1934 Dodge Full Body Off Restoration by Ian_Greenlaw

3 minute(s) of a 362 minute read

I started to pull the horns apart and found the screws a little tough going. I'll replace them down the track with stainless steel ones so a friend of mine was over and we decided to pull them apart. He held them and I got the screwdriver onto them. Then.......disaster struck ! The threaded end literally dropped off one of the horns. Bugger ! Anywho as my daughter says ! We both looked at each other then kept on going and removed all the screws. Closer examination revealed metal fatigue probably from vibration over rough roads put an end to this I thought. It probably took me 3 months of asking people and mucking around with them until someone ( can't remember who ) came up with a brilliant idea of how to fix them. Only problem was he'd have to cut the thread ( which we assumed was ok at this stage ) off the good horn to match the other one. What we did was to make a tapered sleeve that would fit inside the horn with a smaller reverse thread sticking out the end. A threaded collar would then be made with a matching thread on the inside to match the tapered pieces thread and a larger thread on the outside to match that of the elbow that sits below the horn body that this bolts onto. The end result is that you'd have a thread that looks identical to the original and at the same time is stable to hold the horn trumpet in place. That cost a few hundred dollars but I bit the bullet as the other scenario of losing a horn on the road wasn't very appealing. Hope this all made sense. The next job is to find a way to get them replated. Cross that bridge a bit later.

I also bought a big box of strip and clean discs as the guy who is doing my body work suggested that I do the panels by hand and blast the inside of the panels. I guess I'll be tasting dust for the next few months while I do that job.

Cheers

Ian