57 NAPCO rebuild

[Blackie]

The reason it looks so high is because at the moment it has 6" lifted springs in it - I will be using probably 3" or maybe 2" lifted springs with 33" tyres - the ones on it now are 35" so it will sit at a minimum 4" lower. I am picking up a set of 2" springs and a set of 33" tyres tomorrow so it will be sitting a LOT closer to the finished height once they are in.

Splash shields over here are usually made of 1/8" or 3/16" insertion rubber - no need to worry about snow in W.A. fellas !!!!


Yes it will have lots of Dynamat and A/C, even a heater ! it gets cold here too, down to single digits in winter- another advantage of the 59 sedan dash is there is a lot more room under the dash for an A/C system.

[Blackie]

Originally Posted by dsraven

will you still need to raise the bed floor?

Yeah but only by 4" now not 8"

[6DoF]

Originally Posted by Blackie

everything over here needs to be engineer approved before the DMV will licence it - a real pain in the arse......and not a cheap exercise.

duuuuuddde, that sux! depending on the dude could TOTALLY change a build!

[dsraven]

any updates? need updates!
I tore my shoulder apart badly, so taking it easy is doc's orders. translated: tell the ADD guy to sit still for awhile"
grrrr
full thickness rotator cuff tears on all the rotator cuff muscles on dominant shoulder. full thickness tear on one biceps attachment head as well. doc says it's just the bigger arm muscles holding my arm on now. 2 previous rotator cuff surgeries on both sides.
makes it harder to dig out my wallet at the coffee shop. haha

sorry, don't intend to hijack the thread, just getting bored.

[Blackie]

Not a whole lot going on right now - work got in the way ........

Have replaced the 6" raised springs with 2" but not happy with them, picked up a set of 3" springs so will fit them today (Sunday morning here right now) and throw some pics up tonight - that rotator cuff drama must be SO frustrating !!!

[dsraven]

will you put some tires on it that are the size your finished project will run before you choose the amount of spring lift?

[Blackie]

Originally Posted by dsraven

will you put some tires on it that are the size your finished project will run before you choose the amount of spring lift?

Did that last week but didn't really have a decent pic to post - this is how it sits on 33inch tyres and a 2" lift spring. I have 3" springs to go in and I think the body might need to come up another inch.
Was too nice a day on Sunday to work in the shed so I took my daughter out for a ride to a pub in the bush for lunch instead

[Blackie]

Back into it - finished off a temporary mount for the body to the cab using some scrap 4" x 2" RHS


Once the body was solidly mounted to the chassis I could get it off the hoist and make a start on sorting out the doors - first job was to refurbish the hinges so the doors were in the right place the lower left door hinge was the worst culprit - turned out it was bent and the pin had sheared off, possibly from the hit it had suffered at some point in its life ?? The rest of it was well and truly rusted into the hinge so had to remove it with the hand held milling machine and press out the remainder.

Not sure whats going on here - have I ordered the wrong kit for the door hinges ? pins are way too long - I will just cut them down so no big deal.

[Blackie]

First hinge completed , door looks a bit average - will have to wait until the rust repair sections turn up to sort this out

Question for the brains trust - are the hinges supposed to be fixed using nuts and bolts or should the hinge pockets have some form of a captive nut in these holes ? The bolts in this thing are stainless with nuts on the back - seems very odd to me.

Sorry guys, I am having a hell of a time uploading photos at the moment, it keeps timing out and saying the server is too busy - and its only on this website that I am having this problem. The last post and this one has taken near on an hour and I am giving up and going to bed - its 11PM on Saturday night right now. Will try and post the remaining pics in the morning.

[dsraven]

weird, but your daytime is our night time, so maybe morning or miday would work better, since we would be more likely to be sleeping on this side of the globe.

[Blackie]

OK - Sunday morning lets try again ......

Rusty door bottoms - waiting for repair sections to arrive.

Last pic, is there meant to be some kind of captive nut in these holes to make hinge adjustment easier? This thing has nuts and bolts holding it in - all stainless so clearly not original

[dsraven]

pretty sure mine had captive nuts in the cab side mounting holes but you could check the assembly manual to verify
make sure to check the door hinge inner mounting brackets when you have the bottom cut off, pretty common that they crack apart and allow the door to flex and become hard to get aligned

[Blackie]

Cheers mate, got a decent amount done today. Found that when I took the drivers door off - well the right hand door so your passengers door - it had captive nuts in the bottom hinge at least so I guess the ones on the left side are MIA.
Also found some anomalies in the hinges - rebushed them all but found that no 2 are alike - the top left hinge has a bracket for a spring but nothing to hook the spring onto , the bottom one is plain , the right top hinge has a spring and a bracket that runs over the pin to the other end of the spring which I now assume the top left hinge is missing and the lower left has a nut welded to it on the front hole so a bolt can be inserted from behind the front wheel into the hinge base so I now assume the lower left hinge should have one of these as well ???
see photos - Pic#1 is top right hinge, Pic#2 is lower right and Pic#3 is lower left, all 3 are different and top left is the same as top right except its missing the arm that the spring attaches to.
Pic#4 two bottom hinges has sheared pivot pins , some were siezed and had to be cut then the remains of the pin pressed out - original bushes were nylon whereas the replacement ones are brass or bronze ?
So - todays stupid question regarding hinges are -

Should the top hinges only have the spring and the door stay ?
Should bottom hinges have a welded nut on them to fit a bolt from the inner guard area into the hinge ?

[Blackie]

Once the hinges had been rebushed I refitted the doors - bit of a mission on your own - and started playing around with getting them to fit in the hole.

Found out that once I lifted the passengers door up to where it should be it wouldn't close because the top of the window frame is hitting the rain gutter on the roof which must be why it was set low to start with. Also found it would foul on the A pillar at the base - this is why , see pic. Whoever butchered this thing when the damage was done leaded up the A pillar to fill the void, the lead was about 3/8"-1/2" wide. Dug it out and got the door close to where it should be - ran out of adjustment so may need to slot some holes to get it the rest of the way.

Pic#1 is what I started with
Pic#2 is with the paint removed to reveal the lead fill
Pic 3 is lead removed (mostly)
Pic#4 is as close as it would go with stock adjustment holes

[Blackie]

Then it was time to tackle the gap front to back - wrapped a chain around the base of the A pillar on the passenger side and removed the door striker plate to fit an eye bolt through the striker plate and got into it with a come along to pull the back of the cab forward to close the gap up. Got that sorted so the bottom half of both doors now have reasonable gaps - well a lot better than they were a month ago at least. Hopefully have a result on the the rest of it tomorrow

[dsraven]

hinges- on 55-59 trucks that I have worked on the upper hinges are the ones with the spring mechanism and the lowers are bare hinges. some have the nut welded on the inside of the forward hole for a bolt to thread into from the front/tire side of the hinge pillar. all the hinges that i have redone for these trucks have had bronze bushings, but for awhile there were rebush kits available that had plastic bushings, dunno why anybody would use them except for price and availability. on a quick google search I find that some new hinges have the nut welded on the forward end and some don't, they just have an oversized slotted hole. possibly for better adjustability or possibly because it's cheaper to make them without the nut attached. I am pretty sure all the cabs I have had the opportunity to remove doors from have all had the patured nuts in the hinge mounting holes. sometimes they break away due to siexed bolts and sometimes they release the bolts with a bit of work. also, some doors have had course threaded hardware and some have had fine threaded hardware. fine thread is stock i believe but not positive. aftermarket hinges I have installed have had course threads
-nice work on the cab alignment job, have you found any cracks or broken spot welds to contend with?

[dsraven]

sorry, dunno what i was thinking when i said the aftermarket hinges had course threads. I meant one door pair that I have I was sure were replacement units from aftermarket because they had course threaded holes for the hinges whereas all the other stock doors I have sitting here have fine threaded hinge bolt holes

[Blackie]

Cheers mate, it would make sense to have captive nuts welded to the back of the lower hinges at least. Didn't get anything else done yesterday as I tweaked my back wrassling the doors on and off on my own so I did some cleaning up and some easier jobs on the bench instead. Getting old sucks .........

[Blackie]

Happy new year you mob, have been a bit quiet here with the crook back and a big loss of enthusiasm, the more I dig into this thing the worse it gets - decided last week that it was time to put the feelers out for a replacement cab - of at least to explore the possibility of one. They are nowhere near as plentiful over here as they are in the US unfortunately. Havent had much luck unsurprisingly, looked at one today , a rolling body for $20k ........

out of my price range - saw one on Facebook marketplace in Rusk, TX that would be perfect - why cant they be as easy to find over here ????
https://www.facebook.com/marketplace...rral_code=null

[Blackie]

Anyway, time to try to make honey out of pig**** - this is what I am up against, blew some of the lead out of the pillars trying to find out why they are so out of whack - while I was looking at the straight one today I cut a measuring stick to sit between the bottom of the door aperture to the top rear corner so I could measure how far out my cab is - the answer is 5/8" on the left and 1/2" on the right side. There is a row of self tapping screws from the beltline to the inner roof panel on both sides, surfing through photos on this site shows me that they should not be there so I will be removing them, melting out as much of the lead as I can find and then giving it another hit with the porta power- I tried it once with not a massive amount of improvement, got the bottom half of the door to sit better but the top half is still terrible. Shame its not a big back window cab even though I prefer the small back window - it would be a lot easier to work on if it were a big back window !

[dsraven]

Yup, you have some work ahead of you.
It may be less flexible or "springy" if it were bolted to the frame.
Is there body damage somewhere that would indicate if it was hit and pushed out of shape? If so, possibly try to reverse the damage by pulling or pushing from that area.
A badly rusted cab lower area is partly why I went with a frame swap and used the floor and firewall from the donor vehicle. I also had a pretty solid cab but found the door fitment problem with it was not just totally worn out hinges, the cab was bent similar to yours. It had been a farm truck almost it's whole life and had run into the back of a flat deck truck, at some point, and I found it wasn't just the right front fender that had been badly bent, the cab was also bent on the right door opening that was out of shape. I wonder if your truck was hit in the front and inertia pushed to top of the cab ahead while the lower part came to an abrupt stop. I wonder also, if it were bolted to the frame, if you could use a set of brackets, bolted/held under the heads of the forward cab bolts, to use as solid jack points for you to push back against the top rear roof area or top rear door opening areas. Possibly that would more solidly push the top part back squarely while not allowing the lower front to simply deform downwards and then reshape itself again once bolted back onto the frame. Of course using the original frame for this would likely be best, before you make mounts for the Nissan frame.
Just some hairbrained ideas and thoughts
Anyway, thanks for the update and pics. Try not to let it take the wind outta your sails.

[Blackie]

Its currently bolted down to the frame - I have it bolted solidly without rubbers as well to eliminate flex - the Nissan chassis is WAY stiffer than a stock Chevy chassis - especially the one I have ! I will take some more pics tonight , I took one of the row of screws in the B pillar but it was too blurry to post up.

I think if it hit something front on hard enough to bend it 1/2" + halfway up the back pillar the headlights would have ended up in the firewall somewhere !!!

[dsraven]

are the screws holding the rear wall skin onto the B pillar? it is usually spot welded so curious if the welds came apart when the cab was bent.
maybe wanna do a dimension check on the windshield opening from top to bottom when you're done, just to ensure the glass is gonna fit back in there. also a side to side dimension at the lower part of the dogleg, same reason.
looks like you have what it takes to do some serious jacking. keep an eye on the step area to ensure it isn't deforming instead of the door opening. possibly placing the porta power against the corner where the floor bends down into the step, on the front edge, would be an idea since the forward cab mount is also spot welded into that sandwich of metal. maybe a short length of angle iron placed on the corner to help stop the porta power base from deforming the corner as well.
just a few ideas that come to mind from a different set of eyes. not trying to say you are doing anything wrong there
tough making a parallelogram back into a square when you have a few weak spots in the system. also curious if you will overbend things a bit in case they try to slowly spring back to the outta square shape they may have been in for awhile. does your roof try to get involved too, when you apply force with the porta power?

[Blackie]

Yes the rear inner to B pillar is where the row of screws are - hoping if I remove them it will have some more "give" in it so it will move easier.
The truck had a windshield in it when I got it so I can use it as a template to make sure it is going to fit back in - I really need to get the doors fitting to the B pillars first then work my way forwards to get the rest of the thing to line up as it should. I have placed a timber across from the base of the A pillar into the void in front of the lower hinge pockets because I cant push from the bottom of the door step area as the rust monster has been feasting in there and that area has no strength in it

[dsraven]

yeah, mine was bent but not nearly as much as your cab. it makes you wonder what happened, but, that doesn't matter anymore now anyway.
good plan with the timber. I like your plan to brace the dogleg as well, so it doesn't deform in the process. I wonder if the cab could be pulled from the rear somehow while the portapower pushes from the front side? maybe something through the rear window opening somehow? like a timber held across the top inside of the opening, with a chain or cable connected to that, and then a come a long connected to the rear of the frame somehow? just spitballing, but thinking that pulling from both sides plus the rear center might put less strain on the lower portapower set points.