If you have an 'A' or '32, everything should be coming around at this point. All you need to do from there is to decide how close is good enough.

I spent (too) many hours doing mine during the initial build up - then blew the entire car apart for paint. I reassembled it as close to exactly the same way as it came apart, tweaked it, it looked fine, now after sitting a few months, have to redo it - and another XX number of hours to go

A '33 or '34 Ford, 34_40 can share his pain. He and I probably looked at 50 of that vintage last Saturday at NSRA Burlington and every one as far as I could see had something that was off. Then there are '40 Fords -----

Originally Posted by IC2

Maybe I can shed some light.

There really is no cut a dry system to body to chassis alignment but the first steps are after you have the car assembled completely and on the ground with the wheels and tires you will be using :

1. Make sure the body is final bolted to the frame using the correct blocks, webbing and pads. It should be done, IMO, several days prior to anything else to allow for settling (where I'm currently in trouble)

2. Install the grille, shell and radiator (filled of course)

3. Install at least the hood top(s). This will give you your base for body detail lines. At this point you may have to shim the grille/radiator assembly or possibly even the body to achieve reasonable alignment.

4. Install the hood sides - and not to make light of it, you may end up redoing everything you did previously or at a minimum, tweak it some.

5. If you have an 'A' or '32, everything should be coming around at this point. All you need to do from there is to decide how close is good enough.

I spent (too) many hours doing mine during the initial build up - then blew the entire car apart for paint. I reassembled it as close to exactly the same way as it came apart, tweaked it, it looked fine, now after sitting a few months, have to redo it - and another XX number of hours to go

A '33 or '34 Ford, 34_40 can share his pain. He and I probably looked at 50 of that vintage last Saturday at NSRA Burlington and every one as far as I could see had something that was off. Then there are '40 Fords -----

thanks!! pete