On an earlier post I talked about how chopping the top on my cousin Jim’s 1940 Ford caused the rear quarter windows to lose proportion.  I also posted a couple of pictures showing how Jim changed the window opening and restored the size of the quarter windows to something more appealing.

As you can see in today’s featured image, both windows are damn near perfect in both size and shape.  So how did Jim do this?

Well today, I found this on one of the work tables at the shop:

And yes, this is a wooden buck.  Jim figured out what sort of arc needed to be reproduced to give the window opening the right “look”.  This arc was then transferred to a wooden buck.  The two openings on either side are there to secure the piece of sheet metal with a screw, washers and nuts.  Then, with a mallet, Jim slowly hammered the sheet metal to take the shape of the arc for the window.  The following two pictures show what the buck looks like compared to the end result.  Pretty cool, huh?

And here are two pictures side by side, of both window openings.  They are the mirror images of each other.

A few years ago I visited the Studebaker museum.  Among all the wonderful things to see there was a full size buck made from wood for a Studebaker pickup cab.  Yes indeed, this is the way custom bodies were made!  Having said that, can you imagine what it would be like to see all the bucks that must be stored in some special, secret vault in Maranello?