I am in the place where I need more room to move around in my basement, so I decided to take some pieces out to the chassis and mock them up. After mock up, I will tarp the chassis completely to keep the rain at bay.
Remember: the ENTIRE body was disassembled when I got it, so there are no references to go off of. The sills are remade, so there are no mounting holes to reference from.
Starting with the body sills from a previous post, I uncovered the car.
Next, taking the FRAME COWL ASSEMBLY, I positioned it in it's approximate location on the sills at the front of the cowl section. My quandary comes into play here. How exactly is the front upright attached to the sill. Is it just screwed in from the side, or is it notched into the sill and then screwed? Behind the uprights are BLOCK (COWL REINFORCEMENT) pieces that screw into both the upright and the sill. These are the original uprights for the FRAME COWL ASSEMBLY for the Center Door body. The large hole in the upright corresponds to a series of holes in the cowl sheet metal for attachment.
Below, we see the floorboard risers and the entire FRAME COWL ASSEMBLY attached to the sills temporarily. The engine we see here is actually a '25 engine according to the serial number. I will most likely replace it with another engine I have that is around '22-'23 manufacture.
Once I placed the reproduction firewall in place, I can see how far forward the cowl needs to come or firewall to come back to be in the right location to mate to the firewall. It is between 1/2 to 5/8ths of an inch.
I am not entirely sure that I have the correct firewall brackets. OR maybe it needs spacers between the bracket and the firewall to move it backwards. There was chatter on the MTFCA forum about spacers. If the radiator and hood were extant, I could tell if spacers were needed since those items are in a fixed position.
Below is the entire mock up of the cowl, convincingly looking like it's in the right place...but it's not. The top piece and the upper left corner piece are from a wood kit for an entirely different car. No wood kits exist for a Center Door, (except for the roof), so this wood is not original. The upper right corner piece is original as are the uprights. The floor risers are reproductions from a wood kit for an entirely different car.
Below in this picture, you can see how much it needs to move forward. The riser is overlapping the angle the floorboard sits against.
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