The restoration came to a halt a few weeks ago because when we went to fit the cowl wood it didn’t fit. My fault I bought the 2 cowl wood posts from Brad’s Woodshop and I found the cowl header at a swap meet thinking all 3 pieces would fit together nicely. Well in a perfect world that’s exactly what should happen but the cowl header didn’t fit correctly to the wood posts. I called Brad Brown and told him about my dilemma and Brad said to send all 3 pieces including the cowl windshield stanchion brackets back to him and he would correctly fit the pieces together.
From the front everything looks like it fits, not quite!
Where the cowl wood posts meet the cowl header there is a gap.
At the top you can see the overlap and gap of the two pieces.
Quite the overlap and gap. One thing that I am not is a woodworker and dealing with the compound curves and angles in wood is not my forte.
Not quite as noticeable in this photo.
With the cowl stanchion bracket in place it doesn’t look that bad from the front.
The Cowl L-Bracket fitted to the cowl posts and we still have some work to do on the A & L Brackets which will be addressed in a future post.
We have the original cowl wood to work with and it will help immensely in fitting all the pieces together. However the original cowl wood had dry rot, the wood was fractured in a few places and had become significantly structurally weakened so its all being replaced.
You can see the overlap of the cowl metal on the cowl header it actually fit quite tight.
I’m told that after the cowl header wood was insatalled in the factory they would then complete the metal detail on the top corners on each side of the metal cowl, both sides of the cowl corners had been lead filled and the cowl wood is usually always burnt away in this area. Both sides of my original cowl wood are charred in the corners. As you can see we have a little restoration work on the top corners of my cowl.