Meet The Players

This 1931 Ford Roadster starred in the movie "Indiana Jones & The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull". It was purchased by a Swedish client of mine at last month's Barret Jackson auction in Scottsdale. The car started life as a coupe or sports coupe and was turned into a roadster. This is pretty common, especially with sports coupes where the canvas half roof is gone. As an interesting aside I learned that the car was originally built some years back by a friend of mine in the high desert! It's a small community.

This car, being a movie car was modified by the studio to look good on screen and perform well enough to make quick work of multiple takes. If the car breaks down a lot it costs tons of money to have a whole crew standing around while it gets fixed, so it has good basic mechanical systems but some weird stuff was done to it as well. When it arrived there was a rumble seat installed, it looked okay from a distance but it was crudely constructed from plywood and the decklid was cut to make it look like a rumble seat lid. The whole deal was attached with wood screws to the body and it was permanently open, so the new owner wants that to work as it should with an opening lid.

The rear suspension was setup so that it was locked in a certain position with no travel. I suspect that was done so when the rumble seat was loaded with two girls for the scene the suspension wouldn't bottom out. The steering was also kind of a mess, it was just worn out and the toe was set wrong.

Here's a few pics along with pics of what we did so far. The owner seems happy with the progress so I think the next steps will be to redo the floor and make a hood.

Here's the roadster, in the movie it loos just like this only with a rumble seat.

The car has an original Model A frame and the '32 rear frame extensions were crudely added to make it look like a Deuce.

Here you can see how the decklid was hacked to make it a permanent rumble seat car. I will either fix the damage to the decklid or start over with a new one.

The interior is finished pretty nice with red vinyl. There's 1" eyes bolted into the floor, I imagine they were there to anchor the actors or stuntmen in place during the takes, as the car had no rear suspension at all!

The first thing I had on my list was to make the rear suspension functional. Here you can see how the spring shackle is straight up and down, the spring was too long and in a full bind.

With a new custom made spring (shorter) and proper length shackles the spring can now work as it should. I also greased the hell ot of the leaves so they would operate smoothly. This is the trick to getting a buggy spring car too ride better.

In the front, I replaced one lever shock and both sets of shock links (called "dogbones"). I had to heat and bend the shock arm to get it to fit, this was commonly done on early hot rods. The owner wants the car to look like an early homebuilt hot rod so I didn't hide anything with new paint. We also corrected the front alignment, it had 1" of toe so we corrected it to 1/8" like it should be. After a thorough test drive the owner reports it drives like a new car! Well, maybe not like a new car but it does work a bunch better.