Inside the thrash: A look into building a hot rod on a tight deadline, part 2

It might not seem like a ton of progress has been made on Scott Sheehan’s Model T roadster project in over the past week — you can blame The Grand National Roadster Show for that — but the little Model T is still moving along. The major projects Sheehan knocked out this week might not be as glamorous as putting together an engine or laying paint, but are examples of the mundane-but-necessary tasks it takes to build a car.

Our hot-rod hero made a pair of chassis mounts for his front axle locating arms — colloquially known in the hot-rod world as hairpins, because, well … you can see why — and finished his transmission mount. He also tasked a friend, Todd Tacey, with removing some of the vestigial structure from the Model T. Sheehan also went to work to finish welding together the Model T’s frame, obviously an essential part of any build.

Oh yeah, and he moved forward with his open-driveline conversion, which will require a trip to a machine shop for balancing and other wizardry. 

With only a few weeks to go until move-in day at the Autorama Extreme basement, it was worth asking Sheehan why he would want to sprint to the finish in a mad dash to get the car ready for an arbitrary deadline. While some might assume this trash-to-the-finish approach was made famous by campy cable car shows (as reader SPEEDO82 pointed out in the comments of the first installment), the reality is less dramatic: Indoor car shows like Autorama give Midwestern builders a reason to get their cars together before the weather breaks in spring. 

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