Thursday Report

Thursday saw the usual crew at work: Tim working on the 50th Avenue ticket booth, John Sheldon and Gerry working on the 306, and me on the 453.

I spent the day making new roof saddles for the car.  I'll spare you all the tired jokes about saddles that we've used before.  So here's some stop-motion photography instead:

We start with a pile of 8/4 white oak.  This stuff is heavy!

One of the original saddles is used as a pattern.  Sixteen new pieces are cut out on the big bandsaw, then sanded down on the belt sander as needed.  

Then we start drilling holes.  Since the bottom is curved, I need a long piece of plywood as a table so the holes are vertical.

We start with a 1/4" through hole, and then a 5/8" countersink hole.

Finally, at the bottom I drilled the shallow alignment holes.

Explanation: One of the bigger challenges in roof work is aligning the saddles directly over the carlines after the canvas has been stretched, so that the screws go into the carlines and not thin air.  In the past this has required various measurements, and often drilling pilot holes to find the carlines.  For this car, I have installed a small round-head wood screw into the center hole of each of the old saddles, which were easy to locate before the wood was painted.  (One of these screws is posed above.)  These screws should show up as small bumps in the canvas, and they are exactly in the longitudinal middle of each carline.  In this particular case, I determined that the old saddles were about 3/4" off center, so the alignment holes in the new saddles were placed 3/4" away from the center holes.  (We also need to make sure the seam in the canvas doesn't go over the alignment screws.)  When it's time to install the new saddles, the alignment holes will be placed over the alignment screws under the canvas, and everything should line up automatically.  We'll see how well this works.

Finally, I just had time to start painting.

I didn't have much time to photograph what the others were doing.  Here are a couple of grab shots of the steel work on the 306.

 Stay tuned for the next exciting episode!