Looking for '30 "Victoria" style wood body plans for a reasonable price - last guy wanted $1,500.00

Leads appreciated.

cj

Plans or the wood itself?

Unless you're an excellent woodworker- I'd just buy precut wood from a major supplier and tweak it to fit your car.

You can buy the subrails, top wood, post wood etc....

Looking for just the plans.

And yes, dad is looking for the plans and has built several bodies before, including '16 Cadillac, & '13 Overland.

thanks,

cj

My only guess would be the Ford Archives.

And there's a chance they may not have them.. Vicky's were built by Briggs and the body was shipped to the Assembly Plant.

There's a Model A Victoria Club.. you can get their address off the Model A Ford Club's website
MAFCA.com

There were no real plans made that you can get from Ford. The wood you see out there today are carefully made from good originals. Plus you have to be real good to be able to make the wood from patterns.

You are really stuck either finding someone with a good set of wood to copy. From what I have seen that does not happen too often.

Overall it is wise investment in time and money to get a set of wood. If you do not have the budget to buy the wood then you are going to have troubles. It should cost at least $8000 to do some kind of restoration. If you are properly restoring the car to drive like new (not a high point show car) then you best expect to spend $15,000 or more. This assumes you are doing all the work yourself and you already have the tooling.

Thanks. Tried the Ford Victoria website, not much there. Will try to contact them for thier input.

The major factor is dad has the knowlede & ability, tools, experience, raw materials, and time... but NOT the cash to buy the body.


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cj

I'm a bit confused.....

Are you talking about a Victoria(passenger car) with the steel panels and wood subframe or a 'huckster' with an all wood body- a home made body not like a Station Wagon that Ford produced.

It would be cost prohibitive to build a Victoria body from scratch.

Looking for wood plans for a full body 2 door Victoria with sheet metal skin.

Not a huckster, wood wagon, depot wagon, or whatever the full wood body is called...

I don't know why you think it would be "cost prohitive". Dad has the sheet metal, needs plans to build the wood frame. Has necessary wood, tools, skills, and pleanty of time.

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For one... you would have to find a slant windsheild cowl which decent ones run around 3-400.00 ..
All the small brackets, gussets, garnish mouldings are stampings and are cheaper to buy them to make them.

The doors are a complex procedure to fab from scratch no matter how skilled you are. Here again it's cheaper to seek out a set then try and make them. The Vicoria and A-400 share the same door.

You can buy a decent Victoria for about 15K.. whereas if you went to make one from scratch you'd have several times that and it would just be a custom body on a Model A chassis.

But this is just my opinion.

Well, it is possible to build bodies. And I'm not sure I would call them "custom bodies". That's why he wants the wood plans, to make the wood as close as possible to the origional. He has the fittings, the wood is bad due to dry rot.

15k for dad would be a good amount of money, where spending 2 years creating a body from plans would not be a problem. He has done some remarkable things before. Created 3 more wire wheels using 1 as pattern for the Overland.

If you get bored, go to the photos under user name c.johnson and look at the cadillac bodies... I'm sure the collector who spent six figures for the completed car didn't consider it "custom". And yes, he has won many awards from it - including Pebble Beach. If you would like, I can tell you the "rest of the story" later....

Using your reasoning it would be cheaper and more productive to buy an airplane ticket than to rebuild the Wright brothers plane...

Please don't be so quick to judge, I thought the whole idea of this board was to help each other and have fun, not to criticize someone else's creativity.


Back to the point...


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CJ,

Please don't take my post the wrong way...

I understand the creative factor and all that.

When I restore a car for a customer I have to fabricate panels sometimes so I know where you're coming from.

My best sugestion I can give is find someone near you with a Victoria and spend a few days getting photos, demensions etc..
I wasn't saying it couldn't be done, just that it would take a long while. With Yankee ingenuity anything is possible!

Not to disappoint, but to make a safe driving car you have to expect to spend some serious money.

To build a Vicky can get even more expensive if he needs some slant window specific parts.

If you can not afford the price of a wood kit how is he going to afford the $1000 to make the brakes safe or are you just planning on slapping it together and hope you do not get into an accident or stuck along side the road.

Have you looked in to the cost of paint. You will have over $500 in just the top coat paints with the cheap stuff. Then you have the cost of undercoats.

I think you might be wise to get a catalog out and add up what it would cost to put together a safe to drive car.

There are way too many "restored" cars that are just unsafe at any speed, we do not need another.

If he can not put at least $8000 into his project I doubt he can even do it on the cheap. A more realistic number is closer to $15000 for most guys. I have access to $50,000 in special tools so I can keep my costs down to $20,000 to do a full proper restoration on a cabriolet to drive- not a points car. I could do it a lot cheaper, but I am trying to do this car a bit nicer from the details point of view. I think I could return the chassis to factory specs and make the paint and interior nice for $8000 in parts and the car would be safe to drive 55 mph all day.

Like I tell everyone. The catalogs are free. Sit down and calculate how much it would cost to do the restoration. Then add in a pretty big fudge factor as there are many things you do not realize you need till you need them. Then look at your wallet.

Again, you are assuming the capabilities of my father, and you are not much help with the question.

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