Body, Rear Brakes and Radiator Assembly

By Frank Colgoni

We're going to dedicate this article, and digress from the work, to tell you about a few products that we're using for this project. Specifically, the body, rear brakes and our radiator.

The Body
While we've shown numerous pictures of our body in the previous two articles, we didn't speak about it. So, to remedy that...

The body is a Kilbourne Rod Shop '32 roadster body made in, oddly enough, Kilbourne Illinois.

We got our body from Horton Hot Rod Parts in Milton, Ontario, Canada and, rather than duplicating the same information that Horton has provided about the body, we're going to direct you to their site where you can check it out. There is a link on the following page that will take you to a features page with additional photos and text about the body:

http://www.horton.on.ca/Products/prodpages/kilbourne.htm

Obviously, you'll be seeing much more about the body as things progress.

Rear Brakes
John Edwards at Dream Machines brought our attention to a very cool rear brake setup that is available from the Ford Performance Parts catalogue. The kit # is M-2300-G

The kit is described in the Ford Racing Performace Parts catalogue as follows:
"This rear disc brake kit may be low buck, but it really works! Kit includes 11" rotors,
calipers, mounting brackets and attaching hardware.

The rotors have the popular 5-hole, 4.5" diameter passenger car bolt pattern. Caliper mounting brackets fit the popular 8.8" Truck/9" Late Ford axle housings with 2" x 3.56" pattern and big 3.15" diameter bearing.

This kit is designed for vehicle installations with a 2.5" brake gap (housing flange-to-axle
shaft flange)."

This kit features an internal, drum-type parking brake assembly. These brakes are used on Ford Explorers so they should definitely do the trick on our hiboy.

We got our kit from Summit Ford in Toronto. They specialize in Ford Racing Performance Parts. Talk to Dave Brooks.


You can see the parking brake activation lever / cable bracket in this photo.

As installed on our 9" rear end assembly.

Radiator Assembly
We mentioned in the previous article that Dream Machines fabricated a “frame” that went inside our rad shell that we were going to provide to Kydd Radiators. It would provide a reference for crossmember mounting and upper mounting positions. It would also establish the lowest point of the lower rad tank. As planned, the shell and frame went to Kydd Radiators in London, Ontario, Canada.

If the name Kydd sounds familiar, that’s because Bill Kydd (proprietor of Kydd Radiators) has the distinction of being the first Canadian to hold an NHRA record. He achieved this driving a race car he designed and built. He was inducted into the Canadian Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1998. Cool stuff (no pun intended!).

Kydd Radiators design and fabricate radiators and associated products to fit just about anything. As they say “If you can dream it... we can build it!”

When we went down to their shop to get our radiator, everything was fitted as shown in the first photo below - rad, overflow tank and the fan support and Spal fan. And, as we subsequently found out, they had placed the rad perfectly relative to the frame supplied.

Bill and his guys do killer work.


As mentioned above, this was how our assembly was provided to us.

Detail of upper tank area.

Detail of lower tank, main mounts and transmission cooler fittings.

A neat detail: a rubber bumper to isolate the fan frame from the core.

Detail of overflow tank, fan support mount and rad mount to shell.
While we were at Bill's shop we could't resist grabbing a shot of this absolutely gorgeous rad destined for a Chrysler Airflow - very sweet.
 
 

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