My 1939 Ford Standard Coupe - The Tear Down

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Here's the hood and release handle. The hood is nice and straight. It just needs to be stripped. I'm fortunate that the handle release parts are there and not broken. These are unique to the 1939 Standard Ford and are not reproduced by anyone at this time. These will have to be rechromed of course.

Check out the "work bench". I bet my wife doesn't even know I took one of her chairs into the garage!

Here are the hood release parts by themselves. Both are chrome plated "pot metal". The handle has a steel stem somehow inserted into the metal casting. The stem has a couple flats ground into the end near the threaded section. The parts that these connect to inside the car are all steel and are painted black.
I stood the hood up on end and began to strip the paint off. You are looking at the residue of the old primer.

The hood was one of the nicest pieces of sheet metal on the car! Not a dent or ding nor a spot of rust anywhere. I'm extremely careful where I put it when in the garage so that it doesn't fall or get knocked into. When I've finished stripping it I'll shoot a coat of primer on it and return it to safe storage in the basement for now.

The driver's side door is stripped. I think I spent more time on this than most of the rest of the body! There are many grooves, corners, crevices, etc that you have to get into.

You can see some small spots of corrosion on the bottom half of the door. They're not even pits. I will run over them with a scuff pad on my polisher to see how they clean up.

Page 9 of the Tear Down

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