Guys, my truck has been in a workshop getting "some" work done, and so far five months have transpired. I recently paid a visit there and was shown the work currently being undertaken on the truck. unfortunately what has happened is the workshop owner and I have fallen out, and work like this is one of the reasons we have. I have told him to stop all work. Currently in a battle to get my truck and parts off him as well as most of a massive deposit I gave him. But that is another issue.
I would value your honest opinion on this, guys. I think what the workshop guy was trying to do was incorporate the rear jag mount with some sort of proposed engine mount structure. See left side. I can see nothing but a disaster in this? Thoughts anyone? The jag mount on the right hand side looks fine in my opinion.

 

Are you talking about the subframe to frame mounts? And by Left / Right, do you mean in the picture?
What are the curved plates? Part of his "plan"?

 

Ross , if your referring to the curved plates laying on the front crossmember and chassis rail , they are weld on upper shock mounts .

 

Don't know why the twit of a builder has seen the need to do 2 different types of rear mounts there .
The jag rear mounts will work fine , the one on the right looks ok , but that chassis should really be boxed up to the firewall also .
Didn't you buy that truck with the jag f/e already fitted ???

 

Exactly right, Scott. And would you believe he managed to stuff them up as well?
Peter Gough from Toprodz makes them and I used a set for my '54 with a Jag front and they welded straight up.
This guy decided they needed to angle in more and has cut them to a degree that they no longer fit flush. The thing is, they sit vertical to a degree.

 

Yes, Scott. Already had front fitted up.
Definitely going to get the whole thing boxed up in there. The right mount support looks good. His piece of angled design on the left is leaving me scratching my head.

 

I think his line of thinking doing the mount on the left is to spread the load from that mount .
Looks like it connects to the chassis rail , top , bottom and at the side ? .
Not a bad thing if he does the other to match .
And yep , those mounts from Pete at Toprods don't need to be altered , i have a couple of pairs here .

 

Peter, while I can't help with your bodyshop dilemma, I can feel your pain. My 56 has been in 3 bodyshops and I've probably bought every part on my truck at least twice. Good luck on getting ALL your stuff back and moving forward on your project.

 

Edited to correct the country (thanks Old F1).

Can’t help on the build, but if Australia is like the US, get whatever you can back upfront. Then take the owner and shop to small claims court. If you’ve kept good documentation, including feedback from experts (like this site), you’ll usually win. Then you have to collect on your judgement. In the US, it varies by state, but if they don’t pay on the judgement, you can usually attach any assets with the help of the sheriff (those additional costs can be collected too).
Good luck!

 

I think the OP is from Australia ?

 

This is the main reason that a vintage vehicle owner has to do as much work on their vehicle as possible. Unless you're prepared to dump a lot of money, I mean more than what your vehicle is going to worth when the work is done, you most likely won't find a quality shop to do the work. I worked in a small body shop way back, one project I remember was a '59 Caddy. The shop owner, my boss, would have me throw some mud on the car whenever the car owner would call to say he was coming in to drop off parts and check on the progress. Otherwise the car sat in the corner and gathered dust. Unless you're willing to pay to have a complete frame off restoration most quality shops won't touch the vehicle. I've also seen many instances where a person brough an old vehicle in to have the front fender repaired and come back a week or two later complaining that the left rear wheel was making a noise and wanted the shop to repair the new noise because it wasn't there when the vehicle was brought in and the problem had to be the fault of the shop.

Old vehicles are a pain to work on.

 

Yes, that was my plan. Bob. I wanted to do a lot of the work myself, but we moved house and our new place is on a significant incline and the old truck has no brakes or motorvation. My plan with the repair guy was to get it at least to driveable state so that I can at least get it up the driveway and work on it. But he put forward a really decent proposal to basically get it to turnkey stage for 30 grand. He told me he had a professional painter and a mechanic on his team who could do the work. Turns out he has neither as he told me he would be doing everything. I contacted a Government department down here called the Department of Fair Trading and they advised he wasn't even licensed to operate as a vehicle repairer. They advised going to a tribunal to a hearing to argue the reasons why I want my vehicle, parts and at least a large part of my deposit back. The deposit alone is $9000 which was what he wanted to lock the deal in. Talk about a mess.
I have a hearing set for this coming Tuesday.
Thanks for your good wishes, guys. I am gonna need everything I can get!

 

Peter , you should NEVER pay up front .

 

Yeah, big mistake. Too trusting. You live and learn. Did sound like a great deal and he was very convincing. Plus I was kinda stuck as the other guys I wanted to send it to were flat strap booked until the end of the year and the truck was coming up from Melbourne and had nowhere to put it. My wife wouldn't let me get it towed up to our garage out the back on account of it messing up her Sir Walter Buffalo grass. If only we had crystal *****.

 

Peter, you are quite welcome to take a holiday to the US next October and sit round the campfire at Truckstock and share the body shop horror stories. We all have one or two (or five in my case) that are quite similar - only it is great to hear them told in different accents and with new twists and turns.

In one of my stories I had to go to a junkyard and get my '51 F2 front body parts from the top of a scrap heap. The body shop I had working on my truck at the time was not paying his rent, so the landowner forcibly evicted him and then sent a crew to clean the shop up to prepare it for a new commercial tenant. I didn't learn about the eviction for a few weeks and went looking for my parts. My chassis was still at my house thankfully. The front clip was taken in pieces to a junkyard as scrap metal. F2 parts are very hard to come by, so I went 20 miles away to find the junkyard and begged them to give me back my parts. They understood my plight and I got most of the parts back. Some were half crushed, some were missing.
The body shop guy disappeared off the face of the earth. I lost my $1,000 deposit, and lost about $600 of parts. Members here helped me find and replace them. The body shop guy had been promising me for six months that my job was 'next' in his priority. Lying bastid he was.
This story isn't even my worst experience. I'm convinced there isn't a good shop within 50 miles of me that can reliably work on old cars/trucks. They make good promises but do not follow through.
I'm also convinced that in order to get a body shop business license, the application has five questions to be answered 'YES' in order to be granted one.
1) Can you lie to the pope?
2) Are you an alcoholic and/or addicted to narcotics?
3) Are you secretly bankrupt?
4) Do you have untrained and unreliable employees?
5) Are you colorblind?

I've had to repossess three different cars/trucks from bodyshops over the last 20 years after I fell victim to new ways to be let down.

A couple of weeks ago I took advantage of an unseasonably warm day and painted the aluminum roof of a '72 Land Rover 4x4 wagon I'm working on, in my driveway on a plastic sheet. It came out kind of sucky, but it was my own sucky work. Didn't have to pay someone to put runs in the paint and have bugs and dust stuck to it - I've done that too many times. I used off-the shelf-at-the-hardware-store Rustoleum boat topside paint to save money. I figured for $22 a quart I can eff it up quite a bit before approaching the cost of real automotive paint. I'm doing my own body work on this project cause of the lack of good body shops. It won't be real nice to look at when done, but I can control the amount of time and money it will take.

Note to others....don't use an air sprayer outside within 25 feet of a daily driver. My windshield wipers were making a funny scratchy sound. Yep, over-spray got on the glass that far away on what I thought was a non-windy day and a tight nozzle pattern.