Although I spent much of the weekend helping a friend install a ceiling fan, I got out to the garage for a few hours on both Saturday and Sunday. I worked more on correctly locating the motor mounts and center crossmember (Tardel K-member): measure twice, and thrice, etc., and drill once (or, as many times as you have mounting holes).
There seems to be as many opinions about where the flathead motor mounts should be located on a Model A frame as there are people building these things. Here are some of the dimensions. I'll try to flesh out this post more with additional photos and dimensions, but here's the big one: 6-1/4". That's how many inches, center to center, my Tardel flathead motor mounts are located back from the radiator mounting holes in the front crossmember. These holes are NOT in the center (front-to-back) of the crossmember, however.
For those of you building a hot rod based upon the very good book, "How to Build a Traditional Ford Hot Rod" (Mike Bishop and Vern Tardel), you're probably here looking for better measurements than those in the book. The authors have acknowledged there are a few errors in the book. For instance, they suggest using a '34 front wishbone to correctly locate the front and center crossmembers for a flathead and standard three speed transmission. Ain't gonna happen. You're going to come up about 1-1/2" too short. You need to use a '32 front wishbone, or lengthen the '34 to match the '32's dimensions (this link goes to a repost of Mike Bishop's). Another of the chassis dimension errors (and, frankly, a pretty big one), is the location of the motor mounts. They suggest 3" from the radiator mounting holes to the front face of the motor mount. This is too close to use a mechanical fan.
Mine are 4-5/8" from the radiator mounting holes to the front face, which provides me enough room to run not only the standard 4-blade fan (immediately below), with 1/4" clearance at the bottom as I discovered when I mocked it up this weekend, as this is the type of fan I'll be running, but
I also have enough clearance to run a 5-blade truck fan (which is apparently too noisy, according to my friends; I know it's too ugly - only going to use it if I have cooling problems) with about 1/8" clearance (which is pretty snug).
Other progress this weekend involved the very scary (for me) drilling and bolting in the center portion of the K-member. After pulling the radiator and mock-up block, I pulled the wheels and tires off the chassis, and jacked up the frame - allowing the spring/axle/wishbone/K-member/transmission case to "float" in relation to the frame, without interference by the block. I did this to square up the K-member to the frame left-to-right, as it was ever so slightly off.
After getting it square, I C-clamped it in place (along the the various C-clamps holding the legs the the center crossmember, and the legs to the frame rails), center-punched the location of the holes on the top of the frame rails to the center crossmember, drilled with a 3/16" bit as a pilot, then final drilled with a bit one greater than 5/16". Because the drill bits I have probably aren't great, and the metal's pretty thick, I had to really lean on the drill, and kept oiling the bit so it wouldn't burn.
Once the holes were drilled, I threw in a couple of Ford 5/16" bolts and called it a night.
My friend tells me Ford bolts are Grade 8 (maybe; they sure held everything together back then, and are still equally strong today - probably due to Henry's Vanadium Steel), and I have more than enough to assemble the whole chassis, if not the entire car, thanks to my parts-hoarding uncle. Some of them are already cadmium plated, which was apparently the restorer's standard, before it was discovered most Ford bolts were not cad-plated from the factory, and toxic concerns (at least in California) outlawed cad plating.
(The bolts I used for the front crossmember are cadmium plated)
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