Saturday 8 December 2018

Progress report

After a long.. very long time in storage both outside and now in the barn at our farm, the '26 T is slowly getting pulled apart cleaned up and put back together.

A big step forward in 2017 was the purchase of an original 1926 front half of a 4 door tour tub, which was shipped over from Model T Haven in Kansas ..

I loosely fitted it to the chassis, and bolted the cut down steering column in to see how it looked, my daughter Rosie trying it for size..
The original Pig n Ford racer had a cut down steering shaft and control rods, so after pulling it, and a replacement column apart and doing a lot of cleaning up I managed to make one straights column out of the parts .. i still have to make up a couple of column supports , one at dashboard level and one similar to the drawing to brace it and the firewall off the chassis




Next on the list of jobs was to free off what at first glance was a couple of sticky valves but I soon realised that the valves were very corroded in the port area so ordered a new set from Neil Tuckett.
In the meantime I pulled the front timer off and swapped in the neat little unit that came with the new Texas Truefire kit that will go on once the cylinder head is back on. The cylinder head had two rusted in spark plugs that snapped off when I tried to get them out. After a lot of heat, drilling, swearing and eventually cleaning up with a 1/2" NPT tap the head was ready for a new set of spark plugs.