Thread: I couldn't build it for $3 K either!

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Well I finally got a chance to work on the T some more. I've been working on the 46 lately. We have a trip planned in it and I had a few things that needed taking care of.

I don't think I'll ever be a prolific poster like Itoldyouso or J Robinson,but I'm going to give it a try. As I take things apart in the future, I'll post pics of the stuff built up to this point.

This time I'm going to show how I built the windshield mounts and posts. I didn't get it completely finished and it looks like it'll be week after next before I can get on it again. This will be a long post for me to start with and may take a couple of nights to get done. I'm going to post in small sections to keep it from being so big.

I started by buying some short windshield posts from Total Performance. I fabbed up a dummy windshield frame from 1/2" pipe so I could see what width frame I needed.

I started with 40.5" since that's the widest commercially available frame. I figured I would just keep shortening it until it fit. Turns out 40.5" was the width I had to have. Trouble is the brackets were nowhere near fitting. The corner of the cowl was hitting the bracket and it didn't fit anywhere else. If these brackets hadn't been chrome, I would have ground them till they fit better. If I did this again, I would buy plain brackets and have them chromed later.

The really big problem was the HUGE 1/2" gap on the driver's side. It turns out that the "accepted" method of fitting these brackets is to build up under them with some kind of filler until they fit. I didn't like that solution and I didn't like the look. It was typical t-bucket. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just not what I wanted.

Sooo, I decided to try my hand at building my own brackets. My first attempt didn't look very good either. I had already built a 40.5" windshield frame(I'll post that build later) and the wide frame looked out of proportion to the rest of the cowl. I felt the windshield needed to be narrower. It was about this time I got the idea to build a folding frame like the later Ford roadsters and the older British sports cars. Looks like I'll have a nice set of chrome TP windshield post to sell.